The Nike Football site uses a deceptively simple trick to draw attention to its unobtrusive search box. The narrow sidebar navigation menu features what looks like a search box that is a bit too small to be usable. Clicking what you think is the search box expands a real search input adjacent to the sidebar in the body.
It's a clever method, but as you can see from the comments, it's not without problems. A good example of how simple solutions aren't always easy to come by.
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like that in Firefox at all! The search box is smaller, clicking the search icon doesn't work and worse, using enter to start searching results in a bright yellow screen. ouch.
Hmm. I captured in Firefox 3.0.5 on a Mac. It's a Flash site. I think it's an interesting idea, but not if it isn't working everywhere. Kind of shows that tension that can exist between wanting subtlety or reduced weight and prominence of certain elements in visual design versus requiring that some functionality is visible and obvious. But if it's broken, then no amount of cleverness can save you.
I just noticed that the site started spitting out errors on the results page though. Not good.
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