UI Components for Search

Last week we published an article on UX Magazine under the title, From Pattern to Component, and released a new section of our website revealing more about TwigKit’s user interface components. What gives?

We’ve been very pleased to see so much conversation taking place around good design patterns for search. In the last year and a half, Marti Hearst has published Search User Interfaces, Peter Morville written Search Patterns and popularised his Flickr collection, and Endeca released a design pattern library for search. All this discussion has been immensely valuable for increasing both search literacy in the UX world, as well as greater UX literacy in the world of search.

But there still seems to be a disconnect: now that there’s a greater understanding of how to best design search, why do so many companies’ search experiences still su… ahem still have so much room for improvement?

The answer is that even though we now have a better set of blueprints, the construction process is still costly and time-intensive. Many companies just don’t have the budget or timeline to go beyond a barebones implementation of search.

Our mission is to help companies achieve an uncompromising search user experience, while simultaneously reducing the time and cost of development.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. At TwigKit, our mission is to help companies achieve an uncompromising search user experience, while simultaneously reducing the time and cost of development. We accomplish this have-your-cake-and-eat-it-to wizardry through user interface components. While design patterns consist of words and pictures, TwigKit’s UI components are composed of all the HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and server-side code needed to make them work. They’re also made to be easily and highly configurable, quickly tailored to the exact needs of each project.

So, we encourage you to take a look at our gallery of UI components and their corresponding code snippets, read From Pattern to Component on UX Magazine, and take a look at our 75-second video on the TwigKit Markup Language. As always, get in touch with us if you’d like to learn more about TwigKit, and do watch this space; we’re very excited about what’s in store for 2011!