UXIdeas blog

Chiara Fox posted a very insightful checklist for designing search result pages in Adaptive Path’s blog:

• Highlight the query term in the results.
• Restate the query on the results page.
• Show the number of results that were found.
• Include next and previous buttons, as well as links to additional pages, to move through results. These should be smartly linked; no link on previous if you are on the first page and so on.
• Include a query box so the user can search again.
• Don’t show the URLs of the result pages, unless your audience is techy enough to derive meaning from the URL.
• Have meaningful page titles and descriptions for each result.
• The page title should be the link to the result.
• Allow sorting and refinement tools if appropriate for your users and content.
• Indicate if a result is not a regular page (e.g., a PDF file).