January 3, 2008

Persuasion on the Search Results Page

First published January 3, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Chris Copeland took out 2007 with one last jab at the whole “agencies getting it” thing. Much as I’m tempted to ring in the New Year by continuing to flog this particular horse, I’m going to bow to my more rational side. As Chris and Mike Margolin both rightly pointed out in their responses to my columns, we all have vested interests and biases that will inevitably cause us to see things from our own perspectives. Frankly, the perspective I’m most interested at this point in this debate is the client’s, as this will ultimately be a question the marketplace decides. So, for now, I’ll leave it there.

But Chris did take exception to one particular point that I did want to spill a little more virtual ink over; the idea of whether persuasion happens in search. Probably the cause for the confusion was my original choice of words. Rather than saying we don’t persuade people “in search” I should have said “on the search page.” Let me explain further with a quick reference to the dictionary, in this case, http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/persuadeMerriam-Webster:

Persuade: to move by argument, entreaty, or expostulation to a belief, position, or course of action.

In the definition of persuade, the idea is to move someone from their current belief, position or course of action to a new one. The search results page is not the place to do this. And the reasons why are important to understand for the search marketer.

For quick reference, here’s Chris’s counterargument: Persuasion is at the heart of everything that we do in search — from where we place an ad on a page (Hotchkiss’ golden triangle study) to how we message. The experience we drive to every step of the process is about understanding behavior and how to better optimize for the purpose of connecting consumer intent with advertiser content.
I don’t disagree with Chris in the importance of search in the decision-making process, but I do want to clarify where persuasion happens. What we’re doing on the search results page is not persuading. We’re confirming. We’re validating. In some cases, we’re introducing. But we’re not persuading.

As Chris mentioned, at Enquiro we’ve spent a lot of time mapping out what search interactions look like. And they’re quick. Very quick. About 10 seconds, looking at 4 to 5 results. That’s 2 seconds per listing. In that time, all searchers can do is scan the title and pick up a few words. From that, they make a decision to click or not to click. They’re not reading an argument, entreaty or expostulation. They’re not waiting to be persuaded. They’re making a split-second decision based on the stuff that’s already knocking around in their cortex.

Part of the problem is that we all want to think we’re rational decision-making creatures. When asked in a market research survey, we usually indicate that we think before we click (or buy). This leads to the false assumption that we can be persuaded on the search page, because our rational minds (the part that can be persuaded) are engaged. But it’s just not true. It’s similar to people looking at a shelf of options in the grocery store. In a study (Gerald Zaltman, How Customers Think, p. 124) shoppers exiting a supermarket were asked if they looked at competing brands and compared prices before making their decision. Most said yes. But observation proved differently. They spent only 5 seconds at the category location and 90% only handled their chosen product. This is very similar to responses and actual behavior we’ve seen on search pages.

Now, if someone is in satisficing mode (looking for candidates for a consideration set for further research) you can certainly introduce alternatives for consideration. But the persuasion will happen well downstream from the search results page, not on it.

Am I splitting semantic hairs here? Probably. But if we’re going to get better at search marketing, we have to be obsessed with understanding search behavior and intent. Chris and I are in agreement on that. And that demands a certain precision with the language we use. I was at fault with my original statement, but similarly, I think it’s important to clear up where we can and can’t persuade prospects.

Of course, you may disagree and if so, go ahead, persuade me I’m wrong. I’ll give you 2 seconds and 6 or 7 words. Go!

November 9, 2007

Satisficing, Bounded Rationality and Search

Herbert Simon came up with some pretty interesting concepts, among them satisficing, bounded rationality and chunking.

Before Simon, we commonly believed that humans came to optimal decisions in a rational manner, based on the information provided. We took all the data that was accessible, weighed pros and cons and used our cortexes to come to the best possible outcome.

Simon, in effect, said that this placed to high a load on us cognitively. In many cases, there was simply too much information available, so we had to make choices based more on heuristics, cutting the available information down to a more manageable level. He called this “satisficing”, a blend of satisfy and suffice. And Simon started saying this a half century ago. Imagine how this translates to the present time.

We have never had more information available. At the click of a mouse, we can access huge amounts of information. There’s simply no way we can process it all and come to rational decisions. And this brings us to another concept, that of bounded rationality. We’re more rational about some decisions than others. It depends on a number of factors, including risk, emotional enjoyment and brand self identification. Think of it as a chart with three axes. One axis is risk. We put more rational thought into decisions that expose us to greater risk. In consumer decisions, risk usually equates with cost, but in B to B decisions, it could also include professional reputation (related to but not always directly tied to cost). We’re going to put a lot more thought into the purchase of a car or house than that of a candy bar. Another axis is emotional enjoyment. This is a risk/reward mechanism to most decisions, and if the reward is one that is particularly appealing to us, we tend to be swayed more by emotion than rational decision. If we’re planning a holiday, we may make some irrational decisions (or at least, they might appear that way to an outsider) based on a sense of rewarding ourselves. We’ll treat ourselves to a few nights in a 5 star resort, when the 3 star resort would offer greater overall value. The final factor, and one that is usually buried somewhere in our subconscious, is how we use brands or products to define who we are. Now, no one usually admits to being defined by a brand, but we all are, to some extent. This touches on the cult-like devotees that some brands develop. Harley Davidson, Rolex, BMW, Apple and Nike all come to mind. Is a Rolex a rational choice? No. But a Rolex defines, to some extent, the person wearing it. It says something about the person.

Bounded rationality says that there are boundaries to the amount of rational thought that we can and we want to put into decisions. The amount we decide is sufficient depends on the three facts discussed.

Now, the use of Search tends to plot somewhere along this 3 dimensional chart. If risk is high and brand identification is low (buying software for the company), there is a high likelihood that search will be used extensively. If risk is low and brand identification is high (i.e. buying a soft drink or a beer) there is almost no likelihood that search will be used. In this case, the two factors usually work inversely to each other. Emotional enjoyment isn’t as directly tied to search activity. We will do as much (or as little) searching for a purchase that will give us great enjoyment as for those that won’t.

It’s interesting to watch how these factors impact search intent and behavior. Satisficing leads to a classic sort of search behavior, what I call I category search, where we use fairly generic, non branded queries that broadly define the category we’re looking at. Let me give you an example. Tomorrow my wife and I are headed to Europe for a week. We’re going to spend a few days in Portugal, then fly up to London for SMX (where I’ll be talking more about these ideas in some of my sessions). We’re flying into Lisbon, then renting a car and driving down to the Algarve region. I have GPS navigation software for my PDA, but only for North America. I wanted to get European software, but because of the limited use of it, I didn’t want to spend too much. The developer of my North American software didn’t make a EU version, so I turned to search to find a suitable candidate. Here there was no brand identification, some degree of risk (if it didn’t work in Europe, I’d be lost, literally) and no emotional enjoyment factor. My first search was what I call a “landmark” search. I wanted to find some sites to plot the landscape. Sites that listed and compared my alternatives would be ideal matches to my intent.

I searched for “pocket pc gps software”, knowing that “gps software” would be too broad. I soon found the sites were pretty much all about North American versions. Few of them offered or reviewed European versions. I spent several minutes on the TomTom site trying to order a European version from Canada but to no avail. Apparently TomTom doesn’t believe people in North America would ever choose to drive in Europe.

