Category Archives: Behavior & Psychology

Psst – Want a Hot Spot Paisano?

First published August 24, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Surgeon General’s Warning: Prolonged exposure to the Internet can lead to physical dependency and addiction. Use of the Internet can increase levels of anxiety and reduce attention spans.Hello, my name is Gord, and I’m addicted to the Internet. I didn’t realize I was addicted until I recently spent three weeks in Europe and had to go through withdrawal. But after hanging around hotel lobbies trying to get a hit from a local hot spot, I’ve had to face up to the fact that I can’t kick the habit. I need my broadband, baby!

Fear and Loathing in l’Italia

I didn’t go totally cold turkey. I had my PDA to keep up on e-mails, but it just didn’t give me the rush I was looking for. Here I was, surrounded by the culmination of centuries of artistic achievement, and all I could think about was where my Google hook-up was coming from.

I speak somewhat facetiously, but there’s a lot of truth here. Here’s an online definition of addiction:

    1. Compulsive physiological and psychological need for a habit-forming substance.
    2. The condition of being habitually or compulsively occupied with or or involved in something.

It seems to me that going online qualifies on both counts. There’s no doubt that being online is habit forming. But it goes further than that. I realized in the last 20-plus days that it’s hard-wired into my physiology. Not having instant access was as foreign as not having my right hand.

I use online a lot, mainly to access and assimilate information. I enhance what I see in the real world by researching it online, letting me place it in context for myself. And for the past three weeks, every sense I have has been bombarded to the point of overload by input. Art, history, locations, music, literature, architecture, it was all right in front of me. Paris, Florence, Rome: cradles of civilization that I was standing in the center of, and it was if I couldn’t fully assimilate them, because I didn’t have access to an essential part of my cerebral hardware: the right brain, left brain and “wired” brain.

What’s it worth to you, amico?

The analogy carries even further. Accessing the Internet while traveling in Europe is rather like hunting for illicit substances, in that it can be difficult to find and notoriously expensive. Five euros (a little over six dollars U.S.) for fifteen minutes, thirteen euros for an hour, thirty euros for a day… I have a price list for hot spots around the continent imprinted in my memory.

I wasn’t the only one that went through withdrawal. My wife and two daughters showed similar symptoms, but for different reasons. For me, it was losing a logical and information-gathering extension of myself. For them, it was losing a communication channel. They have adopted e-mail as a primary way of keeping in touch (and instant messaging, in the case of my oldest daughter), and they felt somewhat cut off. This was somewhat demonstrative of the way men and women tend to use the Internet, something I talked about in a previous column.

This is your brain on high-speed

But addictions aren’t always harmful. One could argue that we’re addicted to oxygen. Breathing is certainly habit-forming. So is there anything wrong with developing a strong dependence on the Internet?

One theory that I have is that our brains tend to gear up a notch when we go online. There is so much we do through computers that we have difficulty  maintaining linear thinking when we’re online. Even if we’re focused on one task, there’s the knowledge that there’s e-mail to check, things to look up, a hundred other things that we could be doing. Being online seems to increase our level of both anxiety and distraction, just because it’s so damn useful in so many different ways. Focus is a tough thing to maintain.

We have seen manifestation of this trend in the way people act when online. It’s nothing short of frenetic, skipping all over the page, multi-tasking, grasping information in a hundred little forays around the screen. It’s a different interaction from much of what we do day to day. Is it harmful? I’m not sure, but it does seem to be making permanent changes in the way we learn and communicate.

Anyway, I’m back in the office tomorrow, and will once again have my cerebral cortex plugged back into the Matrix. I’ll be wired again. I guess that’s a good thing, but I’m sure going to miss the espressos, Chiantis and Calabrese salsiccia.

Oh, well, everything in life is a trade-off.

What’s Up with Verticals?

First published July 27, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

You probably haven’t given a lot of thought lately to vertical search results, that thin sliver of search real estate that is sandwiched between the top sponsored ads and the top organic ads, and generally shows a few lines of news results, or local, or products. I have. Don’t panic, there’s really no reason why you should have. It’s really just a sad comment on my day-to-day activities. But I’ve noticed some things, and I think it’s incumbent upon me to share them with you. So let’s get vertical for a few moments, shall we?

In a Location Near You

First, this is prime real estate. When vertical results appear on the major engines, they appear smack in the middle of the hottest part of the page. After a number of eye tracking studies, we can say with a degree of certainty that most searchers (upwards of 80 percent) at least look at the top sponsored ads and the top three or so organic ads. That means that vertical, wedged in between, will be at least grazed over by a lot of eyeballs.

