Mark Gibbons
Published on

Sitecore AI Search preview suggestion modes — where technical challenges and good UX meet

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If you’re building with Sitecore AI Search, you might not realise that there are a lot of configuration modes available when it comes to preview suggestions.

This is outlined roughly in the documentation here, but I think it’s missing some further callouts.

There are two main modes for preview search results, Suggestionmode and Contentmode.

Suggestion Mode Options

Suggestion mode has multiple options that can also be enabled, either individually or a combination of any of these.

  1. Sort by attribute — if a visitor clicks in the search bar but hasn’t yet typed anything, a Sort by attribute suggestions block can show top content items by the number of clicks over the last week. This is likely a good user experience for a global search bar where you don’t really want to take the current page context into account.
  2. Context aware — create personalized auto-completion of search queries. What does this look like in practice? Say you have pages tagged as “Dinosaur Article”, if the user starts typing “din” then the autocomplete suggestion would be “Dinosaur Article”.
  3. Edit distance — provide a Did you mean… typo correction experience. I don’t really see the UX value in this one especially when you have the Context aware option available.
  4. Recent history — displays keywords previously searched for by the user. Self explanatory, but not sure exactly the use cases for this, perhaps could be used in conjunction with some of the other methods here.
  5. keyphrase_fallback — Each of the above supports the keyphrase_fallback boolean parameter. When set to true, Search uses the first suggestion from the first suggestion block as an alternate keyword when there are no results for a search.

Content Mode

  • Content mode is the same as normal search results; these are actual results based on the search entered. This is useful if you want to simply list the actual results in-situ instead of any kind of suggestion.

You can then further enable Personalisation, or any custom Blacklist, Boost, Pin, or Bury rules via the Widget settings.

The Challenge

Sitecore AI Search is a complex product, but when you take the time to understand all the options available, you can see how it will possibly be difficult to drive these features into your solution. This is because there is usually a disconnect in teams between the UX team and the development team.

Bridging the UX and development team during the design phase when it comes to implementing search is critical to ensure the best UX outcome.

So I’d recommend for your organisation if you are just starting out with Sitecore Search:

  1. A technical person such as an Architect or Senior Developer should go through the Sitecore Search for Business Users course on https://learning.sitecore.com/
  2. They should set up a POC website / area with all the OOTB basic Sitecore Search functionality that can then be used for future demo’s and POCs.
  3. When it comes to implementing Sitecore Search, they need to work closely with the UX Design team and / or site Product Owner, ensuring they have a rough understanding on all the functionality available, and incorporate those into designs and user journeys. Plan to be iterative on this as there is a bit of trial and error involved.