In classic “satisficing” behavior, I wanted to cut my research workload by setting some basic eligibility criteria: it had to work on a Pocket PC, it had to be reasonably priced (under $100 preferably) and it had to offer coverage for all of Europe (we’re going back to France and Italy next year and I’d like to use it then as well). My next search was for “pocket pc gps software europe”. This gave me what I needed to begin to create my satisficed list. Ideally, we want 3 or 4 alternatives to compare. I did find the TomTom choice, but I was already frustrated with this, and the price was over my threshold. Destinator also offered an alternative that seemed to be a little better match. It matched all the criteria, appeared to have some decent reviews and was available on eBay for about $75, including shipping. Sold! Was it the optimal choice? Maybe not. If I had spent hours more doing research, I could have probably found a better package or a better value. But it was good enough.

Chunking has to do with cognitive channel capacity, and the amount of information we can store in our heads, accessible for use. Again, we tend to maximize the available slots by creating chunks of information, grouping similar types of information together.

When you look at Simon’s work, even though the majority of it far preceded search engines, it sheds a lot of light on how we use search in a number of cases. If you want to tap into user intent, I would recommend finding out more about bounded rationality and satisficing. Chunking is probably worth a look as well.

Posted in Behavior & Psychology, Cognition, Consumer Psychology, Information Seeking & Foraging, Online User Experience, Research, User Behavior
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October 25, 2007

Search and the Digital CPG Shelf

First published October 25, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last April, James Lamberti from comScore, Randy Peterson from Procter and Gamble and I (representing SEMPO) grabbed a relatively quiet corner at the New York Hilton to talk about a potential research project. Here was our wish list:

–   A study that tied together online activity to offline purchase behavior
–   A study that identified the impact of search in a category not typically one that would be identified with search marketing
–   A study that would attempt to quantify the leveraged impact of search with brand advocates

Search and CPG: Are You Kidding?

As you can see, these were pretty lofty targets to shoot for. Choosing the product category was done at that table. What is the last category you would think of as generating significant search activity? Consumer packaged goods. After all, aren’t these either replenishment purchases, where we keep buying the same brand over and over, or a non-considered purchase, where we’re not really concerned with doing much research? Why would we need to turn to a search engine to figure out which toothpaste to buy, or which would be the right chips for Sunday’s ball game? We reasoned that CPG had the “Sinatra” Factor going for it: If search can make it here, it can make it anywhere.

To be honest, we really didn’t know what to expect, but comScore, together with a lot of help from Yahoo and Procter and Gamble, managed to come up with a workable study design. SEMPO jumped on board as a co-sponsor and we put the study out in the field. This week, with numbers crunched and charts drawn, the results were released in a study labeled The Digital Shelf. After several months of holding our collective breaths, we were about to see if people had already locked CPG brands into their brains, eliminating the need to search for product information.

Apparently not.

People went online for CPG information — in fact, to a significantly higher degree than even our most optimistic predictions. Over a 3-month period, comScore recorded over 150 million visits to CPG websites in four categories: Food Products, Personal Care Products, Baby Products and Household Products. Those are numbers no marketer should ignore. But even more significantly, search drove significant portions of that traffic, from 23% of all visits in Household Products to 60% in Baby Products.

It’s not just automotive or travel that drive search traffic. We search for recipes, how to get the stains out of carpets, the most eco-friendly disposable diaper and yes, even the nutritional information for potato chips. We search, a lot!

And our searching sets us apart as a consumer segment. Searchers tend to be more interested in product information, comparing against competitors and what they need to make a purchase decision. Non-searchers are more interested in special offers and coupons.

Searchers spend more, about 20% more — in all the categories in the study. In fact, in the Baby Care Category alone, people searching for information and eventually purchasing could result in almost $12 billion in sales.

Search = Opportunity

But perhaps the most compelling finding was this: People search because they’re comparing alternatives. This means they’re not locked into a brand. They could very well be your competitor’s customer right now. Non-searchers are more likely to go directly to a site because they do have a brand preference. They’re just looking for a bargain on that brand. The study found that 36% of searchers had recently switched their brand, compared to 29% of non-searchers. And, interestingly, searchers are less motivated by price. Only 27% of searchers switched because of price, compared to 38% of non-searchers.

So, the study delivered on our original wish list, and then some. It showed that search is a significant influencing factor in the most unlikely product category of all, the stuff on your pantry shelf or under the sink in your bathroom. In fact, I have yet to see a study done on any product category where search didn’t blow the doors off the competition in its effectiveness in connecting with customers. So perhaps the biggest question left unanswered by the study is this: Why are all those branding dollars still going everywhere but search?

Posted in Behavior & Psychology, Digital Marketing, Information Seeking & Foraging, Research, Search Behaviors, Search Marketing, SEM, SEO, User Behavior
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October 21, 2007

Are Our Brains being Rewired?

I have to start out by thanking Nico Brooks and Jess Gao. Without intending to, they both provided me more than enough fodder for a rather lengthy column in Seach Engine Land on Friday.

Nico is the Chief Search Strategist at Atlas. Jess is our intern at Enquiro, who’s currently working towards her doctorate, specializing in cognitive psychology. Through different paths, they both gave me some major brain melting ideas to chew over. I’m still digesting, but you can catch the thought process in action on my column.

But consider this. What if our brains are being rewired by the internet? Some of our behaviors are innate. They’re our OEM operating software, put there by the manufacturer. Flight or fight. The need to procreate. The appreciation of beauty. This stuff is hardwired.

But some of our behaviors are learned. We’ve developed them as we go. The things sit in our temporary memory caches, and we can adjust them if they’re no longer working. The thing that started all this was how we learn to navigate a physical environment. First we look for landmarks, then we memorize routes, then we put the two together to create a cognitive map. Nico’s suspicion (and Nico, I hope I’m capturing the essence of the idea accurately) is that our need to identify landmarks and even our ability to memorize routes is probably innate. It’s just how we are programmed to get around. But cognitive mapping, at least in the essentially rectangular grid pattern that is common in the Cartesian coordinate model, is a learned behavior. Rectangles have no place in the n dimensional space of online, so as we spend more time navigating online, will we change our mapping process?

Then, with Jess, we had a great chat about how we perceive things, especially ads. There’s a great introduction to selective perception that I would urge you to check out. In recent studies we’ve done at Enquiro, one of the interesting findings has been that the more intrusive the ad, the less it seems to work. It registers high in the first stage of perception, stimulation, and manages to succeed in the second, registration, but fails in the last two stages, organization and interpretation.

Other conversations I had this week, that didn’t make it into either of the columns. On Thursday I was in New York for Google’s B to B Summit and had a chance to chat with Mark Martel, who supports the B to B Tech Sales Vertical at Google. Mark has a healthy intellectual curiosity and I always enjoy chatting with him. We discussed schemas and how important they are in the process of perception. Then, on Friday, I was in Toronto chatting with the Yahoo Canada gang, including Maor Daniels and Adina Zointz (what a great name, literally covering everything from A to Z!) and we talked about how quickly we’re learning to judge the authenticity of content online. It’s as if our bullshit filters are more finely tuned than ever.

I’m definitely on a riff here, but there’s a lot of threads coming together. Even in someone of my ever upwards creeping years (I’m 46) I suspect my synapses are under construction. Old routes are being torn out and new ones are being built. And with my daughters, many of the paths are being built differently right from the start. The routes that were so important to me in grade school, times tables, rote memorization, etc, are becoming overgrown with weeds through lack of use. But new routes I never even thought of, like how to do homework, carry on an online chat and watch the TV with one eye, are being upgraded into major turnpikes. Multitasking is a major operational imperative now, and selective perception is kicking into overdrive.

Anyway, to further dive into some of the things on my mind, here’s some of the columns where I’m beginning to open up some of these ideas to the fresh, online air:

Infomediating a Broken Marketplace – a look at Hagel and Singers Infomediary model from their book Net Worth. Is Google aiming to be the ultimate match maker in the marketplace?

