Beantin

The Beantin Index

Last week I launched The Beantin Index, a site where Swedish websites are graded and ranked!

After a number of months of planning and preparation (as a side-project) The Index has, at last, seen the light of day.

12 Articles worth reading… (Spotted: Week 22-27, 2011)

For your reading pleasure this time, a collection of links (with summaries) including articles related to: web management, SEO, intranet, UX.

Plain english please!

Plain language is better for usability. Giving things descriptive, clear and to the point labels will help users complete their tasks easier.

Eye tracking Google Instant

This week I did held a number of presentations and demonstrations of eye tracking user testing as part of Per Axbom’s course at Jönköping University. One of the tasks we tested was intended to show how people search using Google with Google Instant enabled.

We tested 6 people, all but one of them were students in their early 20s. The test environment wasn’t exactly how I’d normally set up eye tracking tests (being in a lecture room with 20-30 people watching on a projector screen while you try to solve the task will of course have an impact on the results!).

It’s always fascinating to watch people search - which is why I wanted to show the students a test involving a search engine and information foraging. This though was the first time I’d done any testing with Google Instant enabled.

No-one looked at the ads

Here are some quick findings.

• No-one paid any attention to any adverts. Not once. Not a single fixation on an advert during about 7 minutes worth of Googling by 6 people. What does that mean for paid search?
• When someone did stop typing for a moment to look at the Google Instant SERPs, they looked at the first result.
• Those that looked at the keyboard whilst typing didn’t see the Google Instant results at all.
• Results in positions 1-4 were, by and large, the only ones that received any attention.

Pulling out heap maps and the like from an Eye tracking test of Google Instant is awkward as the positions of each item in the SERPs varies depending on how many suggestions appear directly below the search box. Sometimes position 1 is where position 2 would be on a normal Google search without Instant enabled.

First result wins

You can see from the heat map above that there is a concentration of fixations around the search box, the instant suggestions, and then the first result. The first result can at times be an advert - but during this test no advert appeared in that position. Note the lack of fixations in the right hand column. Adverts regularly appeared there throughout the tests.

It’s worth noting that Google chose not to do any eye tracking testing of Google Instant before launch, claiming that they didn’t have time. Others have since found the time and published their findings.

The SERPs are more and more complicated

This was by no means a controlled test, and the sample size was just 6 people - but all 6 searched in a way that was clearly their normal and ‘natural’ way of searching. All of them had to solve the same task, and the task had a specific answer that they were unlikely to know before searching. Most of them hadn’t used Google Instant before, so perhaps their behaviour will change as they adjust their search techniques over time.

Nevertheless, Google Instant creates a whole load of issues, and has a varying impact on behaviour. Google search results were already complicated, but the addition of new features such as Instant and Preview during 2010 have pushed this complexity up to a whole new level.

12 Articles worth reading… (Spotted: Week 42-43, 2010)

Information Architecture 101: Techniques and Best Practices

A great “briefing paper” from Six Revisions, intending to raise awareness of the discipline with designers.

Mental Models

The latest Alertbox post covers what users think they know and how that affects their behaviour. Users, designers and developers all have differing mental models. You need to work with conformity not against it, and gently adjust the mental models of your visitors and users.

10 essential usability guidelines for websites

If every website followed the ten points in this list, i’d suddenly have hardly anything to complain about any more. Well, perhaps not *hardly* anything - more like “less”.

How Yammer Won Over 80% of the Fortune 500

Yammer boasts that 80% of the Fortune 500 use Yammer. I wonder how many of those 400 companies have adopted Yammer as their official, or main, collaboration platform?

How I learnt to stop worrying and love enterprise microblogging

Nice case describing how Yammer took flight at AXA Australia in just the few months since August.

Information flow part 3: Why persistent links are important

I’m really enjoying Kristian’s series of posts about aspects of his work over the last couple with the intranet at Region Västra Götland. This particular post goes into the details of how they’ve tried to deal with managing URLs and links across multiple systems.

How we improved our intranet search experience

Luke describes how they implemented and tweaked their Intranet search (using a Google Search Appliance). Some good lessons-learned and insights that anyone dealing with intranet search can make use of.

Report: iPad Is an Enterprise IT Triple-Threat

The headline talks about iPad (and thereby iSO) but the report concludes that Android and HTML5 should also be prioritised. I’m going one step further than Forrester and saying prioritise HTML5 and Android. Plan for mobile/wireless working and plan soon.

How Google tested Google Instant

An insight into how Google tests it’s products (before launch in this case). What I find interesting is that normally Google uses eye tracking whilst testing. It gives them real data to work with. In this case, Google Instant, they chose not to. Why? I suspect they did try, but realised that far too many people were spending too much time looking down at the keyboard whilst typing - and not looking at their instantly-changing search results.

How Facebook Decides What To Put In Your News Feed – These 10 Secrets Reveal All

Some useful testing into how Facebook decides what to display into your news feed. Would be interested though to know their source for saying “Top News is how a vast majority of Facebook users get their information”

20 Real Tips for Hiring a Social Media Consultant

A good list to help you separate the wheat from the chaff in the world of social media consulting. You don’t need to hold yourself religiously to all 20 points, but there is some really good, honest, to-the-point advice in Pam Moore’s post.

How Google dominates the Web

If you had any doubts about just how dominant Google are in our World of Web Stuff, then this Royal Pingdom posts shows you the stats in easy to consume pie-charts.