37signals has made their e-commerce search report available for free. Some nice overviews of common pitfalls, many of which could easily be applied to the OPAC and other library areas. I tend to think of a library's online presence as e-commerce so I can see lots of applicable ideas.

One that comes up, of course, is how well does it handle misspellings and synonyms. I discussed this in my last post and I still believe it is an important service for people. Another point of discussion was contingency design: How to handle it when there are no results. One of the things that I like about my library is that it retries an alternate boolean search if nothing is found. Unfortunately I don't think it gives as much feedback as I would like and I think the default search is wrong. I'd be interested to see how many searches have to be redone with AND because it didn't work how people expected.

The report itself goes over the methodology (with examples of good and bad), then reviews specific sites outlining problem areas and then goes on to give best practices. I recommend giving it a look if nothing else. Hell, it's free, short and easy to read.

Also if you haven't read it and you work with your library's online presence, I highly recommend you read their book Defensive Design for the Web. The book goes over good and bad error messages, how to help users with forms and other areas where they may need help. As they point out in the book and elsewhere, almost no one likes to think about when things go wrong and so we end up with error messages that do nothing. With proper planning and design you can prevent errors from being a brick wall and help people recover. And don't fool yourself, things will go wrong.

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