4000 Ads a Day, and Counting – Part One of the Infomediary Doubleheader, looking at the disconnect between customers who just want the facts, and advertisers that just want to control our buying habits

Some Big Ideas for a Friday – Some musings about how we perceive advertising, based on recent studies we conducted, and how we might be remapping the perception process

How We Navigate Our Online Landscape – The original exploration of landmark, route and survey knowledge and how it may map (or not) to how we navigate our online space

And please, do me a favor. This is all stuff I want to explore further in the book. If you think I’m full of bullshit, call me on it. Share your thoughts. Post a comment. Start a dialogue. I know it’s a pain in the ass posting comments on blogs because of spam, but PLEEASSSE take a few moments to do so. Or drop me an email.

Posted in Behavior & Psychology, Cognition, Information Seeking & Foraging, Memory, Online Trends, Online User Experience, Research, Web Search
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October 4, 2007

On Your Search Menu Tonight

First published October 4, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

This week Yahoo unveiled a new feature. It doesn’t really change the search game that much in terms of competitive functionality. If anything, it’s another case of Yahoo catching up with the competition. But it may have dramatic implications from a user’s point of view. To illustrate that point further I’d like to share a couple of stories with you.

The feature is called Search Assist. You type your query in, and Yahoo provides a list under the query box with a number of possible ways you could complete the query. This follows in the footsteps of Google’s search suggestions in its toolbar. Currently, Google doesn’t offer this functionality within the standard Google query box, at least in North America. Ask also offers this feature.

Because Yahoo is late to the game, the company had the opportunity to up the functionality a little bit. For example, the suggestions that come from Yahoo can include the word you’re typing anywhere in the suggested query phrase. Google uses straight stemming, so the word you’re typing is always at the beginning of the suggested phrases. Yahoo also seems to be pulling from a larger inventory of suggested phrases. The few test queries I did brought back substantially more suggestions than did Google.

It’s not so much the functionality of this feature that intrigues me; it’s how it could affect the way we search. I personally have found that I come to rely on this feature in the Google toolbar more and more. Rather than structuring a complete query in my mind, I type the first few letters of the root word in and see what Google offers me. It leads me to select query phrases that I probably never would have thought of myself.

Some time ago I wrote that contrary to popular belief, we’ve actually become quite adept at paring our queries down to the essential words. It’s not that we don’t know how to launch an advanced query; it’s that most times, we don’t need to. This becomes even truer with search suggestions. All we have to do is think of one word, and the search engine will serve us a menu of potential queries. It reduces the effort required from the searcher, but let me tell you a story about how this might impact a company’s reputation online.

I Wouldn’t Recommend That Choice

Some time ago I got a voicemail from an equity firm. The woman who left a message was brash, a little abrasive and left a rather cryptic message, insisting that I had to phone her right back. Now, since I’m in the search game, getting calls from venture capitalists and investment bankers is nothing really new. But I’d never quite heard this tone from one of these prospecting calls before. So, I did as I usually do in these cases and decided to do a little more research on the search engines to determine whether I was actually going to return this call or not. I did my quick 30-second reputation check.

Normally, I would just type in the name of the firm and see what came up in the top 10 results. Usually, if there’s strong negative content out there, it’s worth paying attention to and it tends to collect enough search equity to break the top 10. This time, I didn’t even have to get as far as the results page. The minute I started typing the company name into my Google toolbar, the suggestions Google was providing me told the entire story: “company” scam, “company” fraud and “company” lawsuits. Of the top eight suggestions, over half of them were negative in nature. Not great odds for success. Needless to say, I never returned the call.

If these search suggestions are going to significantly alter our search patterns, we should be aware of what’s coming up in those suggestions for our branded terms. Type your company name into Yahoo or Google’s toolbar and see what variations are being served to you. Some of them may not be that appetizing.

Would You Prefer Szechuan?

My belief is that users are increasingly going to use this to structure their queries. It moves search one step closer to be coming a true discovery engine. One of the overwhelming characteristics of search user behavior is that we’re basically lazy. We want to expand a minimal amount of effort but in return, we expect a significant degree of relevance. Search suggestions allow us to enter a minimum of keystrokes and the search engine obliges us with a full menu of options.

This brings me to my other story. Earlier this year we did some eye-tracking research on how Chinese citizens interact with the search engines Baidu and Google China. After we released the preliminary results of the study, I had a chance to talk to a Google engineer who worked on the search engine. In China, Google does provide real-time search suggestions right from the query box. The company found that it’s significantly more work to type a query in Mandarin than it is in most Western languages. Using a keyboard for input in China is, at best, a compromise. So Google found that because of the amount of work required to enter a query, the average query length was quite short in China, giving a substantially reduced degree of relevancy. In fact, many Chinese users would type in the bare minimum required and then would scroll to the bottom of the page, where Google showed other suggested queries. Then, the user would just click on one of these links. Hardly the efficient searching behavior Google was shooting for. After introducing real-time search suggestions for the query box, Google found the average length of query increased dramatically and supposedly, so did the level of user satisfaction.

Search query suggestions are just one additional way we’ll see our search behavior change significantly over the next year or two. Little changes, like a list of suggested queries or the inclusion of more types of content in our results pages, will have some profound effects. And when search is the ubiquitous online activity it is, it doesn’t take a very big rock to create some significant and far-reaching ripples.

Posted in Behavior & Psychology, Eye Tracking, Information Seeking & Foraging, Research, Search Behaviors, User Behavior
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September 27, 2007

In Search of B2B Landmarks

First published September 27, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

This week (actually, right about the time you’ll be reading this column) I’ll be talking to the American Business Media Publishers Summit in Chicago about online opportunities, from a user’s perspective. As I was getting ready for the address, I realized there’s a substantial piece of the B to B market that’s missing online. I call it a market enabler.

Looking for Landmarks

Think of our typical progression when we begin researching something online. If it’s new territory, the first thing we need to do is to find a landmark to navigate from. From that landmark we tend to navigate out from it. This is true both in the online and real world. Think of Google as everybody’s favorite landmark. It’s the starting point of nearly all our online navigation, because we know we can always get back to it if we’re lost. In fact, it becomes the vehicle of our online navigation in almost all cases. The only time we deviate from it is if we have enough familiarity with a certain section of the online landscape that we can find other online landmarks without it. For example, if I’m planning a trip somewhere, I usually don’t start at Google. I either start at one of the travel tools I have bookmarked (Farecompare.com, Kayak, Sidestep) or at my favorite travel community, Tripadvisor.com. I’ve been down this path before, so I’ve memorized other familiar landmarks. Otherwise, I always start at Google.

But there are some things we look for in our landmarks. We want them to be recognizable. We want them to be authoritative. We want them to be comprehensive. And usually, we want them to be relatively agnostic. We don’t want to be pushed in any particular direction. We want to choose our own paths. We want a neutral marketplace that allows us to compile our own consideration set, not have it built for us.

Making Life Easier

It also helps if our landmarks incorporate some strong navigational and comparison functionality. One of the best things about the travel sites and tools I’ve mentioned is their sophisticated search and filtering capabilities. They beat Google at this particular game. They’re a more useful landmark to navigate from within. And increasingly, they’re incorporating authentic community dialogue and reviews with the search functionality. I can search, sort and qualify, all in one place. They make the difficult job of planning a trip easier. They’re market enablers, because they allow us to compare alternatives more effectively. If we look at the two best examples of market enablers, eBay and Amazon, they share all of the above characteristics.

