Imagine that you need a refresher on how to tie a tie. So, you decide
to type [how to tie a tie] into the Google search box. Which of these
results would you choose?
Where
did your eyes go first when you saw the results page? Did they go
directly to the title of the first result? Did you first check the
terms in boldface to see if the results really talk about tying a tie?
Or maybe the images captured your attention and drew your eyes to them?
You
might find it difficult to answer these questions. You probably did not
pay attention to where you were looking on the page and you most likely
only used a few seconds to visually scan the results. Our User
Experience Research team has found that people evaluate the search
results page so quickly that they make most of their decisions
unconsciously. To help us get some insight into this split-second
decision-making process, we use eye-tracking equipment in our usability
labs. This lets us see how our study participants scan the search
results page, and is the next best thing to actually being able to read
their minds. Of course, eye-tracking does not really tell us what they
are thinking, but it gives us a good idea of which parts of the page
they are thinking about.
To see what the eye-tracking data we
collect looks like, let's go back to the results page we got for the
query [how to tie a tie]. The following video clip shows in real time
how a participant in our study scanned the page. And yes, seriously —
the video is in real time! That's how fast the eyes move when scanning
a page. The larger the dot gets, the longer the users' eye pauses
looking at that specific location.
Based
on eye-tracking studies, we know that people tend to scan the search
results in order. They start from the first result and continue down
the list until they find a result they consider helpful and click it —
or until they decide to refine their query. The heatmap below shows the
activity of 34 usability study participants scanning a typical Google
results page. The darker the pattern, the more time they spent looking
at that part of the page. This pattern suggests that the order in which
Google returned the results was successful; most users found what they
were looking for among the first two results and they never needed to
go further down the page.
When designing the user interface for
Universal Search,
the team wanted to incorporate thumbnail images to better represent
certain kinds of results. For example, in the [how to tie a tie]
example above, we have added thumbnails for Image and Video results.
However, we were concerned that the thumbnail images might be
distracting and disrupt the well-established order of result evaluation.
We
ran a series of eye-tracking studies where we compared how users scan
the search results pages with and without thumbnail images. Our studies
showed that the thumbnails did not strongly affect the order of
scanning the results and seemed to make it easier for the participants
to find the result they wanted.
The thumbnail image seemed to
make results with thumbnails easy to notice when the users wanted them
(see screenshots below — page with the thumbnail image on the right)...
Click the images to view them larger.
...and
the thumbnails also seemed to make it easy for people to skip over the
results with thumbnails when those results were not relevant to their
search (page with the thumbnail on the right).
For
the Universal Search team, this was a successful outcome. It showed
that we had managed to design a subtle user interface that gives people
helpful information without getting in the way of their primary task:
finding relevant information.
In addition to search research, we also use eye-tracking to study the usability of other products, such as
Google News and
Image Search.
For these products, eye-tracking helps us answer questions, such as "Is
the 'Top Stories' link discoverable on the left of the Google News
page?" or "How do the users typically scan the image results — in rows,
in columns or in some other way?"
Eye-tracking gives us valuable
information about our users' focus of attention — information that
would be very hard to come by any other way and that we can use to
improve the design of our products. However, in our ongoing quest to
make our products more useful, usable, and enjoyable, we always
complement our eye-tracking studies with other methods, such as
interviews,
field studies and
live experiments.
Posted by Anne Aula and Kerry Rodden, User Experience Researchers