Faceted Search: What Is It?
Faceted search is an essential search feature that helps users clarify their search queries and discover the most relevant results in no time. Search facets are topic attributes used to organize search results and are usually placed right around the search box to offer search support. This small but mighty search feature provides a smoother user experience and helps get customers closer to making a conversion.
Faceted search helps create a better overall site search experience. It minimizes the user's navigation on the site by offering advanced search. Faceted search empowers users to refine results that are more relevant to what they are looking for. It removes friction from the user’s experience by reducing how many results they’ll have to scroll through.
Faceted search works so well with customers because it plays on a human’s natural tendency to organize information. In fact, a website without any facets to choose from is likely frustrating for customers because many have become used to them as a search function. Facets allow users to narrow their results more effectively by allowing them to use less brain power during their search. Instead of having to think about the right thing to type into the search bar, faceted search provides them with a variety of options to help them find what they’re looking for with ease.
The main types of facets you’ll see are Administrative and Descriptive. What’s the difference?
Administrative has more to do with the organization of the data such as format, date, or author which is typically seen when searching a website’s content or a document source. Descriptive facets are the ones most people are familiar with. For example, these would be things like color, size, department, price, etc. These would be more commonly seen on an e commerce website to give shoppers more advanced search and filtering options.
There are many benefits to using faceted search on your business’ website. It allows searchers to tweak search results to get closer to what they’re looking for, which is most effective with large amounts of data options. It also prevents information overload for users. Without narrowing their search, users can quickly become discouraged by the massive amounts of results their query pulls up, and this can hinder their likelihood of converting. Faceted search also provides clarity for users who have limited knowledge of the product or content they are searching for. A facet option prompts them with a topic or idea about what kind of results will actually be most useful to them. Faceted search combines the best of search and navigation by providing more pointed searches without having to click around or use the navigation bar.
