While an advanced search engine logic is the backbone of delivering a great search experience, our usability testing reveals that a great search field design, placeholder text, and button design can set the right expectations and steer users toward better search queries — but it only takes a few minor design hiccups to severely mislead your users. During testing, minor design quirks for the search field led to severe usability issues such as users completely misunderstanding the search results, often abandoning the site as a direct consequence.

To a large extent users see the prominence of the search field as an indicator of how strongly the site “recommends” search as a way to find products, versus the alternative of navigating categories via the site menus. During our usability testing the subjects adopted search as their primary product-finding strategy much more frequently on sites that had a very prominent search field, while the test sites with a subdued search field design saw increased category navigation.

Learn More: Besides exploring the 867 search field design examples below, you may also want to read our related articles with our (free) research findings on “E-Commerce Search Field Design and Its Implications” along with “E-Commerce Sites Need Multiple of These 5 ‘Search Scope’ Features”.

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