Design Patterns – Search in description feature for responsive search flow

What happen to the responsive search flow when we design a feature to search in the item description?

The user focus during the e-commerce journey often is dedicated to the search flow. Sometimes the results after he performed a standard search are not enough. To keep the user focused and increase the engagement during the search experience we decide to try the “search in description” feature.

In my benchmark I put in the top list Ebay that’s delivering this function as well.

During the sketching phase I stumbled in this scenarios:

Scenario extra small breakpoint #1

1. The user performs a search with one or more keywords;
2. The user lands on a listing page with some items to scan;
3. At the end of the list (browsing via pagination, infinite scroll or “more content” button) we display a message about the number of results and a on/off toggle to extend the search in description;
4. The page is refreshing and is delivering the new listing page with extra items;
5. At the top of the page the user will see the update results and the on/off toggle button active;

PRO

• We’re providing content on the go, we suggest to extend the search only at the end of the browsing session;
• We’re not overloading the user with an additional user task;

CON

• The message will be available only at the end of the browsing process, the user that wants to search with this function is in a dead spot; We solved adding this functionality in the filters dropdown;

Scenario extra small breakpoint #2

1. The user performs a search with one or more keywords;
2. The user lands on a listing page with some items to scan;
3. At the top of the list we display a message about the number of results and a check button to extend the keyword search in description;
4. The page is refreshing and is delivering the new listing page with extra items;
5. At the top of the page the user will see the update results and the check button active;

PRO

• We’re providing all the informations about the listing in the first part of the page;
• We put the user in control to manage the list with all the elements designed for this purpose;

CON

• We’re overloading the user with a new task;
• The user effort is not more focused to scan the list;

At the end we decided to deliver the solution for the scenario #2 because;

• this solution is more close to the current methodology that we’re using to display form controls (ex. dropdowns, text fields, radio buttons etc);
• putting this control sticky to the top of the page make easy for the user to perform the task;
• we’re confident that there’s no extra effort for the learning curve;

Here some screenshot of the lo-fi mockups for all the breakpoints: