Designing Advanced Search

Balasubramanyam Ganapathi

“Investigate how other applications & sites provide

advanced search functionality, and propose some

alternatives with pros & cons for how Vault could offer this

capability. “

“The target persona is a business user who is

familiar with consumer web sites & uses Microsoft

Windows, but is by no means a power user or

technical whiz. “

Literature Review

“Often, advanced search is a clumsy add-on that’s rarely

used, and it lets engineers and designers take the easy way out.

Valuable features that are difficult to integrate into the main

interface can be relocated to the ghetto and forgotten. “

Peter Morville and Jefferey Callender

Search Patterns – Design for Discovery (2009)

“The advanced search page can provide a variety of

fancy options, including Booleans, scopes, and

various parametric searches. It is important to use an

intimidating name like "advanced search" to scare off

novice users from getting into the page and hurting

themselves“ - Jakob Nielsen

Search And You May Find (1997)

0.5%

“The people who do use Advanced Search are your

most fanatical users, the professional librarians …

and investigators“

- Tim Bray, Google

On Search - The Users (2003)

Design Implications

Make your default search cover the use cases for

99% usage

Make your advanced search as comprehensive and

powerful as possible.

Advanced search in other applications

Fixed Query Searches

does not contain

Advanced Facets

Dynamic Query Construction

Proposed mockups

Questions?

Thanks