What were they thinking!

Posted: 22 April 2009

One of the hardest aspects of designing a site is making sure it meets the needs of your audience. And regardless of how much research you do beforehand, there will always be surprises when the site goes live. People are strange. They act in unpredictable (and sometimes, dare one say, 'stupid' ways!). So you really need to know what they are thinking when they visit your site.

One good way of getting a view of this is to see what they are searching for. You can log all their searches on your site, and then look through to see what they thought your site wold contain. What you're really interested in is where the searches failed - that is, where there were no results shown to them, or where there were a massive number of results shown. Sometimes this will be because they can't type, and mis-keyed their search query, or it may be because they used different terminology than that on the site. Either way, you can rescue future such searches by adding in words on your pages to match. (For typos you can use the Keywords field, so your page isn't visibly contaminated by mis-spellings.)

In neatComponents you can ask for searches to be logged, and then use the Search Log Datafeed Component to retrieve the logs for display using a Query.

Not only are the search logs useful to improve the user experience on your site, they also provide a fascinating insight into your users, and will likely set you off developing the site in directions you had never before considered. Happy logging.