Archive for October 5th, 2008

Search should be intuitive

I watch baseball. A lot of baseball. And I’m in a fantasy league, so I read a lot alot about baseball. Because of this Baseball Prospectus is a site I subscribe to because the content is top-notch analysis. If though it doesn’t help me much, there’s a lot of information about teams and players that’s very insightful.

That’s what I like.

What I don’t like is their search interface — it’s hard to figure out how to get to certain articles, and everything is separated. Click on the search link above, and it sends you to a complex advanced search page. Finding a player is pretty self explanitory, but the Audit Team doesn’t mean anything to me.

Remember, users are looking for one search box, and it should be designed to intuitively go to results based on what they expect. In this case, I would expect a search box that would show me all results (“Google-style”), and then I could filter on players based on direct and indirect matches. What is here now doesn’t work for me.