Ambient Information and Search Results

I’ve been thinking a bit about ambient information, subtle cues that “exist in the periphery of our senses, where they provide continuous information without being distracting.” [source]

These cues can be in the form objects, as with the ambient orbs which communicate stock information through color changes. They could be unique sounds associated with specific subway stops (for more on this, see the Ambient Signifiers article on Boxes and Arrows). Or, in the two examples I want to share, these could be visual cues that may or may not consciously register, but work to facilitate the understanding and processing of information.

Sneak Peak...
We’re working on another all purpose search view. One of the intentions of this view is to facilitate rapid consumption of search information— how could I make scanning search results more efficient? What changes in layout or contrast might make general search results easier to process, cognitively speaking.

While exploring actual search terms that had been used (I asked several folks to forward me the last five searches they had performed-— it’s always good to work with real data!), I stumbled across a couple interesting little tidbits…

Favicons in search results
One of Travis’ search queries was ‘css conditional formatting’. When I ran this search, and clicked through to several of the sites— I noticed an interesting pattern: At least half of the top search results were from recognizable sites— ALA, Vitamin, and others. And all of the sites have recognizable favicons, assuming you’ve visited these sites before. My thought— why not carry these favicons forward into the search results? Adding this little 16 by 16 pixel goodness is a lightweight way to communicate a lot of information quickly (if it’s a recognized, credible site). So, that’s ambient cue number 1. And to be honest, I’m not sure why we haven’t seen more search results doing this.

Watermarked search results
Idea number two came from personal experience. Lately, at least half of all searches I’ve performed have returned Wikipedia as the number 2 or 3 result (lots of looking up terms and more general information). I started wondering, how much more quickly could I get to (or skip past) this result if it carried with it a subtle watermark of the Wikipedia logo? But why stop there— why not grab logos for the top 50 or so universally recognizable sites (amazon, ebay, wikipedia, myspace, and so on) and append this visual cue to any search result coming from one of these sources? Voila! I can ‘see’ the source of my results before even reading the text.


Science behind this?
Humans are by nature visual and emotional beings. In fact, if you think too long about language and alphabets, the characters you’re reading are nothing more than iconic representations of a concept. With this in mind, which can you process more quickly— the written word, surrounded by other words, letters and numbers, or the visual iconic representation of an entity? Recent studies would argue for the latter, that we process visual information much more quickly than verbal or written information. Which makes you wonder why search results don’t have more visual cues.