We keep hearing this that search is growing in terms of how people navigate the internet.
- Command line is how we navigated the 1970’s. The Find command is how we navigated the 1980’s. Now search is the way that we navigate Web 2.0. The command line is natural language. We are starting to use computers the way we talk to other people.
- If search is an interface, then it’s our navigational device. It’s our steering wheel.
Source: Blog Business Summit
I find this fascinating. I get the logic, that search is akin to asking a question, and that’s what we do naturally in day to day life so why not online. I get that.
But are we ready for a bank site that uses Google Suggest for its primary navigation? Why not – if search is the natural way to find stuff, why put customers to all the bother of searching your navigation?
Why not have a home page with only a search box, that offers suggestions, as done by Google Suggest.
Bankwatch 
Seems OK for prospects, but if I’m logging on to pay a bill I would rather click-thru a bill pay option, select the biller and pay. In such a case a suggested search may not be the best thing
Quite right regarding customers who need to log in. The page would need a little more than I showed to accomodate customers logging in to online banking, and probably a few other details. I was just trying to illustrate the search concept.
It assumes a customer would know what to search for. For example, if a customer had just moved from the US to Canada they might search for 401k instead of RSP.
That’s how I typically think of public site navigation: menus are for people who don’t really know what they want; search is for people who know roughly what they want information on.
Secure sites are different; because the content is much more limited menus are mainly for command structure and search is more or less replaced with help functionality. I can’t see a practical way to front-door an online banking site with search.
Interesting idea. Can you imagine the complex meta data required for this? Seems to me it would need to go beyond XML.
Another navigational device that coke is implementing is community first. Just got back from both the Forrester and BuzzMetrics conferences, and this was discussed.
Dan … agree this isn’t applicable to online banking.
Ed … it is complex, but I know of Banks implementing Google Search, and I would expect that Google Suggest will become part of that offering in due course.
All … I would further expect that traditional navigation would also be required, but I find it interesting to consider how many would use this approach if it were prominent.
Ed … community first is interesting. I am curious how that could play out in Bank sites.
Colin,
This is madness! We can’t have financial institutions giving up their ability to pepper users with glamtastic marketing and animated gifs in favor of simplified and intuitive usability. Where’s the ROI in that?
Sorry, I’m feeling cynical today. A scaled-down, search-centric interface would be great to appeal to a specific kind of user. Others would probably be petrified without the guidance of a traditional nav.
If more sites’ searches worked with the efficiency of Google, and people had more confidence in a blind search, this could stick as an awesome convention. But I know personally that I get burned a lot by the search on a lot of commercial sites.
Brent… too right – we might end up looking like a kinder gentler CU! But your last point is key too, and the usefulness of the search would be critical.
Colin, I’m not sure either how “community first” navigation might work in Finance–i thought Coke was exploring some interesting ideas.
For banking, perhaps it could work like this…You decide it’s time to stop renting and you want to buy, so you want to connect with others that have done the same thing (online and off). Perhaps a bank hosts a community that let’s customers help eachother through it all: desire, to picking a neighborhood, to picking a realitor, etc. The bank can host and chime in when they can help–not with product offers, but by general advice and noting trends and common problems/solutions.
Just a thought.