Supercool Design in the UK released a small study this summer with information I didn’t know I wanted.
They examined the use of search filters on cultural organizations’ websites. Not something I really ever thought I wanted to know, but was curious to read about once I knew the data existed.
The big finding was….people aren’t using filters as much as you might think.
Even on the website where filters got used the most – with twenty-seven pages of event listings – nearly half of all users ignored the filters altogether.
Moreover, even when people did use the filters, they tended to just use one, maybe two. Across our sample the most-used filters were genre, date, and then either location (where this was an option) or audience type (e.g. kids shows versus adult shows). This was true no matter if a website had three filters or nine: the vast majority of visitors only used one filter, and it was most often either ‘date’ or ‘genre’.
Another interesting insight was that when filters are hidden, people don’t use them. Yeah I know, you’re thinking “No duh!” What they found was when filters were concealed under Advanced Options, they didn’t get used. When filters are revealed, people use them a lot more. In the case of the British Museum, the use of filters “jumped massively.”
Though they also revealed that for many websites, the three filters appearing on the top of the list got used the most.
They suggest making all the filters visible and if you are concerned about the clutter that results, consider whether you really need the terms you would relegate to Advanced Options.
The final insight that provided was a little counter-intuitive. People use search bars less than they use filters. They observe it seems strange that people would rather hunt through filter terms than type a few terms in a search bar, but that is what happens.
The only exception we saw to this was in that user testing with the British Library. Here, visitors initially used the listing page search bar more – but only when the filters were hidden behind an “Advanced options” toggle. When we made all the filters visible, people favoured using these to find the information they were looking for.
I wonder how much of that effect is due to people searching directly with search engines, rather than using the site-provided search bar. I know that I’m more likely to use Google with the modifier “site:foo.com” than to trust the site-provided search to do anything decent. Even people who don’t use power tricks like “site:” can often get better results from adding a couple of terms (like place or venue name) to normal search than they can get from website-provided search bars.