But position is not enough. Working the vertical angle is not just about grabbing some prime real estate. Verticals have to offer information scent. The information, links and visual cues they offer have to align with the user’s intent. In one bizarre example we saw during our latest study, somebody searched on Google for “digital cameras.” For some reason, Google saw fit to return news results for digital cameras. Now, just what percentage of the over two million people who searched for “digital cameras” last month (a quick estimate courtesy of Yahoo) do you guess would be looking for the scoop on how Nikon had to recall 710,000 digital camera batteries? Maybe the ex-product manager from Nikon, in between looking for new jobs on Monster, but that’s about it.

Hopelessly Devoted to OneBox?

While we’re on the subject, what’s the deal with Google and verticals anyway? Search pundit Greg Sterling said in a blog post some time ago that Google had an “almost religious devotion to OneBox,” its vertical label of choice. Could be, but it seems that a few in the temple of Google are questioning their religious affiliations. OneBox results have been a little sketchy of late. The reason this came to light is that I’ve just looked at 100-plus sessions in Google for a recent study, and there were surprisingly few of those sessions with OneBox results showing.

First of all, they hardly ever show for product-based searches. Try it for yourself. I must have tried over a dozen different common product searches before I got one that returned Froogle results via OneBox. Now why would that be? Well, for one thing, OneBox real estate competes with top sponsored ads, and perhaps advertisers are starting to resent the increased competition in their neighborhood for highly commercial searches. If that theory is correct, it flies in the face of Google’s goal to provide the most relevant results for each query, no matter what the source of the results. Another reason might be that Froogle has never really gained traction as a shopping engine. Maybe Google’s quiet dialing down the rate of appearance of Froogle results on the main page is their way of admitting that these results aren’t adding value to the user experience.

Doing Vertical Right

If you’re looking at a good example of Vertical execution, Yahoo seems to be currently leading the pack with its Shortcuts. The display of vertical results is consistent, and they seem to be one step ahead of the competition in aligning results with user intent.

Here are some examples we saw in a recent study:

One of the tasks given was to research the upcoming purchase of a digital camera. This resulted in a number of related queries being used, ranging from very general (“digital cameras”) to very specific (“Canon Powershot A530”). When these queries were thrown at Yahoo, the engine was able to differentiate and return appropriate vertical results. Broad generic phrases returned vertical results that compared known brands or allowed browsing by features. More specific queries returned links that led to reviews and best prices for that model alone. It was a great example of results matching intent, and we saw the interaction with these results go up dramatically as an example.

One very bright thing that Yahoo does consistently in its vertical listings is provide a 5-star rating scale. It appears for products, some local results (restaurants, hotels) and in various other places. When it comes to attracting our eye, nothing does the trick better than a visual cue that promises ratings. We love lists that sort from most popular to least popular. It’s the paradigm of the consumer researcher, and it’s something that reeks of scent. We saw eyeballs attracted to these icons like search marketers to an open bar (come on, I know many of you are already scoping out the cocktail network for San Jose).

A Vertical Future

I still believe that verticals mark a path into search’s future, but until the engines do better at disambiguating intent, either through personalization, behavioral tracking or just really smart key phrase parsing, they will be relegated to the thin sliver of real estate they currently occupy. Their success in luring users into what Sterling called a “Page 2” vertical experience will lie solely in how well they deliver on intent.

The Rule of Three in Search

First published July 20, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Once again, I find myself up to my earlobes in eye-tracking data. I have no one to blame, as I got myself into this mess when I made the well-intentioned but poorly thought out promise to have the first draft of a study done by the time I head out on vacation at the end of the month.

In wading through the sessions (about 420 of them) sometimes new insights rise to the top–and sometimes my eyeballs just roll back in my head as my hands jerk spasmodically on my keyboard and drool runs down my cheek. Luckily, this week it was the former.

In this study, we are looking at interactions with Google, compared to MSN and Yahoo. Recently, one finding in particular seemed to be screaming out to be noticed. Being a compassionate sort of researcher, I listened.

When we looked at interactions with the top sponsored ads, there was a notable difference between MSN, Yahoo and Google. On MSN and Google, the percentage of clicks happening on these top ads seemed to be in line with previous studies done both by us and by others. But the amount of activity on the Yahoo ads seemed to be substantially higher. We started out by looking at first fixations, or the first place people looked on the page, even for a split second. Here, the engines were all in the same ball park, with 83.7 percent of first fixations in top sponsored ads for Yahoo, compared to 86.7 percent for MSN and 80.6 percent for Google.

