Recognising something on screen is far easier than remembering it, so keep the information visible.
Heuristic · Nielsen heuristics
Tag
search
Entries tagged search, drawn from across the library. Tags cut through the section structure, which is where most of the useful connections are.
7 entries across 3 sections
Type
Category
Level
7 entries
The escape hatch from navigation, and often the primary path for users who know what they want.
Pattern · Finding
Suggestions as the user types, which turns recall into recognition when it is fast enough.
Pattern · Finding
Narrowing a large set by attributes, which is what makes large catalogues navigable at all.
Pattern · Finding
A searchable list of every action, which serves novices as discovery and experts as an accelerator.
Pattern · Efficiency
Say why it is empty, and give exactly one thing to do about it.
UX writing · UX writing
A large share of searches returned nothing, and the fix was vocabulary rather than the search engine.
Case study · Search