RS Components Microcontroller Search

Transforming the customer experience and boosting sales: RS Components’ new search platform accelerates product discovery.

Filtering out the noise

It’s probably no surprise to find that the products offered by RS Components are often highly complex. Minor variations in memory size, physical features and electrical specifications can make all the difference. It was vitally important, therefore, that users be able to search and filter according to these attributes – which meant a faceted search system was required.

Intuitive and informative searching

Our User Experience (UX) consultants were on hand to help define how this search mechanism should be implemented – drawing on discussions with key stakeholders as well as general best practice principles to guide the design of an optimised index schema that:

• Captured all necessary product attributes
• Made sure important metadata such as product names was included
• Highlighted relationships between fields such as dependencies and prerequisites
• Displayed search fields in the most appropriate format – covering ranges, free text, sliders and more
• Offered additional functionality to improve the search experience, including an alternative text-based search option and ‘shortlist’ feature

Powerful performance

Of course, the usability of the system needed to be backed up by blazingly-fast performance – especially considering the immense size of the initial product range. Reducing the number of round trips to the server is crucial to achieving this, and our development team had numerous tricks up their sleeve to do exactly that. Performance and speed were further safeguarded through the use of leading search technologies such as Lucene and Solr – this had the added benefit of providing users with familiar tools and components, reducing the time needed to get up to speed.

A market-disrupting solution

The beta launch of the bespoke solution – across three of the retailer’s key geographical markets, for a product range comprising over 15,000 separate items – has been a huge success. Not only can users more quickly and easily find what they’re looking for, but RS Components has demonstrated its commitment to utilising innovative technologies and techniques to better meet the needs of its users – reinforcing its status as a leading service provider in the sector.

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Pete Withers-Jones

Head of Development

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Pete Withers-Jones leads Box UK’s Development Practice, and has over 20 years of experience in software development, working across various industries and technologies.

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