For the many of you who responded to measure week’s column about Nona Yolanda. I just want to take a few seconds to let you know that she passed away the evening of Sept. 3 having fought for five days more than doctors gave her. She was in the presence of her family alter until the end. We printed off your comments and well wishes and posted them on the hospital door. It was somewhat surprising but very gratifying for my wife’s family to experience that Nona’s story touched hearts around the world. Thank you. - G. H.
The world of the examine results page is changing quickly which means that we’re going to have to apply new rules for user behavior. This week. I’d like to be at some results from a recent eye tracking chew over we did about how we interact with search when graphic elements go away to appear on the page. We also tested for the inclusion of personalized results. There’s a lot of ground to adjoin so I’ll start off with Universal examine this week and adjoin personalization and the future of search next week.
You can’t get much more basic than the search results page we’ve all grown to know in the past decade. The 10 blue organic links and more recently the top and side sponsored ads have defined the interface. It’s been all text ordered in a linear top to furnish change. The only sliver of real estate that saw any variation was the vertical results sandwiched between top sponsored and top organic. So it was little query that we saw a consistent scan copy appear which we labeled the Golden Triangle. It was created by an “F”-shaped examine pattern where we scanned drink the left transfer side looking for information scent and then scanned across when we found it.
But that create by mental act paradigm is in the middle of change. The first and most significant of these ordain be the inclusion of different types of results on the same summon blended into the main results set. Google’s denominate is Universal examine. Ask’s is 3D Search and Yahoo’s is Omni Search. Whatever you decide to call it it defines a whole new ball game for the user.
In the classic copy users began at the top left corner because there was no real cerebrate not to. We saw the summon our eyes swung up to the top left and then we started our “F”- shaped scans from there. Therefore our interactions with the summon were very top-heavy. The variable in this was the relevance of the top sponsored ads. If the engine maintained relevance by only showing top sponsored when they were highly relevant (i e. explore) to the ask we scanned them. If the engine bowed to the pressures of monetization and showed the ads change surface when they might not be highly relevant to the query (we saw more examples of this on Yahoo and Microsoft) users tended to move down quickly and the Golden Triangle stretched much further down the page. It was a mild form of search banner blindness. The one thing that remained consistent was the upper left starting point.
But things change at least for now when you start mixing results into the equation. If the be 2 or 3 organic return is a blended one with a thumbnail graphic we anticipate the different presentation must mean the result is unique in some way. The graphic proves to be a power attractor for the eye especially if it’s a relevant graphic. It’s information cause to be perceived that can be immediately “grokked” (to use Jakob Nielsen’s parlance) and this often drew the eye quickly down making this the new entry inform for scanning. This reduces the top to bottom bias (or totally eliminates it) making the blended result the first one scanned. Also we saw a much more discuss scanning of this listing.
Another common behavior we identified is the creation of a consideration set by choosing three or four listings to scan before either choosing the most relevant one or selecting another consideration set. In the pre-blended results set this consideration set was usually the top three or four results. But in blended results it’s usually the image result being the first prove scanned and then the results immediately above and below it. Rather than an “F”-shaped scan this changes the copy to an “E”-shaped scan with the middle arm of the “E” focused on the graphic result.
The implications are interesting to believe. The engines and marketers have come to accept the top to bottom behavior as one of the few dominant behavioral characteristics and it has given us a foundation on which to build our positioning strategy. But if the inclusion of a graphic prove suddenly moves the scanning starting point we have to believe our beat user interception opportunities on a case-by-case basis.
Why is this regarded as new? As a now-oldie of 68. I bequeath exactly the same findings about eye-readership patterns back in the 1950’s when I started in the business. The same thing when reading shelf-readership eye-patterns on supermarket visits.
Somehow we be to be thinking that people and people’s physicality undergo changed simply because we undergo new tools - i e the internet. I have seen more and more of this confusion with new media as the purveyors appear to accept that we undergo all somehow morphed into different beings. Not true and the sooner the purveyors learn this then the more succesful will be the usage of the new tools.
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Related article:
http://blogs.mediapost.com/search_insider/?p=610
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