Three weeks ago I took a leap of faith, and moved by search box from a location that would be perceived by most as the best place to have it. It was in the header on the right. Highly visible, on every page, and was very much in it’s own zone. Usability wise, it appeared to be a win. Apparently though, that was far from the truth.

Picking the Location

When the search box was in it’s old location it acted as a dedicated fail safe method for visitors to find my content. My main menu, running horizontal in the header, lead to the search box, so it appeared to be a logical placement. Can’t find what you are looking for using the menu? Try searching.

That isn’t how people use this site though. They most often land on BWI, often coming from Google or other search engines. They read a few lines of the content, scroll down to read some more, and then guess what happens then? The header, main menu, and SEARCH get pushed up off the screen leaving the sidebar as the apparent main menu.

The new location for the search is placed directly under the Recent Post list. Don’t see what you like in the recent post? Search for it, it’s the next logical step…and form.

In this new location I went from one search in 305 unique users to one search out of every 97 users. Site exits from my search results page is only 18% so you can see this is pretty big deal. This all goes back to Jakob’s saying of “It’s not what they say, it’s what they do” in regards to improving a websites usability.

Just another reason to test, test, test.

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