Less Pain, More Gain. Understanding the BuyerSphere Project, Part 1.

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 [...]

Models of Information Seeking: The Standard Model vs. The Tetris Model

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 in [...]

Search and Decisiveness

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 qualitative [...]

The 150-millisecond Gap

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 responded [...]

How Buyersphere Insights Impact Your Content Development Strategy

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 [...]

Eye Tracking as a Method to Improve Search Usability

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.
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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 lot more [...]

Concerning Eye Tracking

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 based [...]

Summer Stories: How I Became a Researcher

About 6 years ago, I had one of those life-changing moments that set me on a new path. I’ve always been curious. I’ve always had questions, and up to that point in my life, I was usually able to find an answer, with enough perseverance. But in 2003, I had a question that no one seemed able to answer. It didn’t seem to be an especially difficult question, and I knew someone had the answer. They just weren’t sharing it.
The Unanswerable Question
The question was this: what percentage of searchers click on the organic results and what percentage click on [...]

Inside the Mind of the Searcher Five Years Later

Looks back at Enquiro”’’s first white paper on Search, 2004”’’s Inside the Mind of the Searcher. Some of the items that we concluded from our research was that it became clear that searchers have mentally divided the search engine results page into distinct sections, and many searchers will skip some of these sections completely. In general, organic listings are more likely to be seen by a greater percentage of users than sponsored listings.

What Age Is Your Customer? June 24 Webinar Explores the Digital Age Divide

I can hardly believe we’re only a few days away from wrapping up the BuyerSphere webinar series.  It has been quite a journey.  Since the beginning of April, we’ve been building this amazing package of webinars and research papers which go to the very core of B2B marketing.  Experts from Google, Business.com, Covario, Demandbase and Marketo have all contributed their unique experience and marketing advice. If you’ve missed them so far, you can still get the recordings and white papers at www.enquiro.com/b2bresearch.
Our final webinar in the series will be – in my opinion – one of the most fascinating and [...]