UX review of Smart Search Preview

[DanielSteen]

Hi fellow feature previewers,

I wanted to share some quick thoughts from my UX review of the new smart search, in case anyone’s curious. I use Morville’s User Experience Honeycomb as the framework for these reviews. It sounds fancy, but it’s really just a practical way to assess key areas like usefulness, usability, desirability, findability, accessibility, credibility, and value. I score each out of 5, then average them to get an overall rating. As a general rule, I don’t recommend enabling features that score below 4 unless there is a compelling unaddressed business need.

Hope this helps!

Useful	2	The tool is not particularly useful in its current form, only returning relevant results for specific queries, with no filtering or sorting options.
Usable	2	Missing key functionalities like filtering and sorting, which are standard in search tools. The current design feels clunky and hard to navigate.
Desirable	5	Users have a genuine desire to search and find content within courses or enterprise-wide. It is desirable in concept, but its execution is lacking.
Findable	3.5	The search feature is somewhat hidden in course-nav navigation and could be better positioned at the top nav for easier access and following other platforms design patterns.
Accessible	3	Some accessibility issues, such as unclear labeling for screen reader users (the result links themselves) and previews that show raw HTML, making it difficult for users to navigate effectively.
Credible	2.5	The tool has potential but currently returns irrelevant results, reducing confidence in its effectiveness.
Valuable	2	The feature doesn't add significant value as it stands, and users may find it frustrating due to its lack of relevance and core functionality.
Average	2.86

Recommendations that would improve this feature

• Introduce filtering and sorting options to allow users to narrow search results by date, asset type (e.g., assignments, pages, etc.), and publication status.

• Improve the preview functionality to provide more context from the page or document, rather than just raw or abridged HTML.

• Fix hyperlinking issues. It really should use the asset names (like “Knowledge Check Quiz - Chinese Medicine”) instead of using the asset type as the link, currently is used “page, assignment etc”, which ins’t accessible.

• Address accessibility concerns by ensuring that links and previews are clearly labeled for screen reader users.

Hope this saves someone else some time and is useful for the development team.

Feel free to reach out for any thoughts.