How listening to our users helped us build a better Search Console

Tuesday, February 06, 2018

The new Search Console beta is up and running. We’ve been flexing our listening muscles and
finding new ways to incorporate your feedback into the design. In this new release we’ve
initially focused on building features supporting the users’ main goals and we’ll be expanding
functionality in the months to come. While some changes have been long expected, like refreshing
the UI with Material Design, many changes are a result of continuous work with you, the Search
Console users.

We’ve used 3 main communication channels to hear what our users are saying:

• Help forum Top Contributors –
  Top Contributors in our
  help forums
  have been very helpful in bringing up topics seen in the forums. They communicate regularly with
  Google’s Search teams, and help the large community of Search Console users.
• Open feedback – We analyzed open feedback comments about classic Search Console
  and identified the top requests coming in. Open feedback can be sent via the ‘Submit feedback’
  button in Search Console. This open feedback helped us get more context around one of the top
  requests from the last years: more than 90 days of data in the Search Analytics (Performance)
  report. We learned of the need to compare to a similar period in the previous year, which
  confirmed that our decision to include 16 months of data might be on the right track.
• Search Console panel – Last year we created a new communication channel by
  enlisting a group of four hundred randomly selected Search Console users, representing websites
  of all sizes. The panel members took part in almost every design iteration we had throughout the
  year, from explorations of new concepts through surveys, interviews and usability tests. The
  Search Console panel members have been providing valuable feedback which helped us test our
  assumptions and improve designs.

In one of these rounds we tested the new suggested design for the Performance report. Specifically
we wanted to see whether it was clear how to use the ‘compare’ and ‘filter’ functionalities. To
create an experience that felt as real as possible, we used a high fidelity prototype connected to
real data. The prototype allowed study participants to interact with the user interface before
even one row of production code had been written.

In this study we learned that the ‘compare’ functionality was often overlooked. We consequently
changed the design with ‘filter’ and ‘compare’ appearing in a unified dialogue box, triggered
when the ‘Add new’ chip is clicked. We continue to test this design and others to optimize its
usability and usefulness.

We incorporated user feedback not only in practical design details, but also in architectural
decisions. For example, user feedback led us to make major changes in the product’s core
information architecture influencing the navigation and product structure of the new Search
Console. The error and coverage reports were originally separated which could lead to multiple
views of the same error. As a result of user feedback we united the error and coverage reporting
offering one holistic view.

As the launch date grew closer, we performed several larger scale experiments. We A/B tested some
of the new Search Console reports against the existing reports with 30,000 users. We tracked issue
fix rates to verify new Search Console drives better results and sent out follow-up surveys to
learn about their experience. This most recent feedback confirmed that export functionality was
not a nice-to-have, but rather a requirement for many users and helped us tune detailed help pages
in the initial release.

We are happy to announce that the new Search Console is now available to all sites. Whether it is
through Search Console’s feedback button or through the user panel, we truly value a collaborative
design process, where all of our users can help us build the best product.

Try out the new search console.

We’re not finished yet! Which feature would you love to see in the next iteration of Search
Console? Let us know on Twitter!

Posted by the Search Console UX team