Exploring a New Search Engine: Galaxy IT - Areas That Need Work
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As I mentioned, Galaxy IT included a top 10 list of things they expected people to complain about. Yes, it loads slowly, though that wasn’t too much of an issue with my tests. Yes, switching levels takes time. But I don’t care if their ads aren’t relevant, and they shouldn’t be worrying about that yet either.
They do need a help screen, or at least an FAQ; surprisingly, that’s not one of the things they expect users to complain about. It’s been my experience that intuitive interfaces usually aren’t, and that their creators are the last ones to realize this. The best intuitive interfaces take 15 minutes to grasp (sometimes less, if the creators of the interface are really on the ball and have run it through lots of tests). You can shorten that time, and keep your users from getting frustrated, by including an FAQ that walks through the important stuff, preferably with pictures and a clear explanation.
For example, I didn’t fully understand how the “organized” search worked and what it was supposed to accomplish until I tried it out. I’m a writer, so I put a very high value on words, but a few images in the right places to accompany those words would have gone a long way toward helping any user understand what Galaxy IT is trying to accomplish.
There are other aspects of the interface that could be better explained as well. You can refocus your search by moving one of the outside boxes into the center, but it took me a while to figure out how to do that (you need to click the box at the top, when your cursor changes to a hand shape). And another reviewer noted that you don’t always get the results you expect when you do this. Brad Linker from Download Squad explained that “when we searched for ‘Eee PC,’ one of our results was ‘Eee PC reviews.’ When [we] dragged that box to the center, our new search turned out to be just ‘reviews,’ so we wound up with reviews for a ton of unrelated products.”
Certainly, Galaxy IT has an interesting concept, but the execution needs a lot of work. It’s intended to be a visual interface, but it can be visually tricky to understand. Worse, it doesn’t quite perform the way one would expect it to. And perhaps worst of all for something that is new and supposed to change the way one looks at search, it doesn’t sufficiently explain itself. I think many of these problems can be fixed, though I’m not sure how they can make it appear visually less cramped. It would be interesting to check back in a year to see how the company and the interface have evolved. For now, however, I’ll be performing my most important searches in a different galaxy, er, search engine.
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