Google Understands User Behavior
Google is renowned for its intuitive user interface—but a lot of work goes in to making sure that Google understands exactly how its users interact with its pages, as evidenced in a blog post yesterday. And Google doesn’t just look at the user data they get from clicks or surveys—they use actual field studies.
Are actual field tests, observing users “in the wild,” necessary? Google’s Search Quality Uber Tech Lead, Daniel Russell, explains why:
people are masters of saying one thing and doing another, particularly when it comes to nearly automatic behavior. We find that searchers often turn so quickly to Google that they don’t really think too much about what they’re actually searching for.
It’s surprising, but often we’ll see people trying to find out something about a topic, but then never actually mention the topic itself. That is, there’s often a big discrepancy between what they’ll tell me (the human observer) they’re trying to do, and the search terms they enter into Google. One person I shadowed for the day spent ten minutes trying to find the schedule of the ferry that runs between San Francisco and Larkspur, but somehow only thought of adding the word “ferry” much later in their search. . . .
Memories of your own behavior are also notoriously unreliable. People’s search behavior in the lab is often different than when they’re at home or at work. This is a natural (and expected) side effect of lab studies: people will work especially hard to please a researcher.
If we ask them to search for a pair of brown shoes they’d like to buy for themselves, in the lab they’ll find the first pair that seems reasonable and then stop, satisfied. If it was real, they would go on and spend more time. We still do lab studies, but we know what to watch for, and what to ignore.
Not the most heartening observation of human intelligence I’ve ever heard…
Anyway, Google also uses tools like eyetracking in this example (the red dot indicates the user’s gaze):
Google also puts this data to use, such as in the overhaul of their Advanced Search page.
What do you do to learn more about how your users interact with your site?
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9 Responses to “Google Understands User Behavior”Graham Jones – Internet Psychologist Says:
November 7th, 2008 at 7:05 pm
Google is right to test things out of the lab – and yes, people will always say what they expect the researchers want them to say. What they are doing is to improve what is known as the “ecological validity” of the research. (In other words how much does it replicate the “real world”.) However, eye tracking is only part of the story – few studies actually test user motivation. And that is fundamental to actually what people do with their searches. Testing for shoe buying behaviour online is all very well – but if you’re not motivated to buy shoes you will behave very differently to when you are motivated to buy them. Knowing the motivation of your users is essential – but is rarely, tested or allowed for.
Saad Kamal Says:
November 8th, 2008 at 1:33 am
I agree with Graham on the above completely. A user can be in different modes while they perform the search – A buying mode will mean that he has the intention to make a purchases, so the query that he will run or the way he will interact will the search results will be completely different compared to another user who is just searching for ‘brown shoes’ to write a thesis on “Personality & Shoe Colours”.
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