Mozillians/Releases/1.3/Search Results

Background

A search box is a search box, and no matter how meticulous we’ve designed it, users are going to put whatever they want into it. Mozillians is a “phonebook”, so this problem is not apparent in its fullest form. We won’t get users typing “Facebook” or “sex” into the search box (which we did get with SUMO). But there are some things we can do to make the search experience great.

Guiding principles

• Use browse to navigate. Though Google have told us otherwise, search should not be the primary mean of navigation. Top 15–20 categories is a good place to start.
• Search should be done confidently. We do not want users to search for something that’s not in our vocabulary list and find nothing. Help them:
  • Complete queries
  • Correct errors
  • Provide tools to facet search

Proposals

• Guided start page
  • Have a search box, but have a list of the top 15–20 groups on there
  • Write “Here are a few groups to get you started”
  • (Optional) have a randomized list of Mozillians
• Controlled vocabulary search
  • Let’s clarify that groups are not people’s name (or other kinds of information) by making it visually distinct in the search box
  • When a user starts typing a group name, he will see a list of possible groups and be able to select from it
• Tailored answer
  • All search result should be helpful, even if they lead to an empty search result page
    • In 404 pages, have a list of the top 15 groups so user can start finding something that gets result
    • Write “Sorry that you couldn’t find anything, here are a few groups that you may be looking for”
  • When search query is too general or return too many results to be helpful, offer help
    • When user try to search for general keywords like “Help” or “Contribute”, they may mean “How do I get started with helping?” The search result should offer names of stewards. Write: “here are some people who you can contact to start getting Involved with Mozilla”
    • When user search for “firefox”, say “do you mean ‘firefox mobile’, ‘fx-team’?”
    • When user search for “mozilla”, say “do you mean ‘moco’, ‘mozilla labs’?”
    • When user search for any of our product name alone, say “People work in many departments within <product name>, like <group>, <group>, <group>”
    • When user search for common terms for group, change the search query to the actual group name that people uses. Websites should be WebDev, Support > SUMO, Mozillians > Engagement, Feedbacks > be Input, BrowserID & Persona > Identity, theme & extension > Addons
  • Give user the ability to facet search through filters and sorting tools
    • Allow user to display vouched users, non-vouched users, or both
    • On the search result page, display related categories. When user search for “Firefox” or something general, display all the related categories. Firefox has a lot of teams. The ones who could benefit the most from a volunteer’s help should be listed.
• Synonyms
  • To achieve this kind of search experience, we’ll need a list of synonyms. The list above is a great start, but we need more
  • It would be great to get some numbers on what groups people use the most. Who can we ask for this info?
  • From this, we’ll build the synonyms list that will be fed into the search engine
  • Of course, we need to make sure that our search engine can handle synonyms, first!