Stat of the Week No. 5 – The Most Popular Search Term at the Library is…
Written on April 10, 2009 by Michael Lascarides
OK, so Stat of the Week has returned! Can we just agree to pretend those twelve skipped weeks never happened? Thanks.
Recently, the Digital Experience Group gave a presentation to the occasional meeting of our Site Managers, the people who run each of our branch libraries. These are the people who work every day with our patrons, help them with their requests, and get them situated on the computers. They know the NYPL patron as well as anyone. We asked this group, “What do you think the most frequently searched word on the NYPL web site is?” We got a lot of good guesses: “Jobs”. “DVD”. “Books”. “Hours”. “Classes”. “Late fees”.
Good guesses all. Many of these searches are definitely in the top 25 or so on a regular basis. But over the past year, one search term has consistently occupied the number one spot, and not by a small margin. I mean, we’re talking a 1996 Chicago Bulls level of dominance. That term is…
Tumblebooks.
When we revealed that answer to the site managers, the reponse was an audible “Huh?”
Tumblebooks are animated storybooks for children. They’re built and maintained on a third-party web site, but they’re there, free of charge, to anyone who visits via the web site of a participating library (like the NYPL). The site managers knew that they were very popular. But the number one search term? Consistently? Really? Yes, really. And they could be even further in front; as you can see from the screenshot above, the third most popular search term is “tumble books” as two words!
I’m not quite sure how Tumblebooks got so popular. Are they promoted in the schools? Great word of mouth? Did Oprah say something nice about them? I really don’t know. Feel free to comment if you can cast some light on the mystery.
Regardless, I love the unexpectedness of this discovery, and the popularity of Tumblebooks has some lessons for us:
- Don’t make assumptions. As the Site Managers’ meeting showed, we probably could have interviewed every member of our front-line staff and never had anyone bring up Tumblebooks as a top priority for navigation. But in the quantitative statistics, there it is. We should never assume we know what’s getting a lot of traffic based on “common sense” without verification.
- The popularity of content can lead to insights about audiences. We might not be able to interview every single patron as they arrive on the site, but since our most popular search is for animated storybooks, we can probably infer that there’s a big audience of parents looking for good content to keep their children occupied. We already sort of knew that, but you can be sure we’ll be trying to figure out if the web site has a higher percentage of young parents in its audience than the physical libraries. Are stay-at-home moms using the web site to avoid dragging the kids to the library? Should we be increasing the amount of kids’ content on the site? All sorts of good questions start to flow.
- If someone’s doing a lot of searching for an item, we might want to make better links to it. The Library’s link to Tumblebooks is not terribly hidden; it’s on the “Books and Materials” page, which is already one of the top 5 most popular on the whole site. But even though it’s only a single click away from the home page, enough visitors miss it and resort to search that we might want to take a look at how the links are presented. And in fact the current Books page is a bit of a mess, with a lack of clear hierarchies. The number of “tumblebooks” searches is evidence of a design that’s not working.
- Search terms reveal context. A search for “tumblebooks” clearly marks the user as a child or someone who’s caring for a child. When we return this search result, not only should we be returning the Tumblebooks link as the first result, but we should be suggesting secondary links to children’s programs, other online storybooks, etc. Our upcoming search redesign (much more on this in future posts) will take this notion into account.
Finally, the popularity of Tumblebooks itself is instructive. It’s a really good web site. Once you follow the link from a library, it’s simple to find a book, it downloads quickly, the usability is excellent (as it should be when your target demographic is four years old), there’s no login or other restrictive administrative overhead, there’s a great variety of storybooks and the content is fun and engaging.
There’s something to be said for design so simple a four-year-old can grasp it intuitively. It’s not an easy trick to pull off.
Filed in: Search, Stat of the Week, Usability.
[...] From the New York Public Library Labs Weblog: Recently, the Digital Experience Group gave a presentation to the occasional meeting of our Site Managers, the people who run each of our branch libraries. These are the people who work every day with our patrons, help them with their requests, and get them situated on the computers. They know the NYPL patron as well as anyone. We asked this group, “What do you think the most frequently searched word on the NYPL web site is?” We got a lot of good guesses: “Jobs”. “DVD”. [...]
So here’s the magic unanswered question: When they do a search for ‘tumblebooks’ in that search box — does it get them to what they’re looking for? How about ‘tumble books’?
I guess I can see for myself… We’re talking about the search box at the top right of the page on http://www.nypl.org/ ?
