Eye Tracking: Does Google Instant Improve Usability?

When it comes to the world wide web, it seems that the old paradigm of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” doesn’t necessarily hold sway. Eye tracking is just one of the methods being used to make the Internet even better. In an ever-accelerating technological culture, a first to the finish line mentality seems to dominate engineering and design trends, and the notion of successfully creating a need for something people never knew they wanted is what makes companies successful.

Google is no exception, and in an effort to continually improve on their product in an extremely competitive online search industry, they have started testing for Google Instant, supposedly a quicker, more efficient way of searching. And is it? Eye tracking technology was recently used to study just that, asking if Instant could change user search behavior in the process of speeding things up.

Twenty people took part in a small study comparing Google’s established search with Google Instant, and eye trackers were used to observe where participants looked, what they looked at, and what they clicked on. Each participant performed a series of tasks having to do with navigational, informational, and transactional qualities. Heat mapping imagery represented the number of times participants looked at any particular part of the page.

As it turns out, gaze patterns didn’t change much from the first to the newer version, and participants tended to look at the page in an F-shape or triangle typical of search page behavior. Users typically consider the first three or four results and then move down the page to form another triangle slightly below. Eye tracking showed that participants paid equal amounts of attention to paid advertisements on the right side of the page.

Google hopes that Google Instant will save 2-5 seconds per search for each user, which doesn’t sound like much but when added up over time is sure to be a significant number.

As for what participants thought, most industry types that had had experience with Instant in the past didn’t like the new search. Those without as much experience did seem to like Instant more than the original Google search, and while overall Google Instant did seem a little faster, eye tracking showed that the change was very slight at most. One third of participants said Instant did change they way they searched, cutting down on typing and showing more relevant results, and while time-to-click did decrease in about 33% of the tasks, their query length seemed in to increase on about 17% of the tasks.

Eye Tracking Google Instant: Does It Change Searcher Behavior?

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