Some usability study, which I can no longer find (I think it was from Yahoo) suggested that if you are going to put a picture in a search result that it should be on the right hand side of the search. This was because the picture typically represented ‘flavour’ and not data and therefore the user had to continually skip it when trying to get to the meat of the search results.
So being slaves to other people’s usability studies and we duly put our picture on the right hand side of our search results. We kept it this way for about 2 months; however we have finally decided to change the position of the picture to the left hand side of search results.
The reasoning is because of user feedback. I’m not saying the original usability study was incorrect, however our experience is that users expect the picture to be on the left hand side and using the design principles of ‘Don’t Make Me Think’, if the user expects something in a particular position then we shouldn’t disappoint them.
Here are both example, which do you think works better?
Image on the Right (NEW)
Image on the Right (OLD)
Caelan, were users reporting bad experiences of having the pictures on the right?
Seems a little innocuous to me
D
No users were reporting anything but in A/B testing the RH images were getting slightly higher click throughs. Nothing major but when you combine all of these minor changes it start making a real difference