We often forget about the brand when evaluate the User Experience

No one is surprised that people are ready to overpay for clothes or perfume of the famous brand. However, when we talk about the User Experience, we are more focused on the convenience of the interface, the intelligibility of the texts, the relevance of the service to the user tasks and rarely take into concideration the brand.

As our research has shown, even in such a conservative service as Search, brand affects the user’s perception of product quality.

https://imgur.com/gallery/w3tLN

When we studied why users stop using the Mail.Ru search engine, we found that one of the reasons is related to the brand. People said: “Mail.Ru is an email service, but Yandex and Google are for searching”.

We decided to check whether the brand really influences the quality of the search engine.

Design of the experiment

To verify this hypothesis, we decided to create webpages with same search results, but different search fields.

We selected three search queries “Pushkin”, “pizza” and “what is SPAM” for our study and put each query to the Mail.Ru search engine. Then we cut the search results and applied them to recognizable parts (logo, search field with entered query, Search button) of Yandex and Google search engines. In this way we obtained nine html prototypes. The prototypes were visually undistinguishable from the real search results pages.

Search results were the same for all search engines and search queries

All prototypes were opened in Google Chrome one by one, each in a different tab. The respondents were asked to evaluate every webpage separately, switching between the tabs. Once a respondent evaluated a webpage, he or she was not permitted to return to that webpage again.

We recruited 32 people for our experiment:

• 10 people that use Mail.Ru as their favorite search engine
• 10 people that use Google as their favorite search engine
• 12 people that use Yandex as their favorite search engine

All respondents are active search engine users (perform search at least 5 times a week). 14 males and 18 females aged 20 to 64.

We show nine webpage templates to the respondents one by one. After the demonstration of a webpage, the respondent was needed to evaluate it using three criteria: visual appeal, relevance and user-friendliness.

Same results has different scores depending on brand

Depending on the brand, scores varied from 3 to 5.

Scores put by one of the respondents (Yandex user) are provided as an example

It is interesting that users’ assessment of various engines differed significantly. Yandex lovers put low scores to the search results branded with Google logo — 3.97 points on average, while to Yandex they put 4.72 and Mail.Ru 4.63. Mail.Ru lovers put same points to Mail.Ru and Google and lower to Yandex. Conversely Google lovers ranked their search engine lower than others.

Mail.Ru and Yandex lovers estimation are predictable. They give more points to their favorite search engines without logical reason. But Google lovers behavior is more complicated. According to the interview, it seems that Google users chose the search engine using only logical reasoning. And when they see same results on web pages they behave as if they scold Google — why aren’t you better than others?

What’s next

1. Users can’t be logical in their choices all the time. That’s why we use research methods which helps to observe user behavior, not only their attitude
2. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t listen to the user. That means that you should divide: here about the interface and here about the brand
3. Don’t focus only the interface. Work together with PM, marketing team and PR to make your brand stronger