[Sigia-l] ROI/Value of Search Engine Design - Resources?

[Jared M. Spool]

Richard Wiggins wrote:

>The point is that a certain percent of your customers will do searches.  If
>you're Amazon and you have a million customers a day, and let's say "only"
>20% of your customers search, that's 200,000 customers to keep happy.

You see, this is where I run into problems.

Peter M. mentioned a recent study we did of people shopping for clothing 
where two of the top three sites didn't have a search engine, yet users 
rated the sites highly, purchased more from those sites than from most of 
the other sites, rated the search engine highly (!), and told us that they 
were very satisified with the site.

So, on those two sites, 100% of the users were happy even though they 
weren't given the opportunity to search. Much happier than when using most 
of the sites that *did* provide Search.

Therefore, I don't buy the "a certain percent of your customers will do 
searches" argument. That's where I'm at with this.

Again, I'm not saying those two sites *shouldn't* have search. I'm just not 
willing to buy the argument that you *always* should provide it.

Jared


Jared M. Spool
User Interface Engineering
http://www.uie.com    jspool at uie.com

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