Search is not what to find

Today, it is time to publish the results of the survey from last Friday and, to be honest, this is the first time that the data received has almost no meaning. The fact is that the voting of the participants practically did not solve the problem facing the survey. According to the comments, one may get the impression that the respondents did not quite understand what was required of them, but in fact the reason for such a misunderstanding is always an insufficiently accurately formulated question. What did we learn and what did we really want to know? The answer is under the cut.

But first, the actual results of the survey, in which at the moment 421 people have taken part. Here are the results from the official Vivaldi blog :



Here the lead is about the trial and error choice. The preferences of those who voted on Habré were distributed a little differently :



Here, the majority uses the browser pre-installed on the mobile device, and the trial and error method was in second place.

In both votes it’s interesting to look at the item “I use a preinstalled browser”. On Habré there were 4 times more people who do not spend time searching for alternatives for an existing browser, but simply work with what is, while “ordinary users” are actively looking for something new and more functional than the pre-installed one web viewer.

The general distribution of votes is as follows:



Now, let's talk about what we really wanted to know and why the results of this task were not solved.

The question was: “How did you find the browser you are currently using on your smartphone?” And the key word here was “how” - we were interested to understand how today users learn about new programs in order to start using them on their devices. They will find out - i.e. where do they get the information from. But in the comments, for some reason, many started reporting which browser they were using and for what reasons. And it surprised me.

But even more surprised was the percentage of people who noted "I chose by trial and error from appstore." And that's why. This answer implied literally searching the browser by busting in the Android application store. The procedure looks something like this: the Android store opens, the word “browser” is entered in the search, the result is obtained with a list of 250 browsers, and then the user starts putting these browsers one after another, comparing with each other and then deciding which browser to leave for everyday use . However, he has no idea what kind of Chrome, Vivaldi, Bravo and other browsers are. The user tests them personally and then makes a choice.

In general, if you read about the browser and its characteristics somewhere, or someone told you about it, and then you went to the Android store, entered “Vivaldi” or “Brave” in the search, and then installed it on your smartphone, to already try on your own and draw some conclusions - so this is not a “trial and error choice from appstore”. You first learned about the browser from another source, and you came to appstore purposefully for it.

Of course, this method of choosing applications can be used by some users - this is how we often look for a cool toy or some kind of photo editor. But it will obviously not be 47% of users, as in the answers on the Vivaldi blog, and not even 35%, as in the answers to Habré. In general, in our opinion, this item failed a little less than completely.

And still it is necessary to say separately about indications of the absence of the item “I installed the same as on the desktop”. Perhaps the lack of this answer affected the overall performance, but there is one subtlety. We tried to find out how users are looking for browsers to use these channels to strengthen the work of the marketing department. It is clear that if you have a desktop version, it is logical to expect that the user will install the same browser on the mobile. That is, in terms of marketing, there is no special field for maneuver - here, most likely, the task for developers is to make the desktop version as high-quality as possible so that the user wants to install the mobile version as well. Be that as it may, in the survey there was the item “Other”, which scored almost 17% in the overall standings. We think that this is the percentage of people using the same browser on both desktop and mobile.

So what's next? And then we are waiting for Friday and a new survey. This business is pleasant and absolutely safe in our difficult viral time.

Photo by marc liu