Give Users the Ability to Filter Search Results

In the early days of web interfaces, most search systems worked like this:

1. Enter a search term, such as red shoes
2. The system would return 100,000 pairs of red shoes
3. The user would try again: red men’s shoes in size 8
4. The system would try an AND match on all the terms
5. The results page would show no results
6. The user would have to work out how to change the query to get the results they want

Some enterprise and business systems still work this way, much to the frustration of their long-suffering users. It’s a symptom of interface design mapped directly onto the engineering requirements: this is how databases are queried, but it’s not how human minds work.

Over the past 10 years, pioneered by e-commerce sites, searching has gotten a lot better—a modern example looks like this:

1. Enter a search term, such as red shoes
2. The system would return 100...