Optimizing Site Search for better User Experience
My Role: Lead UX | EXPERIAN BUSINESS (2021)
Responsibilities: UX Research, Wire-framing, UX Strategy
Team: SEO Analyst, Data Analyst
Time taken: 10 weeks
Background & Strategic Fit
The Experian Business Website visitors primarily use 2 methods to find a solution that meets their needs – Navigation & Site Search. This project involved taking a closer look at the Search experience to identify opportunities for improvement.
The goal of this project is to create a more relevant search experience when users perform an internal search on the B2B side of experian.com. We will do this by:
Evaluating the search experience by collecting qualitative and quantitative data
Weeding out or redirecting consumer searches appropriately
Making small incremental improvements to experience
High Level Plan
1. Define the Initiative Brief
2. Collect Qualitative & Quantitative data on the current experience
3. Analyze data
4. Wireframe the optimal experience
5. Identify opportunities for incremental improvement
01
Initiative Brief
An initiative brief is a 1-pager that helps define the overarching goals of the project. In partnership with the SEO & Data Analyst, we came up with the high-level scope, target timeline and success metrics for the initiative. More importantly, given the aggressive timeline, we had to define what was out of scope.
Old Experience
Clicking the Search button on the top right brings up a search bar.
Results are displayed on the left. To the left, we see spotlight containers helping users navigate to products.
02
Collect data on the experience
In order to evaluate the current experience, we used qualitative and quantitative methods to collect information.
Qualitative Data using Feedback Surveys
A hotjar survey was launched on the Search page with 4 questions to measure task completion, understand what users are looking for and also the top issues when looking for information on the search page.
Quantitative Data using Adobe Analytics
About 20,000 searches are performed on the Business pages. Specific metrics we were trying to understand are:
Number of users & Number of Searches
Null Results rate
Click Through Rate
Conversion Rate (Search result leading to a form fill)
Click position for the results
% users performing a repeat search
Results that are most returned to users across all queries
Popular Search Terms
We looked at data from the last 180 days to understand the most popular search queries on the B2B website.
Heatmap data
We reviewed the clickdata from the heatmaps to understand user behavior.
Competitor Research and comparison
In the data collection phase, we wanted to understand what defines good vs poor experience. We did this by collecting insights from 10 comparable B2B sites – IBM, Bain, McKinsey, EY, PwC, FICO, Equifax, Adobe, Atlassian and TransUnion.
03
Analyze Data
What we learnt: Popular Search Terms
We broke down the popular search terms into 4 categories as shown.
About 70% of the queries came from lost customers looking for personal credit information.
20% of the queries are contact related, possibly frustrated individuals looking for phone number related information.
5% of queries are login related, possibly consumers or B2B customers looking to login or change password.
5% of the queries are related to B2B products and solutions. In fact, the most searched term ‘bullseye‘ has a new product name. We were surprised to realize that users were still searching by the old product name.
This data us gave a compelling reason to weed out the Consumer traffic.
What we learnt: Qualitative Survey
Survey results from 211 participants showed that
93% users
Did NOT find what they were looking for on the Search Page
42% users
stated that their search yielded no results.
33% users
stated that the results were not relevant to the search term.
Feedback from users with a positive experience did not point us in any particular direction on how to improve the Search page
34% of users are looking for personal credit information
38% of users are looking for contact information
21% of users are looking for B2B related information
We were also surprised to see users look for technical documentation on the site.
What we learnt: Competitor Research and comparison
We wanted to understand what we are doing well so we can retain some of the features if we choose to redesign the experience.
Based on secondary research, we also identified opportunities for improvement:
Use effective autosuggest features
Correct typos
Provide sort and filter options
Don’t return ‘no results’
Keep recent user’s search queries
Review Search queries frequently
04
Wireframe the optimal experience
The team was considering upgrading to the next Search platform to power our pages. Through brainstorming sessions we arrived at an experience that we wanted to create on the new platform.
1. Clicking the Search Icon on the Homepage or any page across Experian opens a full screen search experience.
2. The Full screen search experience allows the user to focus on the task at hand. This was an opportunity to weed out consumers looking for personal credit information and also, remind the user that they are searching within Experian Business.
3. An alternate approach was to present the user with popular search terms based on our analytics platform.
4. A big feature consideration was to allow the ability to auto-suggest based on the user’s query.
5. Presenting a cleaner search results page with Meta categories, dates, Title, Descriptions and images where applicable.
05
Identify opportunities for incremental improvement
• WEED OUT CONSUMER TRAFFIC
Redirect Individuals looking for personal credit information from the Business side of the website to the Personal site.
Recommendation #2
Make it easy to reach customer support for Personal and Business users. Provide channels to effectively route their queries.
30% users are looking for contact information to a support site.
Recommendation #3
Provide meaningful suggestions when returning a ‘No Results‘ page
Impact
This project earned wide recognition with all our internal stakeholders. We were able to use quantitative and qualitative data to present our short term UX improvements and complete overhaul. Currently, we are tracking the incremental improvements to understand if we were able to improve the user experience.