Though search is the go-to standard for finding things online, it may be misaligned with the way that humans think and behave. This concept is behind more natural-language search and artificial intelligence such as voice search. How can search be better aligned with human cognition? Yext’s Christian Ward broke it down for us at Localogy 2022.

Key Takeaways

Here are a few key messages or insights that we gleaned from this session.

• How can technology better support the way humans actually think and behave?
• It sounds like a silly question, but often technologies aren’t built for human cognition.
• A good example of that is search: Humans don’t naturally look for things in search queries… they ask questions.
  • And the answer they’re hoping to get isn’t a list of resources where that answer may be buried.
• Something called Conway’s law states that digital representations will mimic their analog counterpart.
  • That’s good sometimes but it also goes wrong when something like the DMV website mimics the excruciating bureaucracy of the physical-world counterpart (extraneous drop-down menus, too many pages, etc.)
• Online interactions, including finding local businesses, will reach the holy grail when they can better align with human cognition
• On the SMB side, things are moving towards more automated marketing assets that can be AI-generated… and eventually generated in real-time for a customized answer or page.
• All of this is the next evolutionary step in what has driven local search and marketing for a few decades: structuring data. That’s the name of the game.
• The key is to be open and ready for it. The early adopter gets the worm.

Customer Journeys: From Search to Decisions

Every customer journey begins with a question. Unfortunately, at the same time, the world is drowning in too much information that is either incorrect or not sourced from the business owners themselves. This session will explore game theory and decision science for insights into how every business can transform their customer experience.

Christian Ward, CDO – Yext