Archive for the 'News' Category

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).

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What if you could measure how perfect your website was? If you could definitively say that your website was 100%, pure perfection, wouldn’t you grasp the chance to test how it fares in the test? Well, the Social Issues Research Centre (SIRC) recently released the results of a study commissioned by Rackspace Managed Hosting which claims to provide exactly this: the ‘Perfect Website Formula.’

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On Wednesday, TechCrunch and Mashable reported the release of Stumble Video, the latest offering from StumbleUpon. Like the core offering, Stumble Video allows users to surf through categories based on preferences and previous ratings, serving up videos instead of websites into one central video player. Beyond a great idea, the implementation is clean and engaging, and happily, the interaction is kept consistent through one player with simple choices and great use of iconography.

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On Tuesday, Techcrunch reported that MySpace has semi-officially overtaken Yahoo as having the most page views of any internet property. This revelation was met with moderate fanfare, and other prominent industry blogs like GigaOm and Searchblog did not even go there. There is good reason to take this news with a grain of salt, as it is misrepresentative and hides some very important facts.

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On Friday, Techcrunch reported on a rumor that the major television networks were planning a joint effort to create their own video web site that would offer the networks’ own content. This seemed like a logical move to regain revenue lost to websites that profit from illegally disseminated property belonging to the networks. Alas, these plans soon fell apart when individual networks started to take favor with Google-owned YouTube after receiving payoffs. Not only is this a great case-study of game theory, it is also an excellent example of missed opportunities and foregone revenue.

Why don’t the individual networks make content available on their own websites?!

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On Monday, Techdirt writes about the concerns that BitTorrent creator, Bram Cohen has regarding the integration of Digital Rights Management (DRM) into his widely popular “peer distributed” product. As the company approaches launch of a store which will controlled by Windows DRM, the issue of the DRM usability has been called into question.

This is a case in point of businessmen demanding that steps be taken to ensure revenue increases without paying due dilligence to the end-user and the ramifications of a poor user experience. Time will only tell how this negligence will play out, but it’s great to see an executive stepping forward to admit these failures and concerns. With formidable competition in the media download space such as Guba and DRM-free emusic.com the race to provide affordable download services with usable rights protection and platform compatability is at full force. Another player, Spiral Frog is set to enter the space this month.
From the original interview on BitTorrent’s future, Cohen is quoted:

We’re rolling out with some content DRM’d, using Windows DRM, at the insistence of our content partners. We’re very concerned about the usability problems DRM introduces, and are educating our content partners about the lost commercial opportunity.

John Battelle reported Thursday on Marissa Mayer’s talk at the Web 2.0 conference held in San Francisco this week. Mayer shared some very fascinating findings regarