Pat’s Point of View

OK I think I know what they do, but how do we expect your average user to decipher this?

Millions of people use Wikipedia every day, so you think the creators would have received a complaint (and taken action) regarding the “two search buttons”. Under the label of Search you would expect that any form button next to the text field would initiate the search. The Search button does this, but what about Go? Lots of forms (including many for site search) use a Go button as the submit button and since it’s on the left and bold, I think it’s quite logical to expect that’s the button that makes the search work.

I find it strange that such a popular, at-the-forefront-of-the-new-web site has such an unusable interface.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 14th, 2006 at 1:43 pm and is filed under Usability, User experience. If you enjoyed this post, you might also like to leave a comment or follow @patrickkennedy on Twitter.

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About the author

Patrick Kennedy is a user experience strategist and design researcher based in Sydney Australia. He leads research activities that improve the user experience of cross-channel products and services; helping both designers and business decision makers in bringing those products and services to fruition. Read more.