mySociety design tip: search box landing pages

We use Google analytics to understand how people use, and find, our sites. This blog post is a summary of one deceptively simple way we use this information to get more people to use TheyWorkForYou, our UK parliamentary tracking website.

Mallard

"Mallard landing" (at Slimbridge) by LHG Creative Photography (CC BY-NC-ND licensed from Flickr)

One technical term: landing pages are the pages on a website that a user first arrives on from a particular link or search result. In this case, we created explicit landing pages. That is, we made these pages solely to be the target of search results. They serve no other purpose in the structure of the site; they are like super-focussed homepages. If you’ve read the blog post about minimising clicks on the homepage you’ll see that this is a clear example of that principal in action.

We added two specific landing pages to TheyWorkForYou — here’s one of them: http://www.theyworkforyou.com/parliament/

This page exists for a simple reason: we know that someone who uses the word “parliament” when searching on Google is probably looking for something that TheyWorkForYou can help with. By creating the “parliament” landing page, we are able to offer a page that is more likely to serve them. Incidentally, we try to make sure that searches lead to the landing page by using Google Adwords, and encouraging the Google bots to associate the page with the keywords, and other things too — but those are not the details this tip is about. Instead, look what we’ve put on that page. You’ll see it includes a set of useful explanations about parliament (it’s very common for people not to know how their parliament works), as well as a search box.

That search box is the same one that appears on every other page on the website, in the top right-hand corner.

But on this landing page, we’ve changed the prominence of the search box by putting it right in front of your eyes. And we added the caption: “Search for any word or phrase – see if it’s been mentioned in Parliament”.

Yes, there’s no technical magic here. No special code. It’s our regular search box. The difference is that on this page we know the user is thinking about parliament, and that search box does indeed search extensive records of what’s been happening in parliament. If we didn’t do this, we could leave the user to figure it out for themselves. They might of course… or they might give up. As you’ll have noticed if you’ve read the previous design tips, we don’t want users to give up, ever.

We did it again for “Hansard”. What’s Hansard? It’s the name of the transcript of all UK parliamentary debates, published by Parliament itself. Someone who knows about Hansard might be searching for it (on Google, say) and not realise that TheyWorkForYou has the entire transcript available for search. So we added another landing page. Again, it’s the same search that’s on all the other TheyWorkForYou pages, but now — for a user who’s already identified as someone who knows that Hansard exists — it’s clear that the search will do what they expect.