I'm responsible for our company's intranet and still sometimes find value in Jakob's writings (like his latest one), although in general they seem to be on a slow, downhill slide. I wonder what he would say about the three search boxes we have built into our intranet's navigation bar. Originally, it had only one search box that was used to search our entire intranet - htm, pdf, doc, xls, etc. Although our intranet is quite large (over 25,000 documents) and is fairly well utilized (over 240,000 page views per month), it isn't heavily database driven, therefore, our search function doesn't index or catalog them.

However, we created a company phone directory that is database driven and very heavily utilized. Employees' first and last names, among other identifiers, are stored in individual database fields. That way, users can search for a person by their first and/or last name, or just part of either name. Originally, we created a link - Phone Book - on the top navigation bar that took users to a phone book search page which presented the user the ability to search by name, by department, or by physical location (we have factories all over the eastern US). In order to deliver this type of search flexibility, we created a phone book search page with multiple but clearly labeled search fields, including first and last name. By analyzing our log files, we saw that the vast majority of phone book searches were by the first/last name option. The only phone book related complaint we received from our users was that they had to follow an extra link to do a phone book search. Further analysis of our log files showed that a significant number of people were using the phone book search page as their entry point to the intranet thereby missing the daily updated news and information on the intranet homepage. Needless to say, this concerned us.

In order to address both the users concerns and our own concerns, we mocked up a revised homepage that added clearly labeled first and last name search boxes underneath the existing link to the phone book in our top navigation bar. We tested with 10 users and got a unanimous approval. We quickly took the change and put it into production. We have never had a more overwhelmingly positive reaction from so many people regarding an intranet enhancement - and we have three search boxes. Just don't tell Jakob.

Posted by: Chris Harr on February 25, 2003 01:22 AM

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Re: "seem to be on a slow, downhill slide"
So far in 2003 the 6 Alertbox Articles published contain 24 links, 15 of which are sales links to NNGroup, 8 are links to useit.com pages and only 1 link to an external site. (See "The Day Alertbox Died")

Re : Directories. We have a directory for 12,000 employees that is searched about 50,000 times a week. We use a drop down list that allows the search to be scoped to People, Department, Branch, Area, Intermediary and Agency. The vast majority of searches are for people.

We allow for first/last name searches by parsing the input. If there is only one word in the search terms then we assume a lastname, if there are more than one term then we assusme a firstname lastname, on the rare occasions when someone needs to search for all people called chris then you can search for chris *, you can search on any partial name so a search for c m would find Chris McEvoy (along with another 119 people).

In addition we only return one page of results (one line per person), rather than paged results. We display a maximum of 200 results from any search, so that if someone searches for a (all people with a surname beginning with a) which matches 556 people, we only display the first 200 matches and ask the user to "try a more specific search". Because no-one is actually going to look at 500 results to find a person, no-one has ever had a problem with this method of displaying results, because no-one would ever trawl through all of the actual results. Google also rely on this 'behaviour' to get away with only ever giving us 1000 results from any search.

We found that this option was easier for people to understand than having a separate box for firstname, lastname.

We are doing some work on making all of our searches work via one search box. We are trying to identify what type of search they want from analysing that they type into the search box. I think it is possible to do this in an Intranet environment where the scope of searches is much narrower than internet searches.

So my guideline would be: Use as few search boxes as you possibly can, with none being the optimum number.

Posted by: Mac - Dont Attack Iraq on February 25, 2003 02:51 AM

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