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February 26, 2009
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It's Girls Day at Google
February 19, 2009
Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day is just one important part of E-Week, which was founded by the National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE) and is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. By the end of the week, Google offices will have hosted more than 600 students at events designed to expose them to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). The students who participate in our E-Week events are from partner organizations that also focus on STEM education for girls, underrepresented minorities, and the economically disadvantaged. Here's hoping each of these students will walk away feeling inspired to pursue studies in these fields.
Eye-tracking studies: more than meets the eye
February 6, 2009
...and the thumbnails also seemed to make it easy for people to skip over the results with thumbnails when those results were not relevant to their search (page with the thumbnail on the right).
For the Universal Search team, this was a successful outcome. It showed that we had managed to design a subtle user interface that gives people helpful information without getting in the way of their primary task: finding relevant information.
In addition to search research, we also use eye-tracking to study the usability of other products, such as Google News and Image Search. For these products, eye-tracking helps us answer questions, such as "Is the 'Top Stories' link discoverable on the left of the Google News page?" or "How do the users typically scan the image results — in rows, in columns or in some other way?"
Eye-tracking gives us valuable information about our users' focus of attention — information that would be very hard to come by any other way and that we can use to improve the design of our products. However, in our ongoing quest to make our products more useful, usable, and enjoyable, we always complement our eye-tracking studies with other methods, such as interviews, field studies and live experiments.
In addition to search research, we also use eye-tracking to study the usability of other products, such as Google News and Image Search. For these products, eye-tracking helps us answer questions, such as "Is the 'Top Stories' link discoverable on the left of the Google News page?" or "How do the users typically scan the image results — in rows, in columns or in some other way?"
Eye-tracking gives us valuable information about our users' focus of attention — information that would be very hard to come by any other way and that we can use to improve the design of our products. However, in our ongoing quest to make our products more useful, usable, and enjoyable, we always complement our eye-tracking studies with other methods, such as interviews, field studies and live experiments.
