Initial Usability Testing Reveals Issues with New Social Search Engine Volunia

New social search engine Volunia has been under scrutiny from its beta usability testers as part of a program to perfect the platform before it is launched to the public.

Roughly 400,000 users have already signed up for Volunia, of which 100,000 were provided access in its first week.  This was done to not only allow for server load access to be evenly distributed, but also to allow the testers to offer timely feedback.

Two of the primary criticisms from this testing phase have been about poor search results and also a lacklustre user interface.

Volunia founder, Massimo Marchiori, blamed the poor search results on the small about of sample websites so far included in the results – just 1% of “all the websites worth indexing”.

Many usability testers had also noted that a large amount of sites, including Facebook and Google, are incompatible with Volunia’s social features menu bar. This is not always an accident however as some sites have measures in place to stop their content being used by other web platforms.

Volunia are hoping to raise additional funding now to improve on their foundation as well as to address these usability issues. If they iron out all the creases, they could very well become an interesting new addition to the social search market.

• Tagged in:
• Usability Testing
• User behaviour