While working on Snap Preview Anywhere, enhancing, improving and supporting it's growth, we have also made some significant improvements over the last two months to the usability of Snap.com. In this post I will describe what was done and the logic behind some of these changes.

1. The Results (Listing) Area:
We realize that most of our users come from the “10 blue links” world where there is nothing but text listing. In order to make the transition into the Snap visual experience easier and smoother, we realized that the listings should be better treated as users are focused first on that area (read, scan, interact), and made the following changes to better treat them and improve their scanability and readability:
• The font size was increased and the colors were changed to be more conventional (non-visited title in blue, visited title in purple, url in green)

• The width of the left pane was increased. Users who prefer pictures over text can adjust the width of the panes (btw, according to our stats only 12% of you do that…).

• The Title was linked to the result page. According to the default behavior the site will replace Snap in the same browser window, but the “Settings” menu lets you change it to open in a new window or open the side inside the right pane.

• The background color of the highlighted listing was changed to light blue. With that we emphasize better the connection between the results and the preview and also indicate that the entire element is clickable.

Note that a click on anywhere but the title moves the focus of the highlighted listing and render the preview inside the right pane without opening the site. This is a similar to what you get if you use the up and down arrows to navigate though the list of results.

2. The Preview Pane:
Being able to preview a site in the search result is of Snap.com key advantage and main differentiator compared to other search engines. It helps users make a better call if a site is worth visiting or not. During different methods of research we learned that some users are still confused about the preview (some even think it’s an ad). We therefore made some changes to make it clear that a preview is a preview:
• The connection between the highlighted listing and the preview was better emphasized using a light blue border.

• The right pane was cleaned.

• The primary interaction button (Go To Site) was moved just below the preview image.

…and here's a visual way (the Snap preferred way) to describe those changes…

Before…

After…

Additional features that we launched include:

• "Email this Search" got an overhaul. The email sent include a large preview of the site sent, and the search term used to generate that result set.

• Cached link – Click on the "Cached" link to see the web page as it looked when we indexed it.

We have some more product enhancements and UI improvements coming soon so stay tuned…and continue sending us feedback on Snap and these recent improvements.

Till next time,
-jay