After using the latest Firefox version (3.0.1), I realized I’ve been using one of the newest features a lot without even noticing it. The feature is convenient for me, but what are the potential usability issues that come along with it as well?
What is It?
Dubbed the “AwesomeBar” by the Mozilla team, the new Smart Location URL Bar for Firefox 3 displays suggestions from pages in your history when you type any keywords into the browser bar. Taking factors such as frequency of visits, time of last visit, bookmarks (and / or tags), and other things, it suggests pages that you might be looking for. It serves like a little search engine just for your browsing history.
Usability Issues
Learned Conventions
If a user has become accustomed to typing in the URL of pages to find it in their history, the new AwesomeBar definitely breaks those learned conventions and will cause frustrations for users.
Typing in “businessol.com,” you can see from the example that the main businessol.com website does not even appear first within the list. Somehow, the algorithm is choosing the businessol.com/staff page as the most relevant result for me. If a user is used to typing “businesso” and then hitting the down arrow and hitting enter on their keyboard, they will be taken to the staff page rather than the homepage. This wouldn’t be so bad, but…
You Can’t Disable the Feature
There is apparently no easy way to disable the AwesomeBar. This violates some of usability’s basic core principles: letting users feel in control of the system, the ability to reverse actions, and consistency of interactions (see: Ben Schneiderman’s Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design). Do a Google search for “disable Firefox smart bar” and you’ll get over a hundred thousand results with no “official” way of disabling it. Some users are obviously frustrated with it because it disrupts their learned behavior with how a URL history bar should work.
How This Affects Your Website
Title Tag & URL Structure
I’m going to start blurring the lines of Usability and SEO, but it seems like the main factors that contribute to the results in the AwesomeBar are the Page Title and URL structure. Caught up in the Olympics fever, I did a search for “Usain Bolt.”
As you can see, the pages with the keywords showing up early in the Title Bar and the URL structure are coming up first before the other pages. I visited each of these pages once, so frequency should not be a factor, and they are not displayed in the order in which I visited the pages.
We have always suggested making descriptive Page Titles and URL Structures from a usability and accessibility standpoint because they allow users to know where they are, identify the pages easily in their bookmarks/tabs/links, and quickly come back to the same page. The examples we see with the AwesomeBar make it even more important than before, and also suggest that having the keyword appear at the beginning of the Title gives it more relevance.
If Title Tags are Not Optimized
Below is a screenshot of pages I visited from a Google News search. The links in purple indicate that I’ve visited those pages before. I purposely visited most of the ones without optimized Titles and URLs.
Now take a look at the AwesomeBar results. The only one that shows up out of those six is the “Usain Bolt gets Kingston dancing.” You may be wondering why the “Usain Bolt has three golden reasons…” page is not showing up in the AwesomeBar. .. It’s because when you click on the link, the page redirects to another page without an optimized Title Tag.
I also checked it out with Benj, one of our SEO Gurus, and here’s what he had to say:
“hmmm I’ve got nothing to say about it. Just SEO the titles and you’re good.”
-Benj Arriola, SEO Guru
So as long as you have been optimizing your page titles and URL structures, you should be in good shape to have your site usable and AwesomeBar Optimized.