Hmm, I’ve got to guess what to click on next after seeing this:
http://www.nypl.org/searchSum.cfm?term=tumblebooks
And I’m not really sure. I guess I want a catalog, but which one do I click on? Nope, that was the wrong choice, that gives me a list of seemingly random words near tumblebooks in the alphabet, but that’s about it. (I know what this really is, of course, I’m pretending to be a user). Okay, how about the first link listed “12 results for the NYPL Website”? That gives me some results… and I have no idea what they are, or which one will actually get me to my beloved Tumblebooks. If I just click on the first one for the heck of it (which has no title or summary, it’s a URL without description) — success!
Okay, how about “tumble books”
http://www.nypl.org/searchSum.cfm?term=tumble%20books
Oh boy, this gets me 11 hits at the NYPL Website, but in fact none of them get me to my wonderful, wonderful, Tumblebooks. Your third most popular search is pretty much a dead end.
(And don’t worry, the website at my library is just as bad! There is nothing particularly egregious about yours in the world of egregious library websites. I just thought it was an interesting experiment to see if folks doing those popular searches were likely to actually find what they were looking for.)
The Office of Staff Development had covered Tumblebooks in previously offered staff trainings, but unfortunately not for a few months,and we are clearly not reaching enough frontline staff members. We will work hard to rectify this asap.
Brook : Just to clarify, most of the front-line staff knew about Tumblebooks, but no one (least of all us) guessed that it’s the #1 most searched for thing on the web site! Apologies if that distinction wasn’t clear.
Quick follow-up: I edited the original post to make that disctinction a bit clearer. Thanks!
How does NYPL propagate this sort of information to branch staff? Infrequent meetings with harried branch managers doesn’t seem like a very efficient approach, in that any one manager’s out-of-hand dismissal of a proposed improvement affects that entire branch’s ability to deliver effective service. See comments 3 and 4; wouldn’t a weekly email digest or staff news feed be able to get this material out to the people who need it?
[...] of the Week No. 5 – The Most Popular Search Term at the Library is… [web link]NYPL Labs (10/Apr/2009)“…requests and get them situated on the computers [...]
[...] From the New York Public Library Labs Weblog: Recently, the Digital Experience Group gave a presentation to the occasional meeting of our Site Managers, the people who run each of our branch libraries. These are the people who work every day with our patrons, help them with their requests, and get them situated on the computers. They know the NYPL patron as well as anyone. We asked this group, “What do you think the most frequently searched word on the NYPL web site is?” We got a lot of good guesses: “Jobs”. “DVD”. [...]
When I use NYPL.org, I know not to search the website, because the information is in the books and not the website. Why wouldn’t NYPL know this? To all people: search the catalogs for information, or search the databases — the website is just for information about the libraries, like, the hours and the locations.
Alex – The first phase of our stats gathering project was to make sure all of our web sites are on one platform, which is now pretty much complete. Next we’ll be working on more accessible reporting so that this and similar statistics will be available to all staff via the NYPL intranet (LAIR). We’re also building a report that will be updated monthly/weekly and distributed to the staff in a format to be determined.
In the meantime, any interested staff can contact me for direct access to Analytics.
[...] George Wright placed an interesting blog post on Stat of the Week No. 5 – The Most Popular Search Term at the Library isâ [...]
[...] the NYPL Labs page and am really intrigued with the changes they are discussing and implementing. Today’s post examined preconceptions librarians have about their users and what is popular in the [...]
[...] Stat of the Week No. 5 – The Most Popular Search Term at the Library is… | NYPL Labs labs.nypl.org/2009/04/10/stat-of-the-week-no-5-the-most-popular-search-term-at-the-library-is – view page – cached NYPL Labs provides a window into the overall digital experience of The New York Public Library. Take a look as we generalize our best practices into processes and tools and start experimenting with new applications and — From the page [...]
The blog article very surprised to me! Your writing is good. In this I learned a lot! Thank you!
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[...] Week has returned! Can we just agree to pretend those twelve skipped weeks never happened? Thanks.http://labs.nypl.org/2009/04/10/stat-of-the-week-no-5-the-most-popular-search-term-at-the-library-is…Recolectado en: Pertenece a: De RSS: NYPL [...]
[...] Week has returned! Can we just agree to pretend those twelve skipped weeks never happened? Thanks.http://labs.nypl.org/2009/04/10/stat-of-the-week-no-5-the-most-popular-search-term-at-the-library-is…Recolectado en: Pertenece a: De RSS: NYPL [...]
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