So, let’s return to the B to B marketplace. In our B to B survey, we found that almost everyone starts with Google, because most of the time when we research B to B purchases, we’re starting in unfamiliar territory. We have no landmarks. And while we usually end up going fairly quickly to vendor sites, the survey found a strong desire to find an unbiased landmark as the market’s middle ground. Yet, no enablers have strongly established themselves in this position. There is no eBay or Amazon, or even a TripAdvisor, of B to B. There are vertical engines, including Business.com, Knowledgestorm, KellySearch, ThomasNet and others, but none have dominated the landscape to this point.

Sorting through the Haystack

In a recent B to B panel I moderated, consultant Karen Breen Vogel mentioned that these vertical properties do restrict the scope of the search, so rather than looking for a needle in a haystack, you’re looking for a needle in a needlestack. While this is true, it can still be a pretty painful process if you’re looking for the right needle. The problem is that the B 2 B marketplace is vast and fragmented. Also, there are no obvious affiliation or revenue opportunities, as there are in the travel business. There isn’t an obvious money trail to follow in the B to B world to make enabling the marketplace a potentially lucrative proposition. Most of the players have morphed over from being directory publishers in the offline world, and are still following the paid listing model. Unfortunately, this doesn’t lend itself to the neutral marketplace favored by researching buyers.

There are few purchase processes that are more difficult or taxing than a complicated B to B one. Sorting out potential vendors can be a long, tedious and frustrating process. First of all, there’s no emotional investment. This isn’t planning a vacation. This is your job. Secondly, the risk level is extremely high. Screw up, and your job may evaporate. While the potential to make money may be obscured by the challenges, the buyer’s need is painfully obvious. And I can’t help thinking, if eBay could do it, given the immense diversity of its marketplace, there must be a way.

September 13, 2007

Personalization Catches the User’s Eye

First published September 13, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week, I looked at the impact the inclusion of graphics on the search results page might have on user behavior, based on our most recent eye tracking report. This week, we look at the impact that personalization might bring.

One of the biggest hurdles is that personalization, as currently implemented by Google, is a pretty tentative representation of what personalization will become. It only impacts a few listings on a few searches, and the signals driving personalization are limited at this point. Personalization is currently a test bed that Google is working on, but Sep Kamvar and his team have the full weight of Google behind them, so expect some significant advances in a hurry. In fact, my suspicion is that there’s a lot being held in reserve by Google, waiting for user sensitivity around the privacy issue to lessen a bit. We didn’t really expect to see the current flavor of personalization alter user behavior that much, because it’s not really making that much of a difference on the relevancy of the results for most users.

But if we look forward a year or so, it’s safe to assume that personalization would become a more powerful influencer of user behavior. So, for our test, we manually pushed the envelope of personalization a bit. We divided up the study into two separate sessions around one task (an unrestricted opportunity to find out more about the iPhone) and used the click data from the first session to help us personalize the data for the search experience in the second session. We used past sites visited to help us first of all determine what the intent of the user might be (research, looking for news, looking to buy) and secondly to tailor the personalized results to provide the natural next step in their online research. We showed these results in organic positions 3, 4 and 5 on the page, leaving base Google results in the top two organic spots so we could compare.

Stronger Scent

The results were quite interesting. In the nonpersonalized results pages, taken straight from Google (in signed out mode) we saw 18.91% of the time spent looking at the page happened in these three results, 20.57% of the eye fixations happened here, and 15% of the clicks were on Organic listings 3, 4 and 5. The majority of the activity was much further up the page, in the typical top heavy Golden Triangle configuration.

But on our personalized results, participants spent 40.4% of their time on these three results, 40.95% of the fixations were on them, and they captured a full 55.56% of the clicks. Obviously, from the user’s point of view, we did a successful job of connecting intent and content with these listings, providing greater relevance and stronger information scent. We manually accomplished exactly what Google wants to do with the personalization algorithm.

Scanning Heading South

Something else happened that was quite interesting. Last week I shared how the inclusion of a graphic changed our “F” shaped scanning patterns into more of an “E” shape, with the middle arm of the “E” aligned with the graphic. We scan that first, and then scan above and below. When we created our personalized test results pages, we (being unaware of this behavioral variation at the time) coincidentally included a universal graphic result in the number 2 organic position, as this is what we were finding on Google.

When we combined the fact that users started scanning on the graphic, then looked above and below to see where they wanted to scan next with the greater relevance and information scent of the personalized results, we saw a very significant relocation of scanning activity, moving down from the top of the Golden Triangle.

One of the things that distinguished Google in our previous eye tracking comparisons with Yahoo and Microsoft was its success of keeping the majority of scanning activity high on the page, whether those top results were organic or sponsored.

Top of page relevance has been a religion at Google. More aggressive presentation of sponsored ads (Yahoo) or lower quality and relevance thresholds of those ads (Microsoft) meant that on these engines (at least as of early 2006) users scanned deeper and were more likely to move past the top of the page in their quest for the most relevant results. Google always kept scan activity high and to the left.

But ironically, as Google experiments with improving the organic results set, both through the inclusion of universal results and more personalization, their biggest challenge may be in making sure sponsored results aren’t left in the dust. Top of page scanning is ideal user behavior that also happens to offer a big win for advertisers. As results pages are increasingly in flux, it will be important to ensure that scanning doesn’t move too far from the upper left corner, at least as long as we still have a linear, 1 dimensional top to bottom list of results.

Posted in Behavior & Psychology, Eye Tracking, Information Seeking & Foraging, Research, Search Behaviors, Search Marketing, SEM, SEO, User Behavior
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September 6, 2007

An Image Can Change Everything for the Searcher

First published September 6, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

For the many of you who responded to last 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 right 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 know that Nona’s story touched hearts around the world. Thank you. – G.H.

The world of the search 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 look at some results from a recent eye tracking study we did about how we interact with search when graphic elements start to appear on the page. We also tested for the inclusion of personalized results. There’s a lot of ground to cover, so I’ll start off with Universal Search this week, and cover personalization and the future of search next week.

Warning: Graphic Depictions Ahead

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 bottom format. 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 wonder that we saw a consistent scan pattern emerge, which we labeled the Golden Triangle. It was created by an “F”-shaped scan pattern, where we scanned down the left hand side, looking for information scent, and then scanned across when we found it.

But that design paradigm is in the middle of change. The first and most significant of these will be the inclusion of different types of results on the same page, blended into the main results set. Google’s label is Universal Search, Ask’s is 3D Search and Yahoo’s is Omni Search. Whatever you choose to call it, it defines a whole new ball game for the user.

Starting at the Top…

In the classic pattern, users began at the top left corner because there was no real reason not to. We saw the page, our eyes swung up to the top left and then we started our “F”- shaped scans from there. Therefore, our interactions with the page 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. Google) to the query, we scanned them. If the engine bowed to the pressures of monetization and showed the ads even 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 number 2 or 3 organic return is a blended one, with a thumbnail graphic, we assume 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 scent that can be immediately “grokked” (to use Jakob Nielsen’s parlance) and this often drew the eye quickly down, making this the new entry point 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 deliberate scanning of this listing.

Give Me an F, Give Me an E…

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 result scanned, and then the results immediately above and below it. Rather than an “F”-shaped scan, this changes the pattern to an “E”-shaped scan, with the middle arm of the “E” focused on the graphic result.

The implications are interesting to consider. 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 result suddenly moves the scanning starting point, we have to consider our best user interception opportunities on a case-by-case basis.

Next week, I’ll look at further findings.

