WorldCat.org tabbed search box showcased in Smashing Magazine

Check out Smashing Magazine's article showcasing well designed tabbed navigation. WorldCat.org's tabbed search box (found on our home page) gets mentioned as a good design, with clean separation and rounded corners. Kudos to our designer, Chris Galvin, for a clean and simple design!

This well liked tabbed search box has been one of our design successes. We've incorporated the tabbed search box look and feel into our distributed search boxes for WorldCat.org and WorldCat Local.

Get your www.worldcat.org tabbed search box by creating a free affiliate account. Or get your institution's WorldCat Local tabbed search box by going to your institution's URL and appending '/tools/searchboxHTML' to the end of the URL. (See an example.)

Why aren't we putting this tabbed search box on the rest of our site? Good question. It's been a success as far as the user experience is concerned, so we are definitely looking at ways to incorporate it into our other pages. The worldcat.org search box was intended to be a simple keyword search box, similar to Google's search, so there are differences of opinions here at OCLC as to whether we should keep that box simple or begin to add more functionality to it.

In our April install, you can expect to see a redesigned search box across our entire site, but don't expect to see the tabbed search box on worldcat.org pages other than our home page just yet.