Improve the Experience

With Coveo Hive modularity, you can easily build a basic search page and improve it along the way, according to your requirements (see Create a Simple Result List).

Add Related Controls to your search interface to improve the user experience. From a result header to a facet, you have it all built in. Give full control to the users, and make your search component a key solution for their questions.

Although you have a fully functional search page, it needs to scale from a device to another. Make sure it’s responsive and use the available tools to help you along. Dealing with many devices, browsers and context makes it difficult from time to time to deliver top-quality layouts. By default, your search results will be displayed as a list. You can easily configure the default layout to list, cards or table. Consider giving users the choice of result layout (see Toggle Between a List and a Card Result Layout).

Implementing Device Detection in Sitecore lets you detect which device is being used to access your website and customize the experience accordingly. It can be used along with CSS media query.

For content relevancy improvement, don’t underestimate Insert and Customize a Distance Resources Component. Distance resources component can be used to filter query based on geolocation. Once implemented, you can leverage Distance Facet Slider, Distance Facet Range and Distance sort components.

Using Sitecore Personalization With Coveo lets you display different search results depending on external conditions defined by Sitecore (for example, display different search result layout depending on user location).

Coveo for Sitecore offers a variety of facet types and facet configurations. Allow users to drill down in search results and minimize your number of facets by opting for the Coveo Category Facet whenever this facet type is suitable for your data structure (see Insert a Category Facet). Date Range and Numeric Range facets come with default ranges that might not be ideal for your data values. Apply custom date ranges to these facets when necessary (see Configure Custom Ranges for a Date Range or Numeric Range Facet).

Coveo makes every effort to eliminate the need for Sitecore system integrators to create custom Coveo for Sitecore components. Coveo JavaScript Search Framework properties not referenced directly in component data sources can be leveraged through a generic data source option (see Pass Non-Fronted JavaScript Framework Properties to Hive Components). You can also override the default search interface initialization script with your own to fine-tune component behavior (see Use Custom Initialization Scripts).

Sometimes, the only thing missing for a Coveo for Sitecore component to meet your needs is some changes to its HTML. In such circumstances, you don’t need to go out of your way and create an entire custom component, which would involve coding and compiling a Model. The solution for these use cases is far less elaborate (see Duplicate a Coveo for Sitecore Component to Modify Its Html).

If you ever feel like none of the default Coveo Hive components delivers the needed functionality, you might then consider creating a Custom Component.