Search Sense

Google’s latest innovations in the way it displays search results in its natural listings has huge implications for user experience and the way we create websites.

‘Sitelinks’ emerged late last year. They are the links that appear under the number 1 search listing that enable you to click directly on a main navigational link that resides on the destination site - think of them as shortcuts. OK, so this helps us get from A-B better and extends the brand’s success at capturing search real estate - effectively pushing other sites lower down the results page.

This example for Woolworths illustrates the natural search navigation at work:

A good overview of Sitelinks can be found on the Google Webmastercentral blog here.

More recently Google has started presenting a ’secondary search’ box within the natural results. This allows people to search all pages that Google has from a site without leaving the search engine. Which means that the much of the huge usability investment you may have made can be by-passed in a click…

The implications are more clear than ever. Search friendly site design means taking into account the whole user journey, from search through to action. This extends the idea of usability from optimising e.g. a shopping cart process into the way people navigate through brand networks.

Now x this by every device and interface Google will interact with people in 3 years time. Wow.

Once we accept that we have lost control of the ‘home page’, and that every page on our site can now reside somewhere else before the click,we can start to put search at the heart of our creative planning. not an original idea, but one that I will keep repeating until someone tells me I am insane, and then I will not believe them.

I really like this post from the Logic + Emotion blog by David Armano that discusses the growing link between offline and online engagement (or touch points) with brands.

This chimes with an approach that I think really helps to communicate to clients how the modern web works. Put simply, we are finding ways to explain interaction to our clients, and there is no reason why the rules of interaction should be any different online than they are offline. Using offline behaviours as metaphors to help businesses understand their online behaviours sets the conversation very firmly in the context of people and not promotion. Put simply, forget that you are a business for a minute and think about treating people how you would want to be treated yourself.

As David’s post says, when it comes to brand interactions, the two worlds are already becoming indistinguishable. Already it is nigh on impossible to pin someone’s brand perception to one particular interaction or channel. However, as he also says in the post, brands themselves aren’t necessarily joining up these experiences. That’s the first challenge. The second is doing it in a way that works for people first and foremost.