Redesign of Google’s celebrity search — an example of good User Experience.
A walkthrough of Google's current change in UX and UI of celebrity search results and what made them do this from my perspective.
I have been in the UX field for a long time now and one thing I frequently encounter is when people ask me what is the need for UX. Why is that extra effort required to go through the process? why the long duration of research and why does its outcome matter? To this, I respond with a smile and take my time to come up with the best example to answer the question and I have got yet another one that I want to discuss in this article.
Google recently rolled out its new feature of presenting key information about celebrities. Now some of you might already witness this change if you regularly look for celebrity information on google and some might not. For me, I noticed it as soon as it was rolled out, first on mobile and tablet devices as I constantly look for celebrities when Peter Griffin (i am a huge Family guy fan) gives a flashback of celebrities and I have this urge to compare their cartoon version and characteristic with real life.
let's dive into what changes happen, what made this change happen, and some research associated with it
Note — This redesign can currently be witnesses in mobile and tablet devices only but not for desktop and may be for some celebrities only.
What is the Redesign ??
- The current design shows a wikipedia link first in SERP( search engine results page) results and all the other elements linked to the celebrity that is most famous followed by “people also ask” feature.
- In the right hand side with some pictures of celebrity there are some basic info like Date of birth , height , net worth etc.
- The redesign has five cards, with the first being the largest on the left with a big image of the celebrity and a brief overview using information from their Wikipedia page.
- The following four rich cards appear to fluctuate depending on other popular searches for each celebrity.
- The Oprah Winfrey card shows net worth, two news stories, and an interview on YouTube.
- These new rich cards sit above the SERP results and all the other elements you’d expect on a page like this such as news stories, and the “People also ask” feature.
Why the Redesign ? The Research
Firstly some basic data figures
- It comes as no surprise that Google is the most visited website. To put a number on it, Google was visited 89.3 billion times in the past month alone (Similarweb, 2022).
- Google dominates the search engine market. In fact, as of January 2022, Google holds 91.9 percent of the market share (GS Statcounter, 2022).
- The latest data shows that Google processes over 99,000 searches every single second (Internet Live Stats, 2022). This makes more than 8.5 billion searches a day (Internet Live Stats, 2022).
- When we take a look at the number of Google searches based on the device, 63 percent of Google’s US organic search traffic originated from mobile devices (Merkleinc, 2019).(organic search listings are not ads. When you type anything into that search bar, the non-paid results are curated by Google to answer your query on page one.)
- To be precise, 84 percent of respondents use Google 3+ times a day or more often (Moz, 2019).
But even though the google has such great data figures then why go for the effort of redesigning the SERP page which will cost you a lot and also will take a lot of time for complete deployment.
Importance of First SERP page
- 90% of survey respondents said they were likely to click on the first results set (Searchengineland, 2018).
- Chances are, if you can’t find your desired results on the first page, you’ll end up changing your query instead of looking at the second page.
- same goes for mobile and tablet devices where the stats are 60 % mobile users were “very likely” to click on the first two or three search results they saw.
Inference and the UX
Since the first top results are so crucial with respect to users , hence its a concern on how to present data and also an oppurtunity for google to capitalise on it.
- The redesign UI brings together all information that is most popular associated with any specific celebrity , for eg it can be net worth of Elon Musk to compare for richest men on earth or Scarlett Johansson age or Date of birth to compare why she stills look so adorable.
- It reduces steps of going into the wikepedia and searching anything specific or looking for any popular linked content associated with it for eg Alan Walker latest concerts . ALL these can be provided in one box.
- The UI of similar colour boxes within this overview section uses the simmilarity principle to convey how the content are connected and believe me this is important when you are a user.
- Also Google is here to earn which it does from showing content that are paid , so it can easily place these contents in this section. Apart from organic search listings which might come later.
- And most Importantly COMPETITION , It’s clear that Google continues to dominate the search market overwhelmingly. But that doesn’t mean that other search engines should be ignored. Search engines like Bing, Baidu, and others continue to gain importance . Not just that, but platforms such as Facebook and Amazon have also maintained their growth over the years. And you can expect from king of internet such as google to keep improving everytime.
“It is more difficult to stay on top than to get there.”
So this shows how research findings , user centric approach and business goals are combine we get a magical thing called UX , and its applicable everywhere to every product that a user is related with , and hence you can imagine its reach and effects.
Hope if next time any of our friends ask about the use of UX , this example or article would help , or would atleast convince him to know more about it.
If you liked this article , a clap would be good UX for me as a writer 😊. stay tuned for more. . .
#UXResearch #UXDesign #Google