Overestimating Users’ Knowledge
Here is something to keep in mind. The traffic to 9rules jumped about 10%-15% yesterday because the ChaCha Search Engine was featured on Good Morning America. That almost has nothing to do with 9rules except a note was posted on the engine a couple of weeks ago. All of the traffic came from search engines and the three searches that brought the traffic were:
- http://chacha.com
- http://www.chacha.com
- chacha.com
People still search for the domain name in search engines while we worry about what type of feed we will offer on our websites. Amazing.
Related reading:
That’s what surprised me the most about the AOL search data that was released last summer. The top ten searches:
google 154219
ebay 66072
yahoo 59550
yahoo.com 44268
mapquest 41536
google.com 36583
myspace.com 36308
myspace 33336
http://www.google.com 19485
http://www.yahoo.com 19090
All of them are either the exact url, or the url minus -.com
I guess most users are just stupid…
By Lode on October 3, 2006 9:31 am
Intriguing search app. I like it. Interactivty is the key.
By Sam @ MindSmack.com on October 3, 2006 10:02 am
My fiancé does this, so I called her out on it and asked, WHY? She made a perfectly valid point – Google.com is her homepage and the input field is conveniently located eye-level and center of the browser; making it the first logical place to start. She says often times it saves her time, if she misspells the domain or isn’t even sure of the URL – Google returns back the obvious location she most likely intended.
She might not be using the application correctly, but she finds it both convenient and useful.
By Martin Ringlein on October 3, 2006 10:55 am
Damn, that actually makes perfect sense.
By Scrivs on October 3, 2006 11:07 am
Wow, who would have thunk a note posted would spur an actual post by you Paul. That is damn cool your traffic experienced a spike.
Maybe after some time has passed and ChaCha has experienced some better stability, you could do an honest writeup (like you often do) about our service.
By Bryan on October 3, 2006 1:42 pm
Some people also have most important things in life to do, other than read up (however quick this mae be) on whats the ‘right’ way to google/go to a site.
The majority of web users haven’t grown up with the web, search terms, or html code, and frankly i cna see why it is just another techology that gets in their way (partly).
That said, it is a silly, silly mistake!
By mike on October 3, 2006 1:43 pm
Chacha is a cool concept. I tried it the other day and asked a guide to search for Wii Preorder sites, but the guide do not even know what is a Wii. The concept is cool but obviously, there’s more work to be done for matching guides to topics.
By Gizmoojo! on October 6, 2006 12:03 pm
Lode’s comment summarises what’s wrong with most developers’ approach: When the user doesn’t understand the tool, they’re branded “stupid”.
I prefer to think of them as “uneducated” — which can be fixed with education.
Or perhaps it’s the tool which is wrong.
I work a lot with end users, providing IT support to small businesses which are not about IT or the Internet. They’re in retail, manufacturing, entertainment, aged care — whatever. I’ve found these people to be intelligent, but not “into” computers. They’ve picked up enough to do their job — write documents, edit spreadsheets, read and send email — but that’s it.
Pretty much everything they’ve learnt about computers has been passed on word-of-mouth from similarly-uneducated users. They have very little formal knowledge.
* They have never heard the term “dialog box”.
* They do not understand the difference between single-clicking and double-clicking, so they double-click on everything because sometimes they single-click and nothing happens.
* They don’t know that the stripey triangle on the bottom right of a window is a re-size control, they think it’s just decoration. Until someone points that out.
They’re discouraged from exploring because (1) things are labelled with words that are meaningless to them, (2) the computer guy tells them not to fiddle with things, and (3) when they ask questions, the response is often body langauge which says “Gawd, how stupid are you?” So they stop asking questions.
In this context, they see a text-entry box with an “OK” next to it, maybe some icon like a picture of the Earth. Why should they be expected to know the difference between an “address bar” and a “search box”?
By Stilgherrian on October 7, 2006 9:45 pm
ChaCha is so neat! You can use a real person to help you find what you need in no time! I love this new search engine, I have downloaded the ChaCha toolbar too so I can use it all the time! You should try it! :)
By Amy on November 17, 2006 1:08 pm