Need Search Syntax Standards and Libraries

Just as Amazon represents the gold standard in eCommerce ease-of-use (no CVV codes, no Verified by Visa, no captchas), so Google for search ease-of-use.

What I have in mind are not the powerful algorithms that deliver up the results, but rather the more basic but crucial details of software craftspersonship, that help insulate us careless humans from our own limitations. Examples:

• Ignoring hyphens and their ilk. I.e., Google treats any non-alpha character as a space or wildcard. This seems like a small thing, but there are a lot of hyphens and slashes out there, waiting to mess up search results. 

• Spellchecking search Terms

• Ignoring capitalization (this one is fairly widespread in your average search implementation).

• Allowing the user to override the compensations, with the simple and generally well-known convention of enclosing search terms in quotes. An example of being smart, but not too smart.

eCommerce Ease-of-Use Notes: Amazon Sets the Standard

I buy a ton of stuff on the internet. I say that not so much to mean that I buy a ton of stuff, but that I buy a roughly typical amount of stuff, but a disproportionately large amount of it on the internet. So I see a lot of eCommerce sites.

What I find is that very few match the attention-to-detail and ease-of-use of Amazon. In some cases, no doubt that reflects Amazon's massive advantages of scale, They can afford a lot more user-experience and software development. But then again, some things are pretty basic, and easily copied.

Three things that I hate come to mind:

1. Verified by Visa. As far as I am concerned, it is awful. I have read defenses of it, so maybe there is another side to the story. But if there is--Visa and their partners have done a terrible job of telling that story. If Amazon can get along fine without it, why would a consumer expect or put up with it elsewhere? (And as noted in my post, an unforgivably poor job of implementing the VbV process during checkout. Given the subject of this post, an ironic counter-example of lack of attention to usability).

2. CVV codes. I HATE having to remember this when I check out from a website. Adding to the irritation--if you left out some other required piece of data, it rests the CVV code. Creating both irritating and often confusing behavior. E.g., I enter everything but my phone number, for example. The SUBMIT fails, prompting for my phone number. Fine. I re-submit, but it fails again, now because of missing CVV code. Irritating if I realize, confusing if I think there is some other field still missing.

3. Captchas. Oh how I loathe them. I must be especially captcha-challenged, but I often find it takes 2-3 tries to get it right.

One possibility is that Amazon's scale may somehow give them a critical advantage that smaller sites don't have. Maybe they feel they can take losses that smaller sites aren't willing to take. Or maybe they extract better terms from credit card companies. But from the consumer perspective, it hardly matters--just more factors to making Amazon the path of least resistance.

Verified by Visa Is Evil

Just spent 30 minutes trying to buy an airline ticket on Delta. In the final stages of the transaction, I got thrown into a "Verified by Visa" screen. It looks, for all the world, like a moderately sophisticated, man-in-the-middle phising attack. I had encountered it a few times before, but not recently, and those times I was able to click past it. This time I couldn't get past it to save my life. So I aborted and purchased through Travelocity. Did I mention that in addition to consuming 30 minutes of my life, all-told, it also delayed my purchase and the price increased by $50?

I got motivated to do some research. This is a very good blog post, and here are some comments from Bruce Schneier. It sounds like: A) A disadvantage to the consumer; B) Almost inconceivably bad security practices. Nice going, Visa, Banks and Merchants.