Then, we looked at where the first activity on listing happened; where on the page did people start actually scanning listings? Google held a good percentage of eyeballs, keeping 12.4 percent of the users, while MSN had a significant defection issue, losing 36.6 percent of the people who first fixated in the top sponsored ads. But Yahoo lost the fewest, with only 5.5 percent choosing to look elsewhere. And finally, Google had 25.8 percent click-throughs on these ads, and MSN had 16.7 percent (yes, this is low, but MSN was dealing with a number of issues at the time of the study). Yahoo led the pack with a 30.2 percent click-through rate. In fact, for the first time ever in our research, a sponsored link (the number one top sponsored) out-pulled the No. 1 organic link, at click-through rates of 25.6 percent vs. 14 percent. This was a complete reversal of the click-through ratios we saw on the other two engines.

For whatever reason, Yahoo’s top sponsored ads seemed to be locking searchers into their part of the results page to a much greater extent than Google and MSN.

Why? What the heck was going on? Better ads? Not really. If anything, Google’s ads seemed a touch more relevant.

Location, Location, Location

Part of it was real estate. Another interesting comparison we did was to look at the percentages of screen real estate devoted to various sections of the page. Yahoo has gone out of its way to make the top sponsored ads the dominant feature on a results page at 1024 by 768 screen resolution. At this size, the ads take up 23 percent of the real estate, compared to approximately 16 percent for Google and Yahoo. This pushes organic listings on Yahoo perilously close to the fold.

And there, as I stared at the screen shots of fully loaded (maximum ads and vertical results showing) Google, MSN and Yahoo results at standard resolution, a possible answer revealed itself. On Google, three top sponsored ads, three OneBox results, and three visible organic listings. On MSN, the same three:three:three presentation. But on Yahoo, there were four top sponsored ads, three vertical results, and just one and a half organic listings were visible.

The Rule of Three

Hmmm, three, three and three. There was something there, niggling in the back of my mind. Quickly, I did a search for the “Rule of Three” and sure enough, there it was. We humans tend to think in triplets. Three is a good number to wrap our mind around, and we see it in all kinds of instances. We tend to remember points best when given in groups of three, we scan visual elements best when they come in threes, and we like to have three options to consider. Think how often three comes up in our society: three little pigs, three strikes, three doors on “Let’s Make a Deal,” three competitive quotes. It’s a triordered world out there.

So is it coincidence that search results tend to be presented to us, neatly ordered in groups of three? I think not. It strikes me that this engrained human behavior would probably translate to the search engine results page as well.

The Ruler-breaker

MSN and Google tend to adhere to the rule of three in their layouts (depending on whether or not Google serves three top sponsored ads). Our choices are conveniently presented in neat trios, with logical divides between each.

Yahoo breaks the rule by tipping the balance in favor of the top sponsored ads. First, it provides four results, not three. Does this mean we need to spend a little more time up in these results, trying to fit one extra one into our limited memory slots? That appears to be the case, with people spending an average of 4.6 seconds in the Yahoo top sponsored results in our study, compared to 2.4 seconds for Google and 1.73 seconds for MSN.

Second, it only gives us one visible organic listing to consider. It breaks our natural desire to have three alternatives, thereby reducing the Promise of Interest for the organic listings. In effect, on the screen of results most people would see on Yahoo, we only have one alternative, the top sponsored ads.

An earth-shaking discovery? Perhaps not. But cut me some slack. I’ve been looking at eye-tracking data daily for three months now, spending about three hours each day looking at interactions with the three engines. I think it’s time I took the three other members of my family on a three-week vacation, during which we’ll be visiting three countries. Wait a minute! Do I sense a pattern developing?

Dear Google Search History

First published July 13, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In the 1600s, Samuel Pepys became history’s most famous diarist. From 1660 to 1669, this English Member of Parliament kept a detailed diary, which was published posthumously. In it, we gain a fascinating eyewitness account of the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London. Most passages were not so monumental, however. Here’s one example from July of 1663:

Up betimes to my office, and there all the morning doing business, at noon to the Change, and there met with several people, among others Captain Cox, and with him to a Coffee [House], and drank with him and some other merchants. Good discourse. Thence home and to dinner, and, after a little alone at my viol, to the office, where we sat all the afternoon, and so rose at the evening, and then home to supper and to bed, after a little musique.

Sounds like Sam pretty much polished work off by noon and spent the rest of the time drinking, gossiping, playing the ol’ viol and listening to some tunes. All in all, not a bad life! No wonder he had the free time to write about it.

The Diary I Didn’t Know Existed…

I never considered myself a diarist. I’m much too busy actually trying to get through my life to spend time writing about it. I suppose the odd blog post would be autobiographical, but other than that, I didn’t think I was leaving an account of my day-to-day thoughts. I was wrong.

