While defining the new UI strategy for our site, the team came up with different design propositions to redefine the search experience on the home page and the results page. The idea is to add more complex tools to help users actually simplify the search experience. I am not going to talk about the tools here yet, but having a few different databases to search (and they are not easily merged in a results set!), the user stumbles across many unidentified fields of data that are irrelevant to him/her but relevant to the simple search keywords in some shape and order - Who/What and Where. So, from this came the Advanced Search discussion.
Prompting users to actually think about what they search before they enter keywords, is something that we want to try and test. The search task is somehow related to the browse task. We are trying to connect the two by giving users the option to 1) search within categories/channels and 2) browse the results that appear in a taxonomy-like categorization.
How to make the advanced search more popular and a core function in the search UI without making the user think too much?
Now read this great article about ‘advancing’ the advanced search.
anabakalinova