Well, February was an extremely busy month, and for the shortest month of the year was packed with quite a few gems from the User Experience community. Here is a re-cap of a few articles and concepts that should not go without mention: (more…)
The latest issue of Usability News from the Software Usability and Research Lab (SURL), has a very interesting study—‘Eye Gaze Patterns while Searching vs. Browsing a Website’—on web users’ eye gaze patterns while browsing and searching web sites. Findings from the study show that the ‘F’ pattern as described by Jakob Nielson does not hold true for some kinds of web sites.
Results show that users follow a fairly uniform scan path when browsing through pictures, and a more random path while specifically searching through them.
In fact, not only does the study suggest that users’ viewing patterns depend on the nature of the web page (text-rich versus image-rich) but also by the users’ tasks (browsing versus searching).
In a previous article, ‘4 Principles of Effective Navigation on the Web‘, one of the stated keys is letting users know where they can go. One of the most effective ways to let users know what paths are available to them is to expose subsequent destination points. In other words, bubbling up subsections and pages found within top-level sections helps users gain context as well as unearths particular destinations within those sections. Let’s start with an example to illustrate what I mean.
Imagine that you are in a supermarket buying groceries for dinner. Imagine also that this supermarket does not label what kinds of items can be found in each aisle making it impossible for you to know where to go for the next item on your list. To make things worse, the aisles in the store shift around without warning and you never know quite where you are with respect to the last place you’ve been.
This painfully frustrating scenario seems outlandish, yet many websites put their users in this precise situation. (more…)
In the first installment of this series, we examined how we can enhance search tools by allowing users to set the context of searches. In this article we will examine another key feature that aids users in completing a task within a site: the help link. Particularly, we will examine providing contextual help globally on sites: allowing users to access information pertaining to the specific task at hand.
Contextual help is an integrated means of accessing supplementary information and instructions about a feature or content. Common manifestations of contextual help are:
At Paradyme, we often think of ‘users’ as ‘patrons’ to stress the fact that users of most web sites are either active or prospective customers or contribute to the web site’s financial state in some way. It is critical to acknowledge this fact, because unlike users of desktop applications or physical products, web site users tend to be more immediately tied to revenue and costs, and as such, optimizing web sites means much more than making them usable; it also means increasing their value through optimizing things such as marketing strategy, acquisition and retention rates, and user participation as well as reducing costs.
Two weeks ago, I attended a talk given by Mark Wehner of Yahoo! Inc. at a BayCHI event in Mountain View. At first glance many may balk at the idea of conducting research through mere drawings, but having heard and seen the impact this tool can make, I am now a huge enthusiast for this exploratory process. I am writing this article in the hopes that more companies and user experience designers investigate this technique to see how it can enhance their own product research.
This article summarizes the key concepts behind researching with comics as presented in the talk along with some other considerations around this technique.
Some time ago iVillage commissioned Dynamic Logic to study the effect of page clutter on the effectiveness of advertising on the iVillage web site. The study strove to discern what effect, if any, ‘online clutter’ (defined as the number of text, image, and advertising elements on a page) had on the brand value score (aggregate of the purchase intent generated, brand favorability, brand awareness, message association, and brand attributes) of the actual on-page advertising.
The research was developed and carried out by Dynamic Logic, OgilvyOne, and Jupiter Media Metrix. While some of the results from the study were expected, many were astounding:
One of the most pervasive design shortcomings of web sites is neglecting entire market segments–a mistake that can have very costly consequences. This article provides the basis for an effective method to correct this and improve overall conversions.
There are many different ways to divide a company’s market into segments; the most effective partitioning for web site design hinges on the conversion likelihood of the prospective customers. It is a matrix of a user’s commitment to buy a product or service and that user’s perception of the company selling that product or service. (more…)
Last Thursday, September 7th, a federal judge ruled that a class action lawsuit brought on by the National Federation of the Blind against Target Corporation could commence. (Additional coverage available here and here.) The lawsuit alleges that Target’s web site is inaccessible to people with impaired vision. Although the lawyers for Target tried to get the case dismissed arguing that the Americans with Disabilities Act and state laws do not apply to its web site, the judge ruled that the laws protecting disabled persons not only apply to Target’s web site but also to all other services offered by the company.
This ruling is a clear wake-up call for all web and mobile-based services regardless of the outcome of the trial—just going to trial is a huge cost. New web design and development must take accessibility into account, and existing services should perform audits to identify and correct accessibility issues. The case against Target Corporation is not an isolated incident; it is just the tip of the iceberg of a larger industry-wide problem. (Similar lawsuits over web accessibility for the blind were filed against Southwest and American Airlines in 2002.) Undoubtedly, the company was the target (no pun intended) of this disability lawsuit due to its size and high profile, but this certainly does not rule out smaller internet and mobile-based services. Just as accessibility laws apply equally to large corporations and your local, tiny, family-owned restaurant, so too the Americans with Disabilities Act and other state, local, and federal disability laws apply to web properties of all sizes.