Some time ago, I signed up for a Google Analytics account for my blog and at the time, I somehow activated Google’s Personal Search History function. Because I have a laptop, and tend to use the same computer at work and at home, I was unknowingly capturing a pretty complete snapshot of all my search activity. Just a few days ago, I realized I was still logged in. Today, I took a look back at two months of search activity.

…A Day-by-Day, Search-by-Search History…

First of all, in the past two months, I’ve searched 540 times. That’s an average of 9 searches a day. In looking at the log of day-to-day activity, I can pretty much tell exactly what I was doing, and what thoughts preoccupied me, on any given day from May 11 to today. The topics are a little scattered. In a one-hour period on June 5, I went from looking for what an average winning percentage was on Freecell (don’t ask), to looking up the details on a new business contact, to looking for a new design template for my blog, to looking for GPS software for an upcoming trip to Europe. Can you say attention deficit?

In a quick analysis of my activity, it seems that 59 percent of my search activity is work-related, and 41 percent is personal. Twenty-eight percent of my searches were navigational (I knew what site I wanted to end up on, and was using the search engine to get there) and 71 percent were what I call “mapping” searches (where I was looking for the search engine to suggest sites I was previously unaware of). And in 34 percent of my searches, I never actually clicked on a result.

…And That Was Just Mine…

The point is not to go on about how I search. You could care less. The point is that search history gave me a snapshot of just what I was thinking about, at an average of about nine times a day. In looking back, I could remember what I was working on, what products I suddenly thought I needed, how much planning I was doing for an upcoming vacation, what new acquaintances I suddenly decided to Google to find out more about, and what arguments needed to be settled. I’d see queries come up, disappear for a few days, then suddenly re-emerge later, either in the same or modified form. It made me realize how integral online is to my life, and how much I depend on search to connect me to the vast and diverse content that sits out there. It mirrored my thoughts about upcoming purchases, life events, things that were bothering me, issues at work and just plain old time-wasters.

Now consider the implications of this. I’m one person, who actually lived the life in question, and I was amazed by the insight gained by looking back. Consider this data in aggregate form. No wonder John Battelle was blown away by what he called the “database of intentions,” this gargantuan deposit of data that is owned by the search engines, providing intimate glimpses into individuals at the micro level, and incredibly granular macro mosaics as we step back. Based on the search trail and clickstream I looked at, Google, if it chooses to, would know more about me than my wife (keep the snarky comments to yourself). And remember, search history is just the data Google chooses to make public. Through the tool bar, it’s capturing a lot more clickstream data on you.

…What About Yours?

The whole “Big Brother” aspect of this has been commented on numerous times in the past. Sure, it’s frightening, but I think it’s tied up in the new reality of our online world. Is the fact that it sits in the hands of a private corporation any more troubling than the huge amount of personal information that sits in government files? Theoretically, we have democratic recourse with the government, but we all know how much weight that holds. Take some comfort in the fact that Google, with all its billions and resources, has exactly 1.5 people working in its sales and market research department (although I’m hearing rumors of a new addition). For the foreseeable future, Google might have a frightening amount of data, but it doesn’t have anyone with the time to look at it.
Read more: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/45508/dear-google-search-history.html#ixzz2ZoaFoUTS

Branded Terms in Search Results: Pre-Mapping in Action

First published July 6, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Two separate occurrences in the last little while have lent credence to a behavioral occurrence we’ve seen in many of our studies.

First, I was sitting in on a meeting where an agency (not ours) was reporting on the performance of its sponsored search campaigns and was ecstatic with the performance of its branded term phrases, which were outperforming every other keyword bucket both in terms of click-throughs and conversions. While giddy with delight, company executives were at a bit of a loss to explain why.

On a similar track, a search marketing firm has recently released some results that looked at cannibalization of search campaigns when you are buying terms where you also hold top organic position. Again, they found this is most likely to happen when you’re buying branded terms.

While neither of these examples should be surprising to a seasoned search marketer, we’re all interested to know the reasons behind this interplay between organic and sponsored, particularly on branded terms. The answer, as it so often does, lies in looking more closely at what the search user is doing.

Pre-Mapping: A Theory

After looking at thousands of search sessions in detail, one thing is becoming clear. Searchers are incredibly adept at focusing in on just the portion of the results page that interests them. The time required to relocate to the prime real estate is literally a fraction of a second. Yet that real estate isn’t always the same spot. It varies depending on query and intent. It also varies by user, but even the same users will navigate the real estate of the listings in very different ways, depending on what they’re looking for.

Pre-Mapping supposes that we’ve interacted with search results pages enough to know the sections of real estate we typically deal with. We know where the top sponsored ads are and what they are. We know about where the top organic listings start. And in our minds, we already have a good idea of the type of site we’re looking for and approximately where we expect it to appear. Before the page ever loads, we’ve already mapped out the sections that would appear to hold the greatest promise to deliver on our intent. As the page loads, we do a split-second scan to get our bearings (orient in the top left corner, see how many top ads there are, see where organic starts) and then we go to the part of the map we’ve predetermined to be our best starting point.