Posted in Behavior & Psychology, Eye Tracking, Information Seeking & Foraging, Research, Search Behaviors, User Behavior
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July 13, 2007

Interview with Jakob Nielsen on the Future of the SERP (and other stuff)

I recently had the opportunity to talk to Jakob Nielsen for a series I’m doing for Search Engine Land about what the search results page will look like in 2010. Jakob is called a “controversial guru of Web design” in Wikipedia (Jakob gets his own shots in at Wikipedia in this interview) because of his strongly held views on the use of graphics and flash in web design. I have a tremendous amount of respect for Jakob, even though we don’t agree on everything, because of his no frills, common sense approach to the user experience. And so I thought it was quite appropriate I sound him out on his feelings about the evolution of the search interface, now that with Universal search and Ask’s 3D Search we seem to be seeing more innovation in this area in the last 6 months than we’ve seen for the last 10 years. Jakob is not as optimistic about the pace of change as I am, but the conversation was fascinating. We touched on Universal Search, personalization, banner blindness on the SERP and scanning of the web in China, amongst other things. Usability geeks..enjoy!

Gord: For today I only really have one question, although I’m sure there be lots of branch offs from it. It revolves around what the search engine results page may look like in 2010. I thought you would be a great person to lend your insight on that.

Jakob: Ok, sure.

Gord: So why don’t we just start? Obviously there are some things that are happening now with personalization and universal search results. Let’s just open this up. What do you think we’ll be seeing on a search results page in 3 years?

Jakob: I don’t think there will be that big a change because 3 years is not that long a time. I think if you look back three years at 2004, there was not really that much difference from what there is today. I think if you look back ten years there still isn’t that much difference. I actually just took a look at some old screen shots in preparation before this call at some various search engines like Infoseek and Excite and those guys that were around at that time, and Google’s Beta release, and the truth is that they were pretty similar to what we have today as well. The main difference, the main innovation seems to have been to abandon banner ads, which we all know now really do not work, and replace them with the text ads, and of course that affected the appearance of the page. And of course now the text ads are driven by the key words, but in terms of the appearance of the page, they have been very static, very similar for 10 years. I think that’s quite likely to continue. You could speculate the possible changes. Then I think there are three different big things that could happen.

One of them that will not make any difference to the appearance and that is a different prioritization scheme. Of course, the big thing that has happened in the last 10 years was a change from an information retrieval oriented relevance ranking to being more of a popularity relevance ranking. And I think we can see a change maybe being a more of a usefulness relevance ranking. I think there is a tendency now for a lot of not very useful results to be dredged up that happen to be very popular, like Wikipedia and various blogs. They’re not going to be very useful or substantial to people who are trying to solve problems. So I think that with counting links and all of that, there may be a change and we may go into a more behavioral judgment as to which sites actually solve people’s problems, and they will tend to be more highly ranked.

But of course from the user perspective, that’s not going to look any different. It’s just going to be that the top one is going to be the one that the various search engines, by what ever means they think of, will judge to be the best and that’s what people will tend to click first, and then the second one and so on. That behavior will stay the same, and the appearance will be the same, but the sorting might be different. That I think is actually very likely to happen

Gord: So, as you say, those will be the relevancy changes at the back end. You’re not seeing the paradigm of the primarily text based interface with 10 organic results and 8-9 sponsored results where they are, you don’t see that changing much in the next 3 years?

Jakob: No. I think you can speculate on possible changes to this as well. There could be small changes, there could be big changes. I don’t think big changes. The small changes are, potentially, a change from the one dimensional linear layout to more of a two dimensional layout with different types of information, presented in different parts of the page so you could have more of a newspaper metaphor in terms of the layout. I’m not sure if that’s going to happen. It’s a huge dominant user behavior to scan a linear list and so this attempt to put other things on the side, to tamper with the true layout, the true design of the page, to move from it being just a list, it’s going to be difficult, but I think it’s a possibility. There’s a lot of things, types of information that the search engines are crunching on, and one approach is to unify them all into one list based on it’s best guess as to relevance or importance or whatever, and that is what I think is most likely to happen. But it could also be that they decide to split it up, and say, well, out here to the right we’ll put shopping results, and out here to the left we’ll put news results, and down here at the bottom we’ll put pictures, and so forth, and I think that’s a possibility.

Gord: Like Ask is experimenting with right now with their 3D search. They’re actually breaking it up into 3 columns, and using the right rail and the left rail to show non-web based results.

Jakob: Exactly, except I really want to say that it’s 2 dimensional, it’s not 3 dimensional.

Gord: But that’s what they’re calling it.

Jakob: Yes I know, but that’s a stupid word. I don’t want to give them any credit for that. It’s 2 dimensional. It’s evolutionary in the sense that search results have been 1 dimensional, which is linear, just scroll down the page, and so potentially 2 dimensional (they can call it three but it is two) that is the big step, doing something differently and that may take off and more search engines may do that if it turns out to work well. But I think it’s more likely that they will work on ways on integrating all these different sources into a linear list. But those are two alternative possibilities, and it depends on how well they are able to produce a single sorted list of all these different data sources. Can they really guess people’s intent that well?

All this stuff..all this talk about personalization, that is incredibly hard to do. Partly because it’s not just personalization, based on a user model, which is hard enough already. You have to guess that this person prefers this style of content and so on. But furthermore, you have to guess as to what this person’s “in this minute” interest is and that is almost impossible to do. I’m not too optimistic on the ability to do that. In many ways I think the web provides self personalization, you know, self service personalization. I show you my navigational scheme of things you can do on my site and you pick the one you want today, and the job of the web designer is to, first of all, design choices that adequately meet common user needs, and secondly, simply explain these choices so people can make the right ones for them. And that’s what most sites do very poorly. Both of those two steps are done very poorly on most corporate websites. But when it’s done well, that leads to people being able to click – click and they have what they want, because they know what they want, and its very difficult for the computer to guess what they want in this minute.

Gord: When we bring it back to the search paradigm, giving people that kind of control to be able to determine the type of content that’s most relevant to them requires them interacting with the page in some way.

Jakob: Yes, exactly, and that’s actually my third possible change. My first one was changing to the ranking scheme; the second one was the potentially changing to two dimensional layouts. The third one is to add more tools to the search interface to provide query reformulation and query refinement options. I’m also very skeptical about this, because this has been tried a lot of times and it has always failed. If you go back and look at old screen shots (you probably have more than I have) of all of the different search engines that have been out there over the last 15 years or so, there have been a lot of attempts to do things like this. I think Microsoft had one where you could prioritize one thing more, prioritize another thing more. There was another slider paradigm. I know that Infoseek, many, many years ago, had alternative query terms you could do just one click and you could search on them, which was very simple. Yet most people didn’t even do that.

People are basically lazy, and this makes sense. The basic information foraging theory, which is, I think, the one theory that basically explains why the web is the way it is, says that people want to expend minimal effort to gain their benefits. And this is an evolutionary point that has come about because the people, or the creatures, who don’t exert themselves, are the ones most likely to survive when there are bad times or a crisis of some kind. So people are inherently lazy and don’t want to exert themselves. Picking from a set of choices is one of the least effortful interaction styles which is why this point and click interaction in general seems to work very well. Where as tweaking sliders, operating pull down menus and all that stuff, that is just more work.

Gord: Right.

Jakob: But of course, this depends on whether we can make these tools useful enough, because it’s not that people will never exert themselves. People do, after all, still get out of bed in the morning, so people will do something if the effort is deemed worthwhile. But it just has to be the case that if you tweak the slider you get remarkably better results for your current needs. And it has to be really easy to understand. I think this has been a problem for many of these ideas. They made sense to the search engine experts, but for the average user they had no idea about what would happen if they tweaked these various search settings and so people tended to not do them.

