An empirical study of search box and autocomplete design patterns in online bookstore

A category of user interface design patterns offers several design solutions and techniques. To solve one design problem, novice designers may have a difficult time in deciding which design pattern they should use. This study examined user satisfaction toward six user interface design patterns of search box and autocomplete: 1) a simple search box, 2) a search box with a dropdown menu, 3) a search box with two dropdown menus, 4) a search box with autocomplete, 5) a search box with autocomplete and book cover images, and 6) a search box with autocomplete and book rating. An online bookstore prototype with these six design patterns was developed for the study. Participants worked with the prototype and rated their satisfaction on a 7-point scale via an online questionnaire. A repeated measures ANOVA found that the user satisfaction among all six design patterns was statistically different at a significance level of .01. A multiple comparison using a paired sample t-test with Bonferroni correction revealed that the search box with autocomplete and pictures, which received the highest satisfaction score, was statistically different from all three search box without autocomplete at a significance level of 0.003.