Theory in Practice

Let’s run through a few examples. Imagine you’re looking for the possible side effects of a medication. The types of sites you would be looking for would be authoritative information sites, either the official site for the medication, a recognized health portal or possibly a government information site. In this case, you may be leaning more towards objective sites, rather than the pharmaceutical company’s own site. After launching the search (the name of the drug) you’ll quickly filter out, or thin slice, any commercially oriented sites. In this type of interaction, you’ve determined through pre-mapping that your area of greatest promise is not likely to be in the sponsored ads. You also expect the official site to rank No. 1 organically, so your area of greatest promise is probably in the No. 2 to 5 organic rankings, where you expect the types of sites you’re looking for to sit. In a split second, you’ve narrowed the real estate where you’ll start your active scanning to about 10 percent of the total real estate.

Now, let’s say you’re looking to renew your auto insurance. You’ve already checked out a few quotes online, but before you commit to any, you want to see how your current carrier compares. You’ve also pre-mapped the page in this case. Here, you expect your company to be bidding for the term ( “Brand Name auto insurance”) and because it’s a commercially oriented query, you assume that the sponsored listing would take you to a page where you could get a quote. Your area of greatest promise is the top sponsored ads. Again, you do your orientation scan to find your bearings in the upper left, but in this case, you would start right at the top sponsored link and work your way down the page until you find a link to the carrier in question that offers the promise of giving you a quote.

Theory Applied

Considering these two examples of user behavior, you can easily see what was happening in the two anecdotes I cited at the beginning of this piece. Brand terms will convert like gangbusters in the top sponsored location, because when a brand term is used, it’s very likely that the user has pre-mapped and is expecting to find that site in those top sponsored spots.

Similarly, you will find significant cannibalization because when users have pre-mapped, they start at the top and work down. They’ll hit the sponsored result before they hit any organic result that might appear. They’re looking for the quickest route, and in this case, the sponsored listing is giving it to them.

The likelihood to pre-map, and what this means for interaction for the page, lies in that deep dark place where all the answers to search engine success lie, the mind of your target prospect. Spend some time exploring it.

Wise Words about Branding from the Usability Sage

First published June 29, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Jakob Nielsen knows a lot about usability. He’s perhaps the world’s foremost expert on how people use Web sites. I finally had the chance to meet Jakob face to face last week (we’ve been trading e-mails for some time) in San Francisco at his Usability Week Summit. I was down there to sit in on his one-day session on eyetracking.

No Graphics for Nielsen

Jakob takes a pretty austere view of the user experience. One can tell this from his own website, useit.com. Perhaps his most famous quote is “Flash: 99% bad.” He takes a similarly dim view of animations and large graphics, which lead to “banner blindness,” he says. In fact, other than the obligatory head and shoulder shot on his bio page and a small arrow glyph used to indicate hierarchy in his breadcrumb navigation bar, there are no graphics on useit.com. He goes on at some length about this. Why no graphics? He’s pretty adamant that they add nothing to the user experience. We’re not in complete agreement about this, but I get his point.

Jakob’s Nielsen Norman group has recently added eyetracking to its usability arsenal. If ever you’re looking for justification for not using large graphics on a site, look (sorry, no pun intended) no further than eyetracking heatmaps. In session after session, users skirt around large graphic blocks, focusing their interaction on text and navigation. It can be a rude slap in the face for most graphic designers (there’s a rather amusing anecdote about one such encounter that happened at the session, and an example of the phenomenon I’m talking about, on my blog).

Experience, Not Exposure

In the session, Jakob tossed out a line, the import of which I’m not sure was fully appreciated by the audience. When responding to a question from the audience about the seeming contradiction between the need for building of brand exposure and best practices for usability, Jakob said that online, brand value is built through experience, not exposure.

Whoa! There’s a world of wisdom in those eight little words! Beneath them lies a whole different way of looking at online engagement. It sums up something I’ve been hammering away at for years now. A successful user experience builds brand equity in a way that hammering visitors over the head with Flash or streaming video never could. Every single thing on a Web site should have one purpose, to make that user experience more successful. If it’s there solely for the gratification of the designer, or the CEO, or the CMO, it’s there for the wrong reason. And before you dismiss this thought, saying it doesn’t apply to you, take a look at your home page and ask yourself, why are the elements that are on the page actually there? Think through the decision process that placed each element on the page. How present were users in the process? Who was asking them for their opinion?

