Blog

The most sought-after books in Madrid's 52nd annual book fair

As Madrid’s annual book fair goes into its second week at the Parque de El Retiro in the Spanish capital, the attention of Madrileños is once more turned to the latest literary sensations, creating a unique opportunity for booksellers.

How can you truly understand what your customers want?

By Borja Santaolalla

eCommerce site’s search engine can also be a key tool to understand what customers want and a means to discover their needs. In fact, it’s one of the most powerful conversational tools on an eCommerce site as shoppers are telling the store exactly what they’re looking for, making it the best way to know customer’s interests, interpret them and react with actions within the catalogue.

Brutalist websites: Going out of our comfort zone

By Paula Natal

During the last few years, we started seeing webpages that reminded us of the first websites from the 80s and 90s, being either full of text with no photos or having “too many” gif animations and hover effects.

Now Visualisation, access your search data in real-time

By Germán Heredia

The Now visualisation is one of the most popularly used data visualisations. As you may well be aware, it shows trending search queries to quickly and easily identify performance in terms of the frequency of typed queries, clicks and, importantly, no results.

Highlight Products with Boosts

Boost is a very handy tool that enables us to modify the position of one or several products on the result list. You can simply choose a product or keyword to improve its position within the results grid

The Battle of the Retail Sexes

By Angel Maldonado

Men and women want very different things – although I am of course only going to touch on this purely from a retail perspective!

Introducing empathy.co

By Angel Maldonado

From today empathy.co is the new brand that will replace EmpathyBroker and www.empathy.co is where this new identity will be hosted.

Five minutes with Lovelybikes

By Borja Santaolalla

We caught up with Diego Fernández who’s Digital Manager at Lovelybikes to get his thoughts on some of the merchandiser tools we’ve been talking about recently and to ask him to share some of his insights and learnings over the years.

Create Beautiful Moments of Joy this Mother’s Day

By Olalla Salazar

Mother’s Day is one of the most important dates in the annual calendar for some eCommerce sites as they experience huge increases in online searches and sales leading up to the big day.

Fun with Types

By Javier Iglesias

Over the past few months, TypeScript has become an increasingly popular language. According to the 2018 State of JS survey, if we omit the ES6 standard, it is the top trending JavaScript dialect.

UX Design Tips for an eCommerce Experience filled with Empathy

eCommerce sites have taken the high street and more traditional shopping by storm and you can now find literally any kind of shop online.

The Quest for Holy Grail Part 2: User Intent

By Germán Heredia

Last year I started a trilogy of articles to share the path we’ve taken, and the discoveries we’ve made, in the quest to find search happiness, starting by looking at the search journey.

Introducing the ‘all-in-one’ Search Performance Visualisation

By Germán Heredia

We continue to explore the Daily Dist Report and another useful visualisation; Search Performance. One of the key, and incredibly useful, features of this visualisation is the way it easily highlights and draws comparisons between behaviour and performance across various devices.

Make sure this Easter is egg-stra special

By Borja Santaolalla

As we make the final preparations this week for the long Easter weekend, we thought we’d take a look at not only the impact of this period on eCommerce but also the different traditions and shopping habits it generates. Looking at not only the differences from one country to another but also the variances in customs and traditions regionally too.

10 Common Errors Every Tester Should Look out For

By Jorge Gabriel

Software quality tests are designed to validate the stability, speed, and scalability of a tested program’s characteristics. This is done in order to ensure that the program operates perfectly as expected and to establish possible areas for improvement.

Become a mind reader: Predict your users’ next moves with Next Queries

After a user has submitted a query, the Next Queries service is able to present them with a new set of suggested queries that are related to the initial one. This service makes educated predictions as to what the user may want to do next.

Why the Now Visualisation is whipping up a storm, a bubbly one

By Germán Heredia

The simplicity, meaningfulness and instantaneity of presenting real-time searches in little bubbles to spot trends and create a clear picture of what’s happening at that very moment in the online store is not only incredibly useful but mesmerising and fascinating.

Turn your No Results Queries into Opportunities

By Borja Santaolalla

No Results pages present a massive roadblock to any search journey. They cause frustration and, more often than not, they are the main reason a customer chooses to leave a site.

Behind Seasonal Keywords Visualisation

By Germán Heredia

Seasonal Keywords is the visualisation for you if you need to observe the behaviour of particular terms within a seasonal framework or when you need to make comparisons between the performance of two different terms. Of course, you can also always resort to the previously mentioned Stats API reports to retrieve the particular data or details you need for your own search performance analysis.

Adapt and Anticipate Create an Instant Search experience that performs

As context awareness has become a key differentiator for brand experiences, search has become all about anticipation and adaptation. It helps make users feel special and understood. It’s often thought that the best way to achieve this is to provide greater degrees of personalisation.

