Search Results Layout Options

[Chaosrains]

Hello! I'd just like to throw out a suggestion/some feedback regarding the search results page... As in, the page you are presented with after searching for something.

 

The search results page in its current form is strictly vertical - that is, all results for a search are shown in a single column. To be honest, this isn't a good design choice for users with widescreen monitors, as their vertical space is considerably smaller than their horizontal. What this means is that the user is forced to scroll quite a bit to view an entire page of results, and it's very unpleasant to do so, as those users will lose the ability to just immediately view an entire page at once. Essentially they would have to waste time scrolling through to see if what they are after is even on the page at all, and it's also a bit difficult to remember what was up above when you've scrolled to the bottom of the page sometimes. Remedying this with allowing a user to define the amount of results per page doesn't help either, as that just adds more unnecessary clicking.

 

So we are presented with a conundrum. The vertical single column kind of works well for non-widescreen monitors. It's also nice for anyone who just happens to rather it. So what to do? Easy - add the option to view results horizontally (basically in the old site's format) or view them vertically (new site's format). It shouldn't be terribly difficult to implement, and it should have little to no impact on bandwidth or server processing. Rather, a good design is one where the user can change things to how they like them - not necessarily large tweaks, but small ones to improve the quality of the experience with the website.

 

EDIT: I suppose I should mention that I realize it's that way because of the fixed-width of the website itself. While this is understandable, I would recommend changing the results themselves to be far less rectangular and more square. Essentially, when a user selects the horizontal view option, you would take this:

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Result

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and change it to this:

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Result

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That should account for the fixed-width fairly well.

Edited September 10, 2011 by Chaosrains