New York — Are you aware that your eyes are helping Google decide what their search results page should look like? What captivates a user’s engrossment on their screen can play a vital role in whether or not they click through to a search engine result. Now Google’s User Experience Research Team has introduced some new technology that makes finding out where eyeballs go on a SERP vital to their overall search experience, and hence, vital to Google’s strategy.
Google of course collects this information through extensive eye tracking research. The site’s engineers are bringing out studies that intends to see where your eyes first land on a Web page — then make sure the content you want is in that same place. The company today has revealed some findings from their latest efforts in this area in a blog post.
“Based on eye-tracking studies, we know that people tend to scan the search results in order,” says the post written by User Experience Researchers Anne Aula and Kerry Rodden. “They begin 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 testing which seems to be employ the Bunnyfoot eye tracking tool, plots the eyefall on the search pages and thus how users potentially engage with the pages themselves. It is interesting to analyze this research against previous research done in this area. One of the first eye-tracking studies highlighted the well known F-Shape eye scan on initial results.
Another impressive finding, which Google’s Universal Search Team considers a success is that even on results pages where there are images embedded further down the page, people continue to look at the results in an orderly pattern.
“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,” the post says.
The post from Google strenthens the traditional 10 contextual link behaviour with a high density of eye fall contained within the intial 3 or so results, however it should be noted the density of links varies throughout the results page itself — particularly when this is compared to results which incorporate blended search — most notably those with visual assets such as PR or Video.
Google did not disclose whether these results have integrated any aspect of personalisation, as earlier research has shown that this significantly impacts not only on the amount of time spent on the search pages but also on the number of fixations on the page as well as the number of clicks.
However, Google did said that it is performing a similar eye tracking tests with image search and Google News. They have discussed such testing with different features in the past as well. Overall, such tests theoretically lead to enhanced usability of products. The results found for SERPs, will make people strive to get that number 1 ranking all the more.