Build a cheaper, more flexible VPN solution on AWS with our open-source OpenVPN Certificate Authority

Today we’re open-sourcing our in-house OpenVPN Certificate Authority and management platform. Built on AWS with serverless technologies, it has proven to be a reliable, easy to use and secure platform. With this open-source release we hope it can be useful to others as well.

So why is it that there are so few women in Tech?

It’s a universally acknowledged and, neither hidden nor denied, fact that women are vastly under-represented in the Tech industry. The figures from every continent and within every segment speak for themselves.

Use Links to promote key products with the Empathy Playboard

By Borja Santaolalla

'Links' is part of the Empathy Playboard. It’s a powerful tool for associating relevant content to the intent of specific queries. It’s super easy to use. You just copy/paste a URL into the Links section of Playboard and add your desired keywords.

Map Out Your Search APIs for a More Global Understanding

By Germán Heredia

As most of our customers operate internationally, we’ve often found that when analysing search data, it behaves differently depending on the location…

2019 A Year of Transformations

By Germán Heredia

In January, our teams from across Spain and the UK met in Gijón to discuss our ideas for the future; what EmpathyBroker wants to be when it grows up. We talked in depth about what we want to create, where we want to be, and the many ways in which we can continue to inject a little more empathy into the world of eCommerce (and beyond).

What can Walt Disney teach us about UX design? Part I

By Jorge Soto

The use of animation in user interfaces has been present since the start on the ‘www’ era. In the early days, animation was used as a way to show off rather than to give users the best experience. Flying logos and (skippable) intros were at large and computers with sufficient power to create more compelling stuff were in the minority.

When Search becomes Alive

By Angel Maldonado

A Search Result is, ultimately, an inanimate thing, an object which can make you feel good or bad, but just that, a thing.

Getting the Gist of the DailyDist

By Germán Heredia

The Stats API is able to generate several reports for different approaches or analytic intentions. Whether you’re looking at things from a query perspective or analysing user-centric metrics, Stats API covers all events that take place under the search experience. These reports are automatically connected with your EmpathyBroker Playboard. That’s where you have a complete overview of your search performance and insights.

Does London Fashion Week Really Get Heads Turning On The High Street?

By Germán Heredia

As London Fashion Week draws to an end today, we thought it would be fun to take a look at data from one of the world’s largest fashion retailers to see if this huge fashion event actually influences real consumers’ shopping patterns.

This Valentine’s Day… did your search experience fill your customers with love?

By Angel Maldonado

Gifting days can often be a nightmare for people who are desperately looking for the right present. While there is a high purchase intent this is often accompanied by a bewilderment about what to buy that can lead to us desperately buying something even though we know it’s not quite right.

How to set up Synonyms using Synonimize & Play API

Good use of synonyms is essential for providing a positive search experience. In this article we take a quick look at when and how you implement them with our Synonymize feature.

How eCommerce search has evolved with our changing behaviour online

By Jorge Gabriel

Search tools have become the favourite way for most customers to find products in an online store. Where, when, and how that tool is accessed and interacted with now determines whether or not a user will stay in a particular eCommerce portal.

Gradient Descent An Algorithm for Deep Learning Optimisation

Optimisation algorithms, used to minimise a cost function against training data, are the cornerstone of many mathematical methods, from simple curve fitting to deep machine learning.

Equalizer An introduction to search relevance

By Borja Santaolalla

The Search Relevance Equalizer (or EQ for short) enables you to configure the order in which your search results appear by changing the weighting of different criteria.

Visual Search is Revolutionising the way we Shop

By Angel Maldonado

Over the last few years, visual content has slowly been replacing text to reach its current position as the most important online content. Social networks have been leading the way with this concept shift; in the last year, Instagram’s active user base grew by 64% and that of Pinterest by an incredible 111%.

Related Tags A Design Perspective

By Paula Natal

How to enhance your search experience using Related Tags

Related Tags are a great tool to help users to articulate a more specific query. They provide refinement suggestions that are inferred through collaborative filtering (i.e. from user search sessions). Related Tags are a more playful approach to refining an original query. When used correctly, they are able to speak the user’s language and become extremely handy if a user searches using only generic terms or categories. Ultimately, Related Tags lead to significant increases in findability.

How to monitor the age of your AWS credentials, using Terraform, Go, AWS Lambda and Slack

By Ramiro Álvarez

Not so long ago, the world relied on machines that had to be managed and provisioned manually. Luckily for us developers, the past couple of years have seen a new wave of technologies become the new standard. I’m talking about Serverless Architecture and Infrastructure Automation. I was exposed to both technologies 6 months ago and I fell in love.

How to Measure Search

By Olalla Salazar

Why Site Search matters? Search visits are the ones that offer the highest Conversion Rates and, what’s more, the best engagement with your site. Average session duration and page per...

Dynamically provisioning Jenkins nodes in AWS

By Roberto Devesa

The saying “Treat your servers like cattle, not like pets” has become increasingly popular among developers in recent years, largely thanks to the proliferation of virtual machines and containers.