User Success In Search

This is a best practice in any Web site’s design, but it becomes particularly true when looking at search-generated leads. Search visitors reek with intent. They are incredibly single-minded in their purpose. They’re looking for a clear path ahead to their intent, and they’ve cast the first few steps down that path through their search query. They’ve come to the site not because they’re engaged with your brand, although that may have helped sway them in your direction, but because they’re engaged with a task. Get between them and the successful completion of that task at your peril. Every time you throw something at them that’s not aligned to that intent, you decrease their chances for success, eroding the value of your brand in their eyes. If you make them wait 20 seconds for a Flash file to load, that’s 20 seconds of ticking on a time bomb that could blow your brand to smithereens. If you throw in a large stock photo with the typical generic smiling face that takes up 70 percent of your home page, you’re wasting prime real estate. But don’t feel bad, it happens to the best of us. At least Jakob practices what he preaches on his site. What would you see if you went to the home page of Enquiro? A generic smiling face. But I’m working on it!

Usability and Asinine Comments from the Bay

Had a chance to catch one day of Jakob Nielsen’s Usability Week in San Francisco. Yesterday, I sat in on the eyetracking session and saw the results of the Nielsen Norman’s just completed study (numbers are still being crunched as we speak).

It was heartening to see that many of their findings mirrored our own, including F shaped scanning patterns, quick scans of pages and aversion of ads and large graphic blocks. It was in this last category that the asinine comments part comes (that’s why you’re really reading this, isn’t it?).

Jakob was demonstrating interaction with the home page of jcpenney.com. (The picture that I’ll be talking about has changed, but the basic page structure is the same). The heat map image showed clearly that the big block graphic, in this case a picture of a bed with a colorful spread, with some promotional text inset in the upper left and the lower right, received virtually no scanning. All the scanning was in the top navigation bar. The large block graphic “fenced in” the scan area, cutting users off from other promotional information that lay below the graphic. We saw the same thing occur with the Bombay Company site in a eyetracking study we did for MarketingSherpa (see below).

bombays

Some hot shot designer in the room decided to take exception with the proof in from of him, and called out some of the examples that Jakob has shown of large graphics that had received no scanning. He used words like apex composition and other regurgitated terms from a graphic design university text book to show that all the sites adhered to basic design principles and that the theoretical composition of the JCPenney picture was in fact spot on, drawing the eye from one promotional headline to the next. Jakob patiently pointed out the obvious, that the theory breaks down, because as the heat map clearly showed, no eyes were even being attracted, let alone drawn to any headlines. We settled back in our chairs, silently cheering the adroit handling of the blow hard in the back. Much to our amazement, the guy wouldn’t give up, continually going back to the point that the theory is right and works, despite evidence on a screen roughly 40 by 30 feet to the contrary. The mic finally had to be taken away from him.

A couple points here. Theories are theories, not fact. Heat maps are facts, at least for the sample of people in the study. And while you may argue that a sample of a couple hundred (the n of the NN/g study) isn’t representative, I would disagree. We’ve done enough to know that consistent behavior in eyetracking starts to emerge at about 10 people, then defines itself very clearly at 20 to 30 people. So designers, you just may have to forget everything you learned, because the way people interact with information is changing faster than new theories can be created. You have to keep an open mind.

Second of all, this guy was approaching this from a print paradigm, not an online one. His spouting of picture composition and eye flow comes from centuries of guessing about how we look at images. I remember talking to a university arts professor once who was really excited about eye tracking because we could finally find out if all the “crap that’s been spouted about how we look at paintings is even true or not”. I’m not saying century old principles are wrong, but you have to consider them in the appropriate context. Take our J.C. Penney picture. Mr. Design Dictionary is correct. The flow of the bed spread and the contours of the bed should hypothetically draw the eye from one headline to the other, if the eye entered the picture in the first place. In the print advertising world, photos act as an attractor. They grab the person who is reading adjacent, usually non relevant content, and pull them over to the ad. They are the entry point. If they do their job efficiently, you have altered the intent of the prospect. They have switched from reading a story to looking at your ad. The job of the photo is to channel this new intent to the right place.

With a website, you have the full intent of the user. That’s why they came to your site. A large block graphic gets in the way of that intent, and will be thin sliced out of the way. Worse, it could block the user from seeing the content on the site that they’re there to see. All the composition theory in the world won’t prevent that. Jakob’s point wasn’t that the picture was composed incorrectly; it was that the picture was a waste of valuable home page real estate.

