Original article: http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2009/02/starting-from-zero-winning-strategies-for-no-search-results-pages.php
There is no set of rules that guarantees a successful no search results implementation. However, by studying various search UI implementations, I’ve come up with three useful design directions:
1. Don’t be afraid to say I did not understand. Clearly indicate there are no search results, so the customer can recover.
2. Focus on providing a way out. Make sure every control on the page does something productive to help resolve the no search results condition.
3. Focus on the customer’s goal. Provide the most relevant recovery content first, while staying as close as possible to the customer’s original intent.
Removing some of a user’s original keywords is just one in long list of effective content strategies. Here are some useful ideas for content strategies, in order of their relevance to the user’s original query:
- substituting a user’s original keywords with different keywords from a controlled vocabulary
- removing some of a user’s original keywords, or making partial matches
- matching categories or aspects
- top searches, featured results, or most popular results
- third-party resources and ads
