Luckily, my roommate never used cuil.com before so I did make her to help me to make this assignment.
Yesterday, we went to the lab and I asked her to go to the cuil.com site. First time, she did not know what to type in. She told that name of the site “Cuil” is horrible. She had no idea first time how to spell it. She thought it would be “quill” or “cull”. Then I realized that it seems hard for the first user to remember the name.
After spelling out right name, she told that she doesn’t like the background color. When she look there she felt like destructed and forget about what she wanted to search. First, time she doesn’t feel comfortable with design. The presentation of search results is unusual and a bit innovative. She doesn’t like the “Explore by Category” because she thought it would narrow results, but instead it does a whole new search.
She tried a few obvious things “+”, “and” etc. and got the same seemingly random results and nothing that gave her the feeling that she could narrow down the search in a non-random way. So, she got confused. Positive side is that there is description to each site and you can easily read. Privacy is also good side that she liked most.
Most of the pictures won’t load and are never relevant. She liked the button list at the top that replaces Google’s “Did you mean…” and is always present and always has multiple suggestions.
She tried to find information about herself and she find out that in cuil.com there is not much information about her than in google.
During examination I saw that her eyes were tired and she felt exhausted and destructed during the search. She told me in the end that she would give to this side 3 out of 5.
