Rory Primrose

Learn from my mistakes, you don't have time to make them yourself

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Doing the unexpected constitutes poor design

Posted on April 10, 2006

I just went to a website for a company that a friend now works for. They have included a search engine in their site. Given that I am interested in the contents of this site, I thought I would give the search a go.

No matter what search criteria I enter, I get taken to a FAQ page. So is this a bug in their code, or were there just no results and they assumed that I would figure that out?

This is a great example of poor design. If the user is expecting results, don’t give them something else. If there really are no results, just say so. Don’t take the user somewhere they didn’t ask for.

Here ends the rant.