Probably the most valuable thing I took from yesterday was a comment Jakob made as an aside. Branding online comes from the experience, not the exposure. This was in response to another comment somebody made about large graphics being present for branding purposes, and the seeming contradiction between the need for branding and best practices for usability. Online, a successful brand engagement and a successful user experience are the same thing. If you deliver efficiently on a user’s intent and make their online experience a pleasure, you will build more brand equity than you could ever build with gratuitous flash files, streaming media and huge graphics. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, but all too often online, the designers win at the user’s expense.

RSS Feeds vs E-mails: More Eyetracking Data from Jakob Nielsen

Jakob Nielsen’s Neilsen Norman Group just released an eyetracking study looking at scan patterns of e-mail newsletters vs RSS feeds. The summary results? People spend more time scanning newsletters, but are ruthless in scanning titles that pop up in their newsreaders. Again, both Jakob’s studies and ours seem to keep coming to the same conclusions, we’re evolving a very advanced form of “thin slicing” when we interact with information online. We have to, as there’s an overload of stimuli. I’m heading down to San Francisco next week to spend some time at Jakob’s usability summit, and hope to chat with him more about this.

Google, Microsoft, Print, TV and other Thoughts on a Rainy Day

It’s raining and I’m not feeling particularly industrious, so I’ll push back the “To do” pile a little bit farther and catch up on some blog posts.

There’s been a lot of buzz lately about the search engine’s foray into the world of print advertising, and Tacoda CEO Dave Morgan tries to pinpoint where Google’s attempt to introduce an auction based model to print could have gone wrong.

One point put forth in the column (although not Dave’s) that’s worth considering is that an auction based market is a tremendously efficient one. It has little overhead and it allows prices to find their own sustainable levels, based on the value in the buyer’s mind. This worked well for search because it presented untapped value. There was no place for search to go but up. Which it did.

Print is another matter. It represents an entire food chain with an accompanying industry that subsists on it. That comes with built in inefficiencies and therefore, pricing inflation. Arguably, when introduced to an open, dynamic, buyer controlled pricing market, print had nowhere to go but down. Which it did. And that was the problem.

But Dave points to another issue, and that’s the significant differences between print and search. Search is driven by intent, which means that search interactions generally lead to a purchase event in the not too distant future. And each click is an expression of that intent, which makes it easy for markets to start assessing value to the click. This measurable value provides easy justification for the bid price. In fact, it’s this direct response approach to search that’s introducing many of the challenges we face in trying to quantify value to search touch points as we move further away from the purchase.

Print is a different animal. It’s often used for branding, a much less quantifiable objective, and it’s not clickable. There’s no way to immediately and easily assign value, which makes bidding a guessing game at best, rather than a provable strategy.

In the end, it comes to down to a number of factors, including underestimating the inertia of the print market, the fact that in a price inflated market, an auction based model will find efficiencies, not profit, and, once again, Google thinking that as soon as they enter a new market and affix a Google label, the world will change rotational direction to accommodate them.

And yes, there is a theme emerging in my posts. I’m not a Google basher. I like much of what they do, I like their cocky optimism, I love what they’ve done for search and deep down inside, I do hope they reinvent at least part of the way we do business (nods to John Battelle) but the fact remains that I don’t agree with their strategy of attacking everything at once. It’s not sustainable.

I was in an interesting conversation yesterday with a multi year veteran of the technology wars. He said that Google takes a typical engineer’s view of the universe, and that is in any model, including business models, the more points you have between the producer and the end consumer, the more friction that is introduced. Google’s view is that friction is inefficient and should be eliminated, disintermediated, freeing the flow to go direct. Other companies, through long experience, including Microsoft, have learned differently. Friction is good, friction is valuable, and friction is inevitable in a world populated by people, not machines. Each friction point is an opportunity to add value.

With the two different views of the universe, it’s interesting to note that Microsoft is looking to enter the offline world as well. They announced that their vision of adCenter is a multi channel platform, that will introduce an auction based model and search like accountability to other channels, including television and print. Boy, if you thought print was a tough model to crack, wait til you take on television! Google’s problem, says Microsoft, is that they didn’t understand the print medium. By the way, in this story near the bottom there’s a really interesting line that speaks of many blog posts to come:

Bradford also indicated that Microsoft was gearing up to compete with Google for employees. She said Microsoft hopes to lure staff from Google when the company’s stock options begin vesting next year.

But another post, another day.

I don’t disagree with introducing efficiencies in the ad buying market. I believe it’s long, long, long over due. And I love the idea of introducing more accountability. But everyone has to understand going in that this means the tearing apart of an existing and considerable power construct (or several) and reinventing from the ground up. That takes time and resources. It takes patience. It takes adoption. Each of these speaks to a strategy that will take a considerable time for execution and to turn a profit. The fact that everyone is jumping on the Google print experiment (including Google themselves) because it wasn’t profitable out of the gate is a little ridiculous. Did Google really think they were going to change the world that quickly? Did the analysts? Did we learn nothing from the Dotcom bust?

