YAB Interview: Laura Granka, Search User Experience, Google
Posted by meredith on 02-05-2010
Today’s Ypulse Youth Advisory Board post comes from Raymond Braun, who sat down with Laura Granka at Google to discuss the impact of young people on the search industry and vice-versa. Laura has spent the past six years studying how people acquire information, in both online and physical environments, and has authored more than 20 publications and presentations on the topic. Working with colleagues at Google since 2004, she has applied knowledge about search user behavior towards improving result ranking algorithms and the user interface. She has also led the Search Quality and User Experience teams through a number of key launches.
Youth Advisory Board: Describe the field of user experience research and your job at Google.
Laura Granka: I first started at Google as an intern for the Search Quality Group in 2004. From there, I was exposed to the User Experience team, which consists of researchers, designers and tech writers. Whenever a product is developed at Google, our team will evaluate it and ensure that Google is taking the most user-centered approach to the product. I came back to Google after my internship in 2005 and have been working since then as a User Experience researcher. I primarily work on search products and on developing new search features.
YAB: How do you study search habits?
LG: Our team uses a repertoire of many different methods and collaborates closely with various designers and engineers depending on the type of question we have. Some of our methods are macro, such as field studies. We’ll talk to people in their own homes or places of work to see how they’re using Google in relation to all the other products they have on their computers. Our goal in doing this is to see how they use search in relation to applications like Word, e-mail and printing. It’s important for us to understand how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together in terms of search and other applications.
We also do usability studies, where we bring people to a lab here at Google and try to evaluate features before they are launched. We use eyetracking to assess what people look at on a webpage and how their eyes scan and process search results. We also use it to evaluate how many search results users look at before they click on one and how long this whole process takes. In addition, we will put news headlines, images and video on the search page to see if the eye does something different when it is presented with different types of information. I had done this type of eyetracking research prior to my work at Google during my master’s at Cornell.
YAB: What do you think makes Google the leading search authority for young people?
LG: In general, Google’s core principle is to focus on the user and that’s what we do in terms of quality. We want to provide the highest quality information best suited to what a user needs and not put advertising in front of it. We’re clear about what we think are really good search results and very good advertisements, and users trust that. Google is also innovative in terms of features while keeping everything simple. We just launched the new fade-in home page, which is an example of a feature that is simple but implemented to enhance the user’s experience and make search easier. At any given time, we are running 50-200 search experiments in which a small percentage of our traffic will see a new variant of something before we launch the feature. We do this to ensure our new features are helpful and not problematic or confusing.
YAB: What have you discovered about the way teens and young adults use Google? How do their search habits differ from those of adults?
LG: Google’s Director of User Experience said this really well: the issues that youth have when they’re searching are the same as the problems everyone else has, though sometimes they may be magnified in certain respects. Search queries may be different or more question-oriented, but in terms of eyetracking, there seems to be a somewhat general consensus among the academic community that there aren’t too many specific differences among age groups. This is probably because eye movements occur so quickly that it’s a subconscious process.
YAB: How could marketers and advertisers use eyetracking research to help them develop products or campaigns for young people?
LG: When targeting individuals, there can be a lot of variability. For example, if someone is searching to buy a new backpack, sometimes a user will click on an ad on the right side of a Google search results page, while others will want to see comparisons of different backpacks. It really depends on an individual’s state of mind. It’s also important to think about social connections. People reach out to their social networks before making purchases – they like recommendations or the confirmation from a trusted source that the purchase they’re going to make will be a good one. Using eyetracking for search results is a relatively new advancement. In 2004, my advisor and I were the first people to use eyetracking for search research. Before that, eyetracking was used primarily for research with websites, newspapers and advertisements. Eyetracking could prove very useful to advertising and marketing professionals in helping them better understand how young people’s eyes are going to move around an ad, which can assist with determining image and text placement.
YAB: Which Google applications resonate with young people?
LG: We conducted some field studies in the Kirkland Seattle area with 18-24 year olds. What we gathered was that the social aspect of applications is incredibly important to young people. There’s a sort of “always-on” mentality in young people, of always being connected online and being able to easily ask a friend for a recommendation or coordinate via e-mail with respect to a search. We’ve seen people validate, via their friends, the choices they’ve discovered in a search. For instance, one person we talked to would always email different options he found with search to his “techie friend” before making a purchase. The more familiar people are with technology, the more likely they are going to use it to connect with other people. Mobile is also a big initiative and mobile devices are even more popular in other countries than they are in the U.S., so we’ve done a lot of mobile research outside the country. Late last year, Google launched Social Search in Google Labs, a feature of Google Search designed to help you discover publicly available web and image content from your network of friends and contacts online. The feature was so popular that it is now available to everyone in beta on Google.com.
YAB: You have TA’d several undergraduate courses at Stanford and interact with college students on a regular basis. In your opinion, how is the college student of today different from the college student of the past?
LG: Young people’s expectations for the type of information and access they can receive from technology are growing. With devices becoming more portable and information increasingly accessible, there is a growing sense among teens that you can fulfill your curiosity about a topic at any given time. The ability for students to have laptops in the classroom has really changed search. I sit in on a class at Stanford and observe that most students are on their laptops during the lecture. I can see them searching on Google for something the professor is talking about in real-time. It is really cool for me to see people searching for supplemental, in-depth information in the context of what the professor just mentioned, so I think having this technology in the classroom is a very powerful tool. It can help students expand upon or clarify certain points brought up in class.
YAB: What might marketers/media executives be surprised to learn about the way young people seek out information and process search results on Google?
LG: Young people are exposed to a huge variety of technologies at increasingly younger ages. They are used to more immediate access to content, and we’ve also seen a growing desire to contribute to the information that’s on the Web. That provides a whole new level of context for search. In addition, young people have a desire for social interaction and feedback while they’re searching. We’re doing a lot of work with social search that will help people leverage their social network in terms of finding out how different people they know think about, and search for, different topics.
There is a growing appetite for real time information. People are constantly updating their Facebooks, and Twitter was a new model for quick, up-to-date information. Real time information is increasingly becoming more relevant and expected, and Google incorporates real time results and headlines into our search results. So if you search for something that is timely and newsworthy, Google will be scanning the web and will display real time search results from various sources, including Twitter.
YAB: What projects or new innovations at Google are you most excited about?
LG: It has been really cool at Google to see all the different ways we can improve search and make it smarter. We have launched features that help us better detect intent, and we now can offer snippets of information extracted from a page, such as the hours of a store or the menu from a restaurant. We also now have “Breaking News,” a search feature where you can see search updates in real time. It’s important to be able to harness information in real time in order to feed the increasing desire for instant information.
Social is definitely here to stay and it’s a theme that resonates across the web. On iGoogle, we recently launched a handful of social gadgets. You can now play Scrabble with your friends in real time, share YouTube videos on a constantly updated feed, or recommend a book. It’s more interesting to see what your friends are thinking and find interesting.
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Helping Children Find What They Need on the Internet [The New York Times]
About Raymond
Raymond is a sophomore at Stanford University majoring in Science, Technology and Society with a focus on Media Studies and Management Science and Engineering. When he’s not studying creativity and entrepreneurship in cutting edge organizations like Google and the impact of technology on media production and consumption, he enjoys politics, testing out new restaurants with friends, social advocacy, and traveling (he’s lived in six cities and speaks three languages). Other passions include writing, reading, magazines, concerts/live music, Pinkberry, and following new trends and technologies. He’s also working on a YA novel that he started writing as a senior at Phillips Exeter Academy. Ypulse Readers can also follow Raymond at @raymondbraun.
Categorized under: Web, Youth Advisory Board, Youth Marketing