Gord: Right. When you look at where Google appears to be going, it seems like they’ve made the decision, “we’ll keep the functionality transparent in the background, we’ll use our algorithms and our science to try to improve the relevancy”, where as someone like Ask might be more likely to offer more functionality and more controls on the page. So if Google is going the other way, they seem to be saying that personalization is what they’re betting on to make that search experience better. You’re not too optimistic that that will happen without some sort of interaction on the part of the user?

Jakob: Not, at least, in a small number of years. I think if you look very far ahead, you know 10, 20, 30 years or whatever, then I think there can be a lot of things happening in terms of natural language understanding and making the computer more clever than it is now. If we get to that level then it may be possible to have the computer better guess at what each person needs without the person having to say anything, but I think right now, it is very difficult. The main attempt at personalization so far on the web is Amazon.com. They know so much about the user because they know what you’ve bought which is a stronger signal of interest than if you had just searched for something. You search for a lot of things that you may never actually want, but actually paying money; that’s a very, very strong signal of interest. Take myself, for example. I’m a very loyal shopper of Amazon. I’ve bought several hundred things from them and despite that they rarely recommend (successfully)…sometimes they actually recommend things I like but things I already have. I just didn’t buy it from them so they don’t know I have it. But it’s very, very rare that they recommend something where I say, “Oh yes, I really want that”. So I actually buy it from them. And that’s despite the (fact that the) economic incentive is extreme, recommending things that people will buy. And they know what people have bought. Despite that and despite their work on this now for already 10 years (it’s always been one of their main dreams is to personalize shopping) they still don’t have it very well done. What they have done very well is this “just in time” relevance or “cross sell” as it’s normally called. So when you are on one book on one page, or one product in general, they will say, here are 5 other ones that are very similar to the one you’re looking at now. But that’s not saying, in general, I’m predicting that these 5 books will be of interest to you. They’re saying, “Given that you’re looking at this book, here are 5 other books that are similar, and therefore, the lead that you’re interested in these 5 books comes from your looking at that first book, not from them predicting or having a more elaborate theory about what I like.

Gord: Right.

Jakob: What “I like” tends not to be very useful.

Gord: Interesting. Jakob, I want to be considerate of your time but I do have one more question I’d love to run by you. As the search results move towards more types of images, we’re already seeing more images showing up on the actual search results page for a lot of searches. Soon we could be seeing video and different types of information presented on the page. First of all, how will that impact our scanning patterns? We’ve both done eye scanning research on search engine results, so we know there is very distinct patterns that we see. Second of all, Marissa Mayer in a statement not that long ago seemed to backpedal a bit about the fact that Google would never put display ads back on a search results page, seeming to open a door for non text ads. Would you mind commenting on those two things?

Jakob: Well they’re actually quite related. If they put up display ads, then they will start training people to exhibit more banner blindness, which will also cause them to not look at other types of multimedia on the page. So as long as the page is very clean and the only ads are the text ads that are keyword driven, then I think that putting pictures and probably even videos on there actually work well. The problem of course is they are inherently a more two dimensional media form, and video is 3 dimensional, because it’s two dimensional – graphic, and the third dimension is time, so they become more difficult to process in this linear type of scanned document “down the page” type of pattern. But on the other hand people can process images faster, with just one fixation and you can “grok” a lot of what’s in an image, so I think that if they can keep the pages clean, then it will be incorporated in peoples scanning pattern a little bit more. “Oh this can give me a quick idea of what this is all about and what type of information I can expect”. This of course assumes as well one more thing which is that they can actually select good pictures.

Gord: Right.

Jakob: I would be kind of conservative until higher tweaking with these algorithms, you know, what threshold should you cross before you put an image up. I would really say tweak it such so that you only put it up when you’re really sure that it’s a highly relevant good image. If there starts becoming that there are too many images, then we start seeing the obstacle course behavior. People scan around the images, as they do on a lot of corporate websites, where the images tend to be stock photos of glamour models that are irrelevant to what the user’s there for. And then people involve behavior where they look around the images which is very contrary to first principals of perceptual psychology type of predicting which would be that the images would be attractive. Images turn out to be repelling if people start feeling like they are irrelevant. It’s a similar effect to banner blindness. If there’s any type of design element that people start perceiving as being irrelevant to their needs, then they will start to avoid that design element.

Gord: So, they could be running the risk of banner blindness, by incorporating those images if they’re not absolutely relevant…

Jakob: Exactly.

Gord: …to the query. Ok thank you so much. Just out of interest have you done a lot of usability work with Chinese?

Jakob: Some. I actually read the article you had on your site. We haven’t done eye tracking studies, but we did some studies when we were in Hong Kong recently, and to that level the findings were very much the same. In terms of pdf was bad and how people go though shopping carts. So a lot of the transactional behavior, the interaction behavior, is very, very similar.

Gord: It was interesting to see how they were interacting with the search results page. We’re still trying to figure out what some of those interactions meant

Jakob: I think it’s interesting. It can possibly be that the alphabet or character set is less scannable, but it is very hard to say because when you’re a foreigner, these characters look very blocky, and it looks very much like a lot of very similar scribbles. But on the other hand, it could very well be the same, that people who don’t speak English would view a set of English words like a lot of little speck marks on the page, and yet words in English or in European languages are highly scannable because they have these shapes.

Gord: Right.

Jakob: So I think this is where more research is really called for to really find out. But I think it’s possible, you know the hypothesis is that it’s just less scannable because the actual graphical or visual appearance of the words just don’t make the words pop as much.

Gord: There seems to be some conditioning effects as well and intent plays a huge part. There’s a lot of moving pieces with that and we’re just trying to sort out. The relevancy of the results is a huge issue because the relevancy in China is really not that good so…

Jakob: It seems like it would have a lot to do with experience and amount of information. If you compare back with uses of search in the 80’s, for example, before the web started, that was also a much more thorough reading of search results because people didn’t do search very well. Most people never did it actually, and when you did do it you would search through a very small set of information, and you had to carefully consider each probability. Then, as WebCrawler and Excite and AltaVista and people started, users got more used to scanning, they got more used to filtering out lots of junk. So the paradigm has completely changed from “find everything about my question” to “protect myself against overload of information”. That paradigm shift requires you to have lived in a lot of information for awhile.

Gord: I was actually talking to the Chinese engineering team down at Yahoo! and that’s one thing I said. If you look at how the Chinese are using the internet, it’s very similar to North America in 99 or 2000. There’s a lot of searching for entertainment files and MP3s. They’re not using it for business and completing tasks nearly as much. It’s an entertainment medium for them, and that will impact how their browsing things like search results. It’ll be interesting to watch as that market matures and as users get more experienced, if that scanning pattern condenses and tightens up a lot

Jakob: Exactly. And I would certainly predict it would. There could be a language difference, basically a character set as we just discussed, but I think the basic information foraging theory is still a universal truth. People have to protect themselves against information overload, if you have information overload. As long as you’re not accustomed to that scenario, then you don’t evolve those behaviors. But once you get it… I think a lot of those people have lived in an environment where there’s not a lot of information. Only one state television channel and so forth and gradually they’re getting satellite television and they’re getting millions of websites. But gradually they are getting many places where they can shop for given things, but that’s going to be an evolution.

Gord: The other thing we saw was that there was a really quick scan right to the bottom of the page, within 5 seconds, just to determine how relevant these results were, were these legitimate results? And then there was a secondary pass though where they went back to the top and then started going through. So they’re very wary of what’s presented on the page, and I think part of it is lack of trust in the information source and part of it is the amount of spam on the results page.

Jakob: Oh, yes, yes.

