eHealth Articles & White Papers

Understand Your Users and Improve Your Site Search 

Ben Dillon - Vice President & eHealth Evangelist

Last fall, while sitting in a presentation on usability research, a member of the audience mentioned that over half of the searches at his hospital's online physician finder returned no results.

Search, in its various forms, plays a significant role in visitors' experiences with your site. Far too often search engines/results are designed out of gut instinct rather than a true understanding of site visitors and how they use hospital websites.

When visitors' searches fail, it leads to frustration and that frustration leads to finding other options, most likely with your competitors.

Why do visitors use search?

A number of reasons compel site visitors to turn to a website's search interface to find information, such as:

• Preference: Roughly half of all Internet users are search-inclined, meaning they'll jump to a site-wide search quickly if they can't find the information they seek. However, on the healthcare sites we've examined, we found the actual use of site-wide search to be considerably lower.
• Safety net: If visitors are not able to find information after valiant attempts, they will turn to the site-wide search as the navigational aid of last resort.
• Necessity: Some site data — particularly structured data such as physicians, job postings or classes - is often only available through a search interface.

Why do searches fail?

Here are a few of the more common reasons:

• Misspellings: This is true across websites as a whole. But when you include medical terminology and a high level of diversity amongst healthcare workers (for name based searches), the problem becomes far more acute.
• Over-filtering: Findings from Geonetric's usability lab uncovered that many users feel inclined to enter data in every field when presented with numerous filtering options. The result: over-filtering eliminates many options that would meet their requirements.
• Configuration issues: Site content and site search configuration need to work together. For example, sites that begin every page title with a very long institution name may end up with search results (due to a limited number of characters) with identical names Likewise, an organization with an average of 10 open positions needs a different search strategy for job postings than an organization averaging 250 open positions.
• Nothing to offer: Sometimes your site doesn't provide the content visitors want. If you don't have what the user is looking for, no amount of searching will help them.

How do I know if I have a problem?

Everyone has a problem because we can't read users' minds. The questions become: how big is the problem, and is it worthwhile to make changes in an attempt to improve the situation?

Ok, how do I know how bad it is?

We need to look at how visitors actually use the site, and not how we think they use the site. Here are a few of the most common approaches:

• Lab-based usability testing: Appropriate test subjects are brought into a lab setting where their interaction with the site is monitored. The subjects are given tasks to complete and their actions and responses are recorded for later analysis. The usability lab approach provides analysts with the greatest control in constructing experiments to test particular scenarios and allows for the greatest amount of data collection as the test subjects are directly observed and can be prompted to share their thoughts during or after the experiment.
• Real-world usability session testing: Tools can be connected to your site that record and replay actual user sessions. The advantage of this approach over the lab is that real-world testing measures the actions of actual users trying to accomplish actual tasks. However, the disadvantage is that you cannot talk with the users or watch their actions outside of their interaction with the system.
• Search logs, analytics and other data aggregation tools: These tools look at behavior across a large number of user sessions rather than a single session. They are good for identifying overarching issues that deserve attention. For example, if many people search for the same item, they must not be finding it through the navigation. These tools are also useful to help you identify potential content gaps in your site.

How can I fix it?

The ultimate answer depends on what the problems you identify. Here are some thoughts that may help you address the most common issues:

• Follow user expectations: Visitors expect to find the site search box in upper right corner. No matter how slick you think your design would look with the search box somewhere else, don't fight it. The goal is to keep site visitors from spending time looking for what they need. Another example of this is to keep search buttons for in-page searches (such as the physician directory) above the bottom of the visible screen to prevent the need for scrolling.
• Simple is better: This can't be said enough. Don't give the user too many options.
• Use advanced search for advanced searches: Some users will need to filter more criteria, and you can offer them that option. But offer it in addition to the simple search that will fit the needs of most users. This can be done under an "advanced search" option. Or after an initial search, you could provide several ways to sort or filter the result set further.
• Prevent user mistakes: This is a complex area, but fortunately there are many effective new techniques to prevent user mistakes. Two tools that can be very helpful are "sounds like" algorithms that can overcome many common misspellings, and auto suggest which has been made popular by Google. Auto-suggest technology recommends words that include the letters visitors type - they appear in a drop-down list on each keystroke from the user.
• Avoid dead-ends: This is a good rule that is typically followed everywhere in the site, but often not considered in search. What are the options for the user from the search results page? Where can they go from a physician profile? Can they make an appointment? Understand how visitors use these pages and work to accommodate their surfing patterns - and be sure to use the search results as a way to provide calls to action for the site visitors.
• Offer a browse-able option: Just because you have a searchable option on your site for information, such as classes or physicians, doesn't mean that you can't also organize that information for browsing. Searching works better when visitors know what they're looking for and browsing works better when they are less sure.
• Understand filtering vs. sorting: When developers put criteria on a search form, they typically think of that criteria as a filter, but that isn't necessarily the case. An alternative is to offer some ranking options that sort information based on selections. This type of preference-based sorting option is less likely to accidentally remove perfectly acceptable results than a traditional filtering approach for search criteria. For instance, when searching for jobs, you may only show jobs for a particular specialty area (applicants that will likely need specific training or specialization to be considered for such roles) using a filtering approach but would only apply a sort on the results for a visitors' indicated preference for shifts, rather than filtering out less-preferred shifts.
• Think about what happens when a search fails: How does your site respond? What is your error message to the user? Do you offer suggestions on how to search more effectively? How do you help them take the next step to find the information they seek? Doing this well is a sign that you've thought through the search process, and search-inclined users will appreciate the work you're doing for them.

Always room for improvement

As you can see, there's a lot that goes into building an effective search engine for your hospital's website. And chances are your site search could be improved. Keep in mind that the right answer for each situation comes from knowing who your users are and what they're trying to accomplish. The better you understand your users, the better your search engine will perform.