Speaking of Google and TV, there’s an interesting column over at iMedia by Alan Shulman about the Googleization of TV. Check it out.

Okay, the rain is stopping, I thinned a few items out of my “blog fodder” in box, my “To do” pile is inching closer and the hordes are starting to gather at my door. Time to get back to work!

American “Idol”izing Google Trends

First published June 8, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Let me apologize right off the bat. I’m going to jump on a pop culture bandwagon, but I’m doing it to prove a point. Search trends reflect the interests of our society, and they can provide an invaluable way to gain intelligence about what’s on the public’s mind.

First of all, some facts to consider:

  • The most votes ever cast for a presidential candidate were 54.5 million, for Ronald Reagan in 1984.
  • On Wednesday, May 24, 63 million votes were cast in the final voting episode of “American Idol”
  • All votes for “American Idol” were cast in a 2-hour window. Typically polls are open for most elections for 13 hours, not including advance polling.
  • In “American Idol,” there was not one hanging chad.

Obviously, “American Idol” struck a chord with the public this year. Some say the final choice of Taylor Hicks was a surprise, but was it? With the help of Google Trends, I did a little forensic investigation and charted the rise in popularity of the contestants, as captured on Google.

A couple of caveats. Total search volumes are an approximation, as Google Trends doesn’t show actual numbers, and currently Google is only showing trends up to the end of April. But as you’ll see, for the purposes of this column, that’s enough.

I divided the contestants into three groups based on indicated search volumes: the Front Runners, the Also-Rans and the Basement Dwellers. I’ve included a link to the chart for each.

The Front Runners

Taylor Hicks started the strongest out of the gate, dominating search volumes in February during the early rounds. Although he lost ground to Kellie Pickler and Chris Daughtry in March, he came back strong in April, only being edged out in total volume for the month by Kellie, due to a surge in searches the week she was voted off.

Pretty boy Ace Young was No. 2 in February, but lost steam moving into March and never seemed to recover. Chris Daughtry was a slow starter in February, but built steam through strong performances in March. Unfortunately, he seemed to lose his edge in April, as search volumes started to drop from their high in mid-March.

The sleeper in this group was Katherine McPhee, who slowly built up steam through late February, March and April, with a huge peak towards the end of April.

If one was to predict outcomes based on search trends from February through April, I would have called it this way

1. Taylor Hicks

2. Katherine McPhee

3. Chris Daughtry

4. Kellie Pickler (one has to adjust for the spike on the week she was voted off)

Remember, this was almost a full month before the final show.

The Also-Rans

In the middle of the “Idol” pack was a group that just couldn’t seem to spark the interest of America, despite significant talent.

  • Lisa Tucker started off the strongest of the group, but could never seem to rise above the search volumes generated mid-February. There was no “buzz” around her. Kevin Covais, on the other hand, emerged out of nowhere and did build through February and March. It’s also interesting to note that when many of the contestants were voted off, their search volumes dropped off the Google trend radar. However, Kevin was voted off March 22, but kept showing up well into April.
  • Diva Mandisa started from nowhere, but generated some of the highest search volumes of all on the night she was voted off. Sometimes you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. And poor Elliott Yamin didn’t have a chance. Despite a great voice (maybe the best, if you believe the judges) he just didn’t turn America’s crank. Although he built search volume slowly, he never emerged as a contender.

The Basement Dwellers

The three who were certified “buzz”-less were Paris Bennett (maybe she should change her name to Hilton), Bucky Covington and Melissa McGhee.

Paris started off hot right out of the starting gate in January, but never went anywhere from there. It seems we got used to the dynamic vocals, the pixie-like speaking voice and the cool hats–and ceased to care. Bucky and Melissa really only attracted significant volumes on the days they were voted off.

The point of this exercise is this. Search volumes do mirror public opinion, and can act as an amazingly accurate indicator of our collective interests. If you would have had access to search volume information, you could have called the results of “American Idol” long before the final show.

The other thing that was interesting was to see the power of community, both in the search results and the actual results. When you look at the top locations for searching, they are, in order: Greensboro, N.C., Charlottesville, Va., Raleigh, N.C., Charlotte, N.C. and Atlanta.

The North Carolina contingent was incredibly active in its quest for information on Chris, Kellie and to a lesser extent, Bucky, far out-searching the rest of the country for those individuals. The search demands for Taylor, Katharine and Ace were spread evenly throughout the country.

If you haven’t played with Google Trends yet, give it a spin. It can provide a fascinating glimpse into search buzz, and through it, what’s on our collective minds at any given time, on any given subject.