Gord: Great thanks very much for your time Jakob.

Jakob: Oh and thank you!

Posted in Behavior & Psychology, Eye Tracking, Information Seeking & Foraging, Interviews, Online Trends, Online User Experience, Research, Search Behaviors, User Behavior, Web Search
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February 22, 2007

A Caffeine Fueled Vision of the Future

This week, for some reason (largely to do with thinking I could still handle caffeine and being horribly wrong), a number of pieces fell into place for me when it came to looking at how we might interact with computers and the Internet in the future. I began to sketch that out in my SearchInsider column today (more details about the caffeine episode are in it) , but quickly found that I was at the end of my editorial limit and there were a lot of pieces of the vision that I wasn’t able to draw together. So I promised to put a post on this blog going into a little more detail.

The ironic thing about this vision was that although I’d never seen it fully described before, as I thought about it I realized a lot of the pieces to make this happen are already in development. So obviously, somewhere out there, somebody also seen the same vision, or at least pieces of it. The other thing that struck me was: it all made sense as a logical extension of how I interacted with computers today. Obviously there’s a lot of technology being developed but if you take each of those vectors and follow it forward into the future, they all seem to converge into a similar picture.

Actually, the most commonly referenced rendering of the future that I’ve seen is the world that Spielberg imagined in his movie Minority Report. Although anchored in pop culture, the way that Spielberg arrived at his vision is interesting to note. He took the original short story by Philip K. Dick and fleshed it out by assembling a group of futurists, including philosophers, scientists and artists, and putting them together in a think tank. Together they came up with a vision of the future that was both chilling and intriguing.

I mention Minority Report because there are certain aspects of what I saw the future to be that seem to mirror what Spielberg came up with for his future. So, let me flesh out the individual components and provides links to technology currently under development that seem to point this way.

The Cloud

First of all, what will the web become? There’s been a lot of talk about Web 2.0 and Web 3.0, or the Semantic Web envisioned by Tim Berners Lee. Seth Godin had a particularly interesting post (referenced in my column) that he called the Web4. All these visions of the Web’s future share common elements. In Godin’s version, “Web4 is about making connections, about serendipity and about the network taking initiative”. This Web knows what we’re doing, knows what we have to do in the future, knows where we are at any given time, knows what we want and works as our personal assistant to tie all those pieces together and make our lives easier. More than that, it connects us a new ways, creating the ad hoc communities that I talked about in my earlier post, Brain Numbing Ideas on Friday afternoon.

For the sake of this post, I’m calling my version of the new Web “the Cloud”, borrowing some language from Microsoft. For me the Cloud is all about universal access, functionality, connection and information. The Cloud becomes the repository where we put all our information, both that which we want to make publicly accessible and that which we want to keep private. Initially this will cause some concern, as we wrestle with the change of thinking required to understand that physical ownership of data does not always equal security of that same data. We’ll have to gain a sense of comfort that data stored in online repositories can still remain private.

Another challenge will be understanding where we, ourselves, draw the line between the data we choose to make publicly accessible and the data we want to keep for our own personal use. There will be inevitable mistakes of an embarrassing nature as we learn where to put up our own firewalls. But the fascinating part about the Cloud is that it completely frees us physically. We can take all the data we need to keep our lives on track, stored in the Cloud, and have it accessible to us anywhere we are. What’s more, everyone else is doing the same thing. So within the Cloud, we’ll be able to find anything that anyone chooses to share with us. This could include the music they create, the stories they write, or on a more practical level, what our favorite store currently has in stock, or what our favorite restaurant has on for it’s special tonight. Flight schedules, user manuals, technical documentation, travel journals…the list is endless. And it all resides in the Cloud, accessible to us if we choose.

The other really interesting aspect of the Cloud is the functionality it can offer as we begin to build true applications into the web, through Web 2.0 technology. We start to imagine a world where any functionality we could wish for is available when we need it, and where we can buy access as required. The Cloud becomes a rich source of all the functionality we could ever want. Some of that functionality we use daily, to create our own schedules, to communicate, to connect with others and to manage our finances. Some of that functionality we may use once or twice in a lifetime. It really doesn’t matter because it’s always there for us when we need it.

The functionality of the Cloud is already under development. The two most notable examples can be found in Microsoft’s new Office Live Suite and in the collection of applications that Google is assembling. Although both are early in their development cycles, one can already see where they could go in the future.

The final noteworthy aspect of the Cloud is that it will create the basic foundation for all communication in the future. Our entertainment options will be delivered through the Cloud. We will communicate with each other through the Cloud, either by talking, writing or seeing each other. We will access all our information through the Cloud.

For the Cloud to work, it has to be ubiquitous. This represents possibly the single greatest challenge at the current time. The Cloud is already being built, but our ability to access the Cloud still depends on the speed of our connection and the fact is right now, our wireless infrastructure doesn’t allow for a robust enough connection to really leverage what the Cloud has to offer. But universal wireless access is currently being rolled out in more and more locations, so the day is drawing near when access will cease to be a problem.

So, when the Cloud exists, the next question is how do we access it? Let’s start with the two access points that are most common today: home and at work.

The Home Box

The Home Box becomes the nerve center of our home. It acts as a control point for all the functionality and communication we need when we’re not at work. The Home Box consists of a central unit, which doubles as our main entertainment center, and a number of “smart pods” located throughout the home, each connected to a touch screen.

So, what would the Home Box do? Well first of all, it would inform and entertain us. The pipeline that funnels our entertainment options to us would be directly connected to the Cloud. We would choose what we want to see, so the idea of channels becomes obsolete. All entertainment options exist in the Cloud and we pick and choose what we want, when we want.

Also, the Home Box makes each one of those entertainment options totally interactive. We can engage with the programming and shape it as we see fit. We can manipulate the content to match our preferences. The Home Box can watch four or five sporting events and assemble a customized highlight reel based on what we want to see. The Home Box can scan the Cloud for new works by artists, whether they be visual artists, music artists or video artists, notifies us when new content is ready for us to enjoy. If we have an interest that suddenly develops in one particular area, for instance a location that we want to visit on an upcoming vacation, the Home Box assembles all the information that exists, sorted by our preferences, and brings it back to us. And at any time, while watching a video about a particular destination, we can tag items of interest within the video for further reference. As soon as they’re tagged, a background application can start compiling information on whatever we indicated we were interested in. Advertising, in this manifestation, becomes totally interwoven into the experience. We indicate when we’re interested in something and the connection to the advertiser is initiated by us with a quick click.

But the Home Box is much more than just a smarter TV set or stereo. It also runs our home. It monitors energy consumption levels and adjusts them as required. It monitors what’s currently in our fridge and our pantry (by the way, computers are already being built into fridges) and notifies us when we’re out of something. Or, if there’s a particular recipe we want to make, it will let us know what we currently have and what we need to go shopping for.

Microsoft already has the vision firmly in mind. Many of the components are already here. The limited success of Microsoft’s Windows Media Center has not dissuaded them from this vision of the future. Windows Media Center is now built into premium versions of the Vista operating system. And the is Smart Pods I refer to? Each Xbox 360 has the ability to tap right into windows XP Media Center. The technology is already in place.

The Work Box

Probably the least amount of change that I see in the future is in how we access the Internet at work. For those who of us who work in an office environment, we’re already fairly well connected to the Internet. The primary difference in this case would be where the data resides. Eventually, as we gain comfort with the security protocols that exists within the Cloud, we will feel more comfortable and realize the benefits that come with hosting our corporate data where it’s accessible to all members of the organization, no matter where they are physically located.

