CROWDCTRL

Came across this the other night while ordering a pizza online. Completing normal tasks such as this in the online world is a bit of a crap shoot, and you can expect the best or worst depending on which mundane task you’re trying to move to digitalia.

When I came to the pizzahut.com page, I noticed the search bar. It piqued my interest a bit.. what would you search for on pizzahut.com? Naturally, I tried it. I searched for pepperoni.

Hm. Searched for “pizza”. Nothing. Searched for “pizza hut”. Nothing.

Of course, in web design there are many elements you feel obligated to include. Search can certainly be one of them, but I think part of the obligation is that it should work!

Where else is search useless? Not necessarily because it doesn’t work, but because no one will use it. People use search engines all the time.. Have the recent search wars made site searches obsolete?

And what does search say about your information architecture or site design? It certainly warrants some study. Searching for something implies either laziness or failure in finding it through your interface. If I can’t find a pepperoni pizza on Pizza Hut’s website, what should the developers do?