Apparently the process of getting to the search engine -- not the act of performing the search itself -- was unattainable for 24% of the participants in Nielson's latest round of usability research. That's a big number.
So what happened? Were the users asked to type in the domain? If the testing was done recently this pesky little site may have been an issue. I would highly doubt that the participants had any knowledge about top-level-domains.
Nielson offers little information about how the study was conducted. The one point he did make was that his team was "recruiting above-average users, so the success rate across all Internet users is probably lower than our finding." Says Nielson:
On the one hand, 76% is a high success rate. On the other hand, getting to Google is a very simple task.
A VERY simple task. I recently wrote about Google's redesign of their advanced search page. In that post I said that most users don't fully understand how a search engine works in the first place.
The implications of this study could be huge. What does it mean for Web developers, designers, etc. if we learn that the average user still doesn't know how to use, for instance, the Web browser. If Google is so hard to find, what does it mean for the rest of us?
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