But consider what happens for the workers who don’t work in an office environment. Access to the Cloud now allows them to substantially increase their connectivity and functionality while they’re mobile. You could instantly access the inventory of any retail location within the chain. You can see if a parts in stock at the warehouse. You can access files and documents from anywhere, at any time. And, you can tap into the core functionality of your office applications as you wish, where ever you happen to be.

Once again, much of the functionality that would enable this is already in place or being developed. In the last year we at Enquiro have started to realize the capabilities of Microsoft Exchange Server and Sharepoint services. Just today, Google announced new enterprise level apps would be available on the web. Increasingly, more and more collaborative tools that use the Internet as their common ground are being developed. The logical next step is to allow these to reside within the Cloud and to free them from the constraints of our own internal hardware and software infrastructure.

The Mobile Device

When we talk about tangible technology that will enable this future; hardware that we can see and touch, the mobile piece of the equation is the most critical. For us to truly realize the full functionality of the Cloud, we have to have universal access to it. It has to come with us as we live our lives. The new mobile device becomes a constant connection to the Cloud. Small, sleek, GPS enabled, with extended communication capabilities, the new handheld device will become our computing device of choice. All the data and the functionality that we could require at any time exists in the Cloud. The handheld device acts as our primary connection to the Cloud We pull down the information that we need, we rent functionality as required, we do what we have to do and then we move on with our lives.

Our mobile device comes with us and plugs into any environment that we’re in. When we’re at work, we plug it into a small docking station and all the files that we require are interchanged automatically. Work we did at home is automatically uploaded to the corporate section of the Cloud, our address books and appointment calendars are instantly updated, new communications are downloaded, and an accurate snapshot of our lives is captured and is available to us. When we get home again we dock our mobile device and the personal half of our lives is likewise updated.

Consider some practical applications of this:

When we go to the gym, our exercise equipment is now “Cloud” enabled. Our entire exercise program is recorded on our mobile device. As we move from station to station we quickly plug it into a docking station, the weights are automatically adjusted, the number of reps is uploaded, and as we do our exercises, appropriate motivating music and messages are heard in our ear. At the same time, our heart rate and other biological signals are being monitored and are being fed back to the exercise equipment, maximizing our workout.

When we’re at home, we quickly plug our mobile device into the Smart Pod in the kitchen, and everything we need to get on our upcoming shopping trip is instantly uploaded. What’s more, with the functionality built into the Cloud, the best specials on each of the items is instantly determined, the best route to pick up all the items is send to our GPS navigation module, and our shopping trip is efficiently laid out for us. While we’re there, the built in bar code scanner allows us to comparison shop on any item, in the geographic radius we choose.

As I fly back from San Francisco, a flight delay means that I may miss my connecting flight in Seattle. My mobile device notes this, adjusts my schedule accordingly, automatically notifies my wife and scans airline schedules to see if an alternative flight might still get me home without an unexpected layover near SeaTac Airport. It there’s no way I can make it back, it books me a room at my prefered hotel.

The Missing Pieces

I happen to think this is a pretty compelling vision of the future. And as it started to come together for me, I was surprised by how many of the components already exist or are being currently developed. As I said in the beginning, it seems like a puzzle with a lot of the pieces already in place. There are some things, however, we still need to come together for this vision to become real. Here are the challenges as I see them.

Computing Horsepower

For the mobile device that I envisioned to become a reality, we have to substantially up the ante of the computing horsepower. The story that led to my writing of the SearchInsider column was one about the new research chip that is currently under development at Intel. Right now the super chips are being developed for a new breed of supercomputer, but the trickle-down effects are inevitable. Just to give you an idea of the quantum leap in performance we’re talking about, the chip is designed to deliver teraflops performance. Teraflops are trillions of calculations per second. The first time teraflops performance was achieved was in 1997 on a supercomputer that took up more than 2000 square feet, powered by 10,000 Pentium Pro processors. With the new development, that same performance is achieved on a single multi-core chip about the size of a fingernail. This opens the door to dramatic new performance capabilities, including a new level of artificial intelligence, instant video communications, photorealistic games, multimedia data mining and real-time speech recognition.

A descendent of this prototype chip could make our mobile device several orders of magnitude more powerful than our most powerful desktop box today. And when implanted in our Home Box, this new super chip allows us to scan any video file and pick up specific items of interest. You could scan the top 100 movies of any year to see how many of them reference the city of Cleveland, Ohio (not exactly sure why you’d want to do this), or included a product placement for Apple.

Better Speech Recognition

One of the biggest challenges with mobile computing is the input/output part of the problem. Small just does not lend itself to being user-friendly when it comes to getting information in and out of the device. We struggle with tiny keyboards and small screens. But simply talking has proven to be a remarkably efficient communication tool for us for thousands of years. The keyboard was a necessary evil because speech recognition wasn’t an option for us in the past. We can talk much faster than we can talk.

I recently was introduced to Dragon Naturally Speaking for the first time. I’ve been trying it for about three weeks now. Although it’s still getting to know me and I’m still getting to know it, when it works it works very well. I found it a much more efficient way to interact with my computer. It would certainly make interacting with a mobile device infinitely more satisfying. The challenge right now with this is that speech recognition requires a fairly quiet environment, you’re constantly speaking to yourself, and mobile devices just don’t have enough computing power to be able to handle it.

We’ve already dealt with the computing horsepower problem above. So how do we deal with the challenge of being able to get our vocal commands recognized by our mobile device? Let me introduce you to the subvocalization mic. The mic actually picks up the vibrations from our vocal cords, even if we’re only whispering, and renders recognizable speech without all the background noise. New prototype sensors can detect sub vocal or silent speech. We can speak quietly (even silently) to ourselves, no matter how noisy the environment, and our mobile device would be able to understand what we’re saying.

Better Visual Displays

The other challenge with a mobile device is in freeing ourselves from the tiny little 2.5″ x 2 .5″ screen. It just does not produce a very satisfying user experience. One of the biggest frustrations I hear about the lack of functionality with many of the mobile apps comes just because we don’t have enough screen real estate. This is where a heads-up display could make our lives much, much easier. Right now they’re still pretty cumbersome and make us look like cyborgs but you just know we’re not far from the day where they could easily be built into a pair of non-intrusive eyeglasses. Then the output from our mobile device can be as large as we wanted to be.

Going this one step further, let’s borrow a scene from Spielberg’s Minority Report. We have the heads-up display which creates a virtual 3-D representation of the interface. We could also have sensors on our hands that would turn that display into a virtual 3-D touchscreen experience. We could “touch” different things within the display and interact with our computing device in this way. Combined with sub vocalization speech commands, this could create the ultimate user interface. Does this sound far-fetched? Microsoft has already developed much of the technology and has licensed it to a company called eon reality. Like I said no matter what the mind can envision, it’s probably already under development. As I started down this path, it particularly struck me how many of the components under development had the Microsoft brand on them.

If you can fill in other pieces of the puzzle, or you have your own vision of the future, make sure you take a few moments to comment.

Posted in Behavior & Psychology, eCommerce, Information Seeking & Foraging, Mobile, Online Trends, Online User Experience, Video and Virtual, Web Search
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Out of My Gord

my thoughts (in no particular order)

Category Archives: Information Seeking & Foraging

Persuasion on the Search Results Page

Satisficing, Bounded Rationality and Search

Search and the Digital CPG Shelf

Are Our Brains being Rewired?

On Your Search Menu Tonight

In Search of B2B Landmarks

Personalization Catches the User’s Eye

An Image Can Change Everything for the Searcher

Interview with Jakob Nielsen on the Future of the SERP (and other stuff)

A Caffeine Fueled Vision of the Future

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