The Mobile industry is experiencing a true expansion across the world, and Canada is no exception. In 2009, Canada had the highest penetration rate in terms of content downloads and mobile games (Nielsen Wire, 2009). In 2010, 75% of Canadian households had a cellphone (Mobithinking, 2010). Read the full article at The Results People blog.
Imagine you’ve just shelled out x-thousand dollars for a 30-second TV spot that will run in prime time for the next three weeks or a full-page, full-color spread that will be published in the New York Times on Saturday. You’re crossing your fingers that you’ll get a good ROI, because your boss is breathing down your neck. I sure hope that you included a URL in your ad. Whether you like it or not, potential customers who watch/read your ad will go looking for you online. Are you making it easy for them to do that? In a research study [...]
We’ve been keeping an eye on the impacts of Google Instant for our SEO clients, monitoring both the changes in the length of keyword queries driving traffic to sites and the change in the number of impressions in the Google search engine. We recently ran an analysis for one of our clients of the length of keyword query (whether it is one-word queries such as “dog” or two-word queries such as “dog catcher”, etc.) for the two weeks leading up to Google Instant compared to the two weeks prior. For this particular client, three-word search queries are the main driver [...]
Since the publication a few months ago of “The BuyerSphere Project” by Enquiro’s CEO, Gord Hotchkiss, we’ve been working hard to integrate the concepts from the book into everything we do. For example, see Charlotte Bourne’s article on using BuyerSphere insights to inform your content development strategy. As we learn from this experience, I’ll share the journey in this blog, and I look forward to hearing your ideas and experience with applying the ideas. If you haven’t read the book yet, The BuyerSphere Project investigates how business buys from business in a digital marketplace. Maybe that doesn’t sound like a [...]
The standard model of information seeking, developed through observation, is one that outlines the basic actions involved in finding information. Variations of the standard information seeking model has been developed through work by Salton and Ennis, Shneiderman, and Broder, among others. The most developed model from Marchionini and White describes the information seeking process as: Recognizing a need for information Accepting the challenge to take action to fulfill the need Formulating the problem Expressing the information need in a search system Examination of the results Reformulation of the problem and its expression, and Use of the results (Marchionini and White [...]
The last two columns (column 1 | column 2) explored decisiveness within a very defined scope: college students picking courses. I did that through an interesting study conducted by Wesleyan University, which used eye tracking to capture the eye movements of decisive and indecisive people. In reading the study, my mind went back seven years to one of the first research studies Enquiro ever did (and still our most popular download) – Inside the Mind of the Searcher. In it, we observed the behaviors of 24 individuals as they used search engines to carry out tasks. It was the first [...]
A few weeks ago, I was sitting in a meeting room at Simon Fraser University, looking at two squiggly lines on a graph in a PowerPoint slide that 5 of us in the room were all looking at intently. Amongst the five of us, there was a PhD and a handful of Masters degrees in Neurology and Psychology. I contributed nothing to this impressive collection of academic achievement. Still, there was something on the chart that fascinated me. The chart was the result of a neuro-scanning experiment we conducted with Simon Fraser last year. We were exploring how the brain [...]
Enquiro has an active research department that tackles everything from eye tracking studies to website user behaviour. One of their recent projects has been to tackle the problem of how business buys from business, which has been compiled into a book called The Buyersphere Project. B2B sales are notoriously challenging as you are not dealing with just one person but with all the complexities of an entire organization. Within an organization you find different people playing different roles and who have differing informational needs – which can be met at least in part by your website. When creating content for [...]
I was recently interviewed by Sonja Quirmbach, of Deutsche Telekom, about eye tracking, usability, and search. The interview was orginally posted on Sonja’s blog. —- An often discussed topic in the UX world is the eye tracking method and its right to exist as a meaningful and valid usability method. I am including eye tracking in my usability tests as often as possible, because I found it to be an helpful method to investigate what user look at on a result page. Particularly the information on eye movement in combination with user behavior on the search results page provides a [...]
I’ve been doing a heck of a lot of industry research recently and I came upon some vehement rants about the quality and value (or perceived lack thereof) in the use of eye tracking. Some of that is along technical/insight lines, but there’s plenty of talk about eye tracking not being “worth the extra cost”. Here at Enquiro we operate a little differently. Eye tracking is an ingrained part of our Usability studies, and we’ve built a strong reputation on our ability to get the best out of eye tracking technology. We don’t use eye tracking as a $30k upsell to lab [...]