A few years ago, I was listening to a Google talk where they were talking about a usability study they had been running on their homepage at the time. “What do you see here?” they would ask. “A text box for search,” came the reply. “Anything else?” “Nope.”

People had become so fixated on Google’s functionality for searching that other features on the homepage (different kinds of search, the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, etc) were going unnoticed. People just had tunnel vision for searching.

Google Reader was recently redesigned, and something in the redesign got me thinking about that talk, and wondering why really interesting, compelling new features go unnoticed.

Specifically, I caught a glimpse of their new Loading message (with the animated wheel thingie), but for some reason I missed the much-anticipated new feature right underneath it!

How strange is it that, despite noticing a new loading message, I didn’t notice the new search functionality? In fact, it wasn’t until I read a recent TechCrunch article on the Google Reader redesign (that I read inside Google Reader, coincidentally) that I knew search had been added. So what’s going on here?

This issue seems to come up with products that are used frequently for a consistent task. Think about the Google homepage: What’s your process?

1. Lock on to the text box and click on it.
2. Type your search query.
3. Hit Enter

That’s your task flow. Same thing with Google Reader: I start on the left with the list of new Feed items to read, I click on one and browse the list. My eyes never go clear to the top where that Search bar is living. The one time they did - very briefly - was to check out the new loading message and confirm that it was, in fact, redesigned. My eyes didn’t stay up there long enough to explore the surroundings.

With all the buzz that Nielsen has had around eye tracking (1, 2, 3, 4), I’m surprised to have not heard about anything documenting this result in a general way. It seems like a general problem for people who design for the web: Without a large product rollout (and with the capability for design to change on a dime), getting new features noticed that lie outside of an established task flow is really difficult.

This is why designers get such a kick out of comics and songs that address their eternal struggle against managers (and occasionally, against users) who think, “If we make the feature bigger, people will be sure to notice it.” Ultimately, it’s a trade-off, and I’d argue that in order to get the new feature noticed, you’d need to make it distracting, which starts to lose its desirability (did you read the first comic?).

So what can be done? Given the higher level of interactivity on the web, if you know that you’ve got a highly desired feature (and yes, search is right up there for Google Reader!), I’d opt for a temporary distraction. If it’s the user’s first time with the new feature, give it a soft pulsing highlight for a couple seconds, and then leave it alone.

I do want to emphasize the word temporary. If you’ve used Office 2007 you’ll notice that the big round Office button in the upper left-hand corner of the window pulsates until you use it. I’ve been in many offices where the button just sits there and pulsates because, yes, the user knows that there’s a menu there. He or she just hasn’t had reason to pull it down. And it’s annoying to third parties trying to focus on the content of the document. Really.

But ultimately, who knows. Maybe this isn’t the best approach, and with design nothing is absolute. In the words of the User Experience Guru, “It depends.”