Dlod

Google are now incorporating page load speed as one of the factors they measure in order to determine the relevance of pages in their search results.This is probably … fine. Google still seems to me to be the best performing search engine out there, consistently delivering relevant search results. Most probably they have figured out how to intelligently incorporate this factor into their voodoo and everything will be business as usual.

But it makes me nervous. It makes me nervous because page load time has nothing to do with the relevance of a search result but everything to do with the quality of the experience of the website that contains that result. It means Google are trying to measure the quality of a website’s user experience.

I can see the logic of that, the quality of the page effects how useful (and therefor relevant) it is. But in order to measure the quality of the experience they will be trying to quantify it. Which is a bit of a worry.

First of all I’m not sure if you can really quantify user experience, as the definition of a good user experience changes depending on context. We define a successful experience for an e-commerce site completely differently to a successful experience for a complex RIA.
Can Google somehow tell what kind of site site it is looking at and who it’s users are?
Different sites have different types of users, in different environments, on different machines trying to achieve different things. Can google figure out all of these variables for each site in order to define how page load should be balanced against other factors that define the user experience? Can they automatically measure what kind of people the users of a specific site are, what kind of aesthetic enhances the experience of a page for that user and how successful that design is in delivering that aesthetic? Can you measure the goals of a business transaction and wether the extra javascript load in a page creates a better user experience in achieving those goals? Because if you can’t measure all those aspects then the value of the aspects you can measure seems questionable. You can’t penalise a rich website for heavy page load unless you know for sure that the added value of that richness is less than the added value of a fast page load time.

Another reason I’m sceptical is because I don’t really rate Google user experience in a lot of areas. It’s not bad, I love their stuff and use a lot of it, it’s so amazingly useful and well thought out. But for me the experience is hardly a joy. I use it but I don’t love using it, it’s not the same pleasure to use that Apple (to use a abused example) stuff is. And judging by the relative reactions to the Google Nexus One compared to the iphone (with the exception of techies of course) I’m not alone. In a lot of ways the Google phone actually seems much better than the iphone, but a lot of people who don’t need iphones want them. Less so, it seems (so far) for the google phone. For you it might be different. Which really, is the problem with quantifying user experience, everyone is different. I don’t notice if a page takes a fraction of a second longer to load but I do enjoy using it more if the UI is gorgeous and intuitive. Other people couldn’t care less how it looks and do care about load time. But how can Google figure out if we are one or the other?

As a designer I wonder if I am going to be forced to favour the Googles aesthetic of low weight pages. And although I actually like the look and experience of web pages that are super low weight (with the exception of Googles), if the users for my project are better served by a lush heavy weight experience is their experience is going to be compromised if the business strategy requires high Google search ranking?

Many people have quite rightly pointed out that of course you can have a beautiful and functional page with low page weight. But there are legitimate cases where heavy load designs are optimal. Our personal preferences for lean low weight designs or heavy rich designs shouldn’t even matter, there is no universal truth about what makes a better experience, the answer depends on what works for each user and what the goals of each site are. Who are we to decide that one approach is the best for every project? Google?

It’s extremely difficult to measure this stuff. Actually the real problem is that it’s easy to measure if a website is successful or not, but much harder to measure why.

Well, not to worry. Google probably give page load a low weighting in their clever secret recipe and everything will be fine. I have a history of getting slightly over excited about these things and then feeling foolish afterwards. But the idea (even if it turns out not to be true) of google dictating the definition a good user experience for every online transaction give me the heebegebees.

Graphic Design, Interactive Design, Jetsum, User Experience

Posted: April 27th 2010 | « Design Rules Writing is hard »