By Bill Slawski, on February 9th, 2006We often focus on how search engines respond to queries here, but don’t often look too closely at the pages of the search engines themselves.
How important a role does usability play in determining which search engine a person will use?
One important aspect of search is how quickly results are retrieved. That amount of time seems insignificant these days, but I remember a time not too long ago when you would have to watch your screen for a number of seconds before a list of results appeared in front of you.
Is it important to still see something like this after getting some results from Google:
Results 1 – 100 of about 38,000,000 for search usability. (0.36 seconds)
When the results come back that quickly, the amount of time it took for the search to take place seems to become as important as the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button on the front page of Google. But if that search time was a lot longer, we would probably notice. The speed with which results are returned does affect how a search engine works, including how results are cached and filtered and indexed, but that’s something that we really don’t notice much.
We are seeing some new features showing up on the pages of search engines, on both the search pages and the results pages. How will they affect the ways people use search engines, and how those search engines work?
Some of the topics I’ve seen being explored in some articles and blog posts recently include sorting and filtering of search results in different ways, drop-down boxes offering suggested search terms, and Web 2.0 reliance on forms. It’s probably helpful to look at search spaces in ways that try to understand the user experience around them.
Search Forms and Usability
Matteo Penzo recently wrote about a study he performed having rookie, intermediate, and pro users of the web look at Google, eBay, Amazon.com, useit.com, and Flickr in Evaluating the Usability of Search Forms Using Eyetracking: A Practical Approach. One idea behind the study, the focus of this article, was to look at how people used search forms with eyetracking software, and see if there were common approaches amongst people with the same knowledge levels, and differences amongst the folks with different levels of experience. Can you guess which search forms from which sites people found easiest to use before looking at the article?
Search Results and Usability
Greg Nudelman, in Improve the usability of search-results pages, has a nice four part tutorial on how to add “sophisticated but easy-to-use filtering and sorting controls” to a site search. In teaching people how to incorporate those features into a site, he makes some interesting observations about such things as the use of personas, the value of appropriate filters for the search at hand, and the advantages of category links over drop down controls.
The article is from a couple of weeks ago, and uses an example from the Amazon.com web site involving their diamond search slider. This press release is interesting in that context: Amazon.com Jewelry Sales up More Than 100 Percent in Fourth Quarter 2005. The slider probably has something to do with it. The folks at Amazon might want to look at some of the other suggestions that Greg Nudelman has in his article.
Traditional Search vs. Live Search
Jesper Rønn-Jensen provides some thoughts on Live search explained. He doesn’t provide too many conclusions, but he does offer some great questions and some nice links for futher research and reading. Live Search? The type of search that interacts with a searcher, and offers suggestions as the searcher hesitates, in the manner of a Google Suggest.
Some of the potential benefits that he sees live search bringing us include: saving time, correcting misspellings, receiving credible alternatives, and refining searches. He does note that there hasn’t been much usability testing behind this type of live search. I suspect that we will see more.
Paranoia and Personalized Search
The user experience becomes very different when we start talking about some of the configurable personalized search pages that Google and Yahoo! and Microsoft are starting to bring us. The look of those pages influence the experience, and the use of such things as search history and bookmarks included in their pages and results bring us a very different way to interact with search engines.
I’ve been holding off on using some of the personalized search features because I feel those are more intrusive on my privacy than I want them to be. But my curiosity is starting to overcome some of my paranoia. I’ll probably be experimenting with some of those features in the future, and keeping an eye out for articles and blog posts from other people experimenting with them.
Recent Comments