Making Results Look Like Results

Jul 04

Stephen MartinWeb Design , , , , , , No Comments

Recently, while working on a refresh of the design for RentList.com I made a statement to a project manager that the “results need to look more like a result.” After FT 2.0 asked what I meant by that statement, I started to think about the idea some more and how to present it with clarity in the future.

It really came down to the fact that the content blocks, which in this case were search results, were not designed in such a way to create individual pieces of content or individual results. The separating design element was a rule, very similar to the background color and it was easily overlooked. This made the results look like a grouping of text.

While trying to think of a physical, visual representation of this concept, I started to think about grocery store isles, specifically the cereal isle. If each and every box of cereal was the exact same color, width, height and used the same fonts or text, how would you know the difference between Raisin Bran and Special K? The fact is that the boxes of cereal in the isle are packed so tightly together, that the only discerning factor is the box design itself.

When designing search results, you don’t necessarly have that luxury of making each individual result look different than the one next to it. You may have different text or images for each result, but there needs to be some clear separation between the results to give them their own space. For RentList.com, I went with a background color and tried to leave a good amount of space between each “shaded box.” But there are other things you can do. Borders, well defined rules, some sort of indicator or dingbat (like in a list of links) are a few. Although I don’t believe Google search results are the perfect example, they do try to experiment with tightly grouping items in a result as well as color for a defining factor which is also an interesting solution.

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