Even if you’re pretty good at searching, the majority of your website’s users are probably not. In fact, user experience expert Jakob Nielsen thinks most people are so bad at searching that site-specific search engines would do better to return navigation elements rather than actual search results.
Nielson’s research reveals that while more people reach for the search box to find what they’re after on a site, few of them “know how to use it.” The normally more prosaic Nielson writes:
It would certainly be nice if schools would get better at teaching kids how to search. But I don’t hold out much hope, because most people have the literary skills of an anteater (I was going to say, “a chimpanzee,” but these animals are too smart for my metaphor). Having new and varied vocabulary words spring from their foreheads wasn’t a survival skill for ice age hunters, so most people today can’t think up good queries without help.
Presumably Nielsen means literacy skills, not literary skills. That’s a pretty harsh critique, but if you’ve ever watched a less web-savvy friend or family member search for something you might be able to relate.
via webmonkey
