The Google Generation and Website Usability

The British Library and JISC commissioned a 2008 study "Information Behavior of the Researcher of the Future." The researchers analyzed trends among students born after 1993 to develop their conclusions. Some findings include:

• 89% of college students begin their searching at a search engine; 2% start at a library Web site (p. 7; source: OCLC).
• 93% of students are satisfied with their search engine experience, while only 84% are satisified with their experience with a librarian (p. 7; source: OCLC)_.
• "[The] new form of information seeking behaviour can be characterised as being horizontal, bouncing, checking and viewing in nature. Users are promiscuous, diverse and volatile . . . ." (p.9)
• Horizontal Information Seeking is defined as: "A form of skimming activity, where people view just one or two pages from an academic site and then `bounce’ out, perhaps never to return. The figures are instructive: around 60 per cent of e-journal users view no more than three pages and a majority (up to 65 per cent) never return" (p. 10).
• "People in virtual libraries spend a lot of time simply finding their way around: in fact they spend as much time finding their bearings as actually viewing what they find" (p. 10).   . . . .   "The average times that users spend on e-book and ejournal sites are very short: typically four and eight minutes respectively. It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense, indeed there are signs that new forms of `reading’ are emerging as users `power browse’ horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense" (p.10).
• "Academic users have strong consumer instincts and research shows that they will squirrel away content in the form of downloads, especially when there are free offers. In spite of this behaviour and the very short session times that we witness, there is no evidence as to the extent to which these downloads are actually read." (p.10).
• "Users assess authority and trust for themselves in a matter of seconds by dipping and cross-checking across different sites and by relying on favoured brands (e.g. Google)." (p.10).
• "Internet research shows that the speed of young people’s web searching means that little time is spent in evaluating information, either for relevance, accuracy or authority" (p.12).
• "Young people have a poor understanding of their information needs and thus find it difficult to develop effective search strategies" (p.12).
• "[Students] exhibit a strong preference for expressing themselves in natural language rather than analysing which key words might be more effective" (p.12).
• "Faced with a long list of search hits, young people find it difficult to assess the relevance of the materials presented and often print off pages with no more than a perfunctory glance at them" (p.12).
• "Many young people do not find library-sponsored resources intuitive and therefore prefer to use Google or Yahoo instead: these offer a familiar, if simplistic solution, for their study needs" (p.12).
• There is little interest in social networking with a library (p. 17).
• "Research by OFCOM shows that the over-65s spend four hours a week longer online than 18-24s" (OFCOM, section 4.1.12).
• "CIBER deep log studies show that, from undergraduates to professors, people exhibit a strong tendency towards shallow, horizontal, `flicking’ behaviour in digital libraries. Power browsing and viewing appear to be the norm for all. The popularity of abstracts among older researchers rather gives the game away. Society is dumbing down." (p. 19).

The study makes three recommendations to university libraries:

1. they need to make their sites more highly visible in cyberspace by opening them up to search engines;
2. they should abandon any hope of being a one-stop shop, and,
3. they should accept that much content will seldom or never be used, other than perhaps a place from which to bounce (p. 31).

Ian Rowlands, David Nicholas, Peter Williams, Paul Huntington and Maggie Fieldhouse; Barrie Gunter ; Richard Withey ; Hamid R. Jamali ; Tom Dobrowolski and Carol Tenopir published these findings as a scholarly paper in ASLIB PROCEEDINGS under the title "The Google Generation."

-DD