How to Create the Ideal Search Bar for Your Website? Check Out the Best Practices
Having a search bar on the website is for the convenience of your users, and to improve their experience. You might have come across the website, where you are searching for a particular product and you are unsure where to find it from. This is when you regret that the website you have visited doesn’t have an ideal search bar.
Unlike, reputed eCommerce brands such as Amazon, Flipkart, Nykaa, and Myntra have an ideal search bar, which makes it easy for visitors where they can easily check out the products they were looking for.
So, having the search bar for the website is essential, specially when you are creating an eCommerce website or blogging website. However, we as a Website design company in Delhi feel that the search bar and filter (for customization) make a great user experience combination.
If you are looking forward to creating one for your website, then here’s how you can create an ideal search bar design:
- Include a text field and add a search button:
The basic search bar is what you want to create, but how you can design it uniquely matters the most. So, the basic search bar consists of two elements:
- Text field – the horizontal bar for the users to write their queries, products, etc.
- Search button – to command the text they have written.
Now, you can level up with this simple and accessible search bar by blending it with your website design or adding a background color to it, etc. And you can also replace the search button with verbs (actionable words) such as Go and Enter.
This is how you can uniquely design a search bar for the website, and the further tips will help you to elegantly use the search bar to improve the user experience.
- Positioning of the bar:
The visibility of the bar is important without this, the users cannot easily access to the search bar. Most of the common positioning is at the top of the website, it can be right, center, or left. Even many of the sites are positioned at the center of the site so that users don’t need to wander for the search bar.
You can also choose to add it on the menu bar, where you can denote it with the icon of a magnifying glass. These are the following ways you can position your website and improve navigation on the site.
- Size it properly:
The search bar size matters, you have a responsive website, and creating an appropriate one for different device audience is essential. So, the length of the text field is crucial. If on average, users on the site write a long description i.e. more than 4 words, then you need to ideally design a long text field and vice versa.
So, understand your website and audience perspective, and design a search bar for the website accordingly.
- Add suggestion or autocomplete:
In today’s time it feels like a lot of effort to put in for writing the whole thing. Users may get annoyed for doing so. We as a website designing company in delhi recommend you to add a drop-down box where you can add suggestions or autocomplete, which will cut off the time of users and get to the result page instantly, which they were looking for.
For example:
If a user is searching for the “T-shirts for men” then you can have a suggestion below with autocomplete such as:
Typing – T-shirt…
- T-shirts for men
- T-shirts for kids men
- T-shirts for old men
and so on.
This will help the user to find the page with ease and instantly.
- Design for mobile:
There is a rise in the usage in smartphones and we can’t ignore this audience. However, the UI for the mobile versions should be compact and impactful. Adding the design search bar for the mobile should be convenient. Here’s how you can design for mobile ones:
- You can keep the search bar at least 9 mm high and 9 mm wide.
- Also, you must keep the surrounding of inactive space.
You can make use of this guideline to design for mobile regardless of screen size.
Avoid these mistakes while designing a search bar
The search bar is just like another element of the website, but it is crucial and plays a vital role in enhancing the user experience. So, you can follow these things to avoid mistakes and design an impactful one:
- The size of the search bar should be appropriate. If the bar is small or large, then it will not only affect the design but also affects in use it.
- The search button beside the text field should be designed to a size that is easy to clickable. Here, you should keep the mobile users in mind while designing.
- Positioning of the search bar is very important, and if it is placed awkwardly, then it may impact the users and they may face difficulty in finding it.
Final thoughts:
We feel the search bar is not only an essential element of the website but also a lesson-learning one (for beginners). The selection of every element is crucial and its positioning while designing is important as well.
