There's a spurious argument that some usability experts make to justify their work that goes like this:
If we redesign an application and save every employee 5 minutes a day, that means we've saved 250 hours of time a day in our 3,000 person company, or 50,000 hours a year. That's more than two million dollars in savings every year!
There are many holes in this argument, but the two big ones are:
- five minutes of saved time doesn't necessarily equal an extra five minutes of productivity
- greater productivity should lead to more output (and revenue), not cost savings (The only way to guarantee savings would be to reduce your workday, and thus your salary load, by those five minutes.)
Bu my main point here is that those minutes don't accumulate in some time bank; in some cases they might be used in some value-generating way, in other cases they'll be frittered away on Facebook.
Yesterday Google launched Google Instant, their new real-time search results, with the idea that faster results are better. They said, according to Techcrunch:
We estimate this will help Google users save two to five seconds per query. That adds up across all users. “11 hours saved. Each second.”
Sound familiar? Google stops short of calculating the economic impact of those 11 hours per second, but not by much. The message is clearly that faster results leads to meaningful time savings.
For most people--quite likely everyone--the two seconds they save per query doesn't amount to useful time. The accumulated savings don't let you leave work earlier, spend more time with your kids, or get more sleep. For a heavy searcher, the three to seven minutes they'll save could, at best, mean a longer coffee break. Nothing wrong with that, but it hardly measures up to the promise of 11 hours saved a second.
The Real Benefit of Google Instant
The problem faced by most search engines isn't speed. It's the low-value, redundant SEO'd results that dominate the top positions for popular queries.
I think the real benefit of Instant is to help users formulate better queries by providing immediate feedback. Instant will help users avoid low-quality results by evaluating results as they search. (It's entirely possible that someone at Google said this and I missed it because everyone's focusing on how bleeding fast Instant is.)
Google can't speak the obvious truth: a great many people are search engine illiterate and, because of that, they aren't good searchers. Instant might help them, and if it does it's a worthwhile innovation.
But all this talk about speed and time savings is mostly irrelevant.
Posted in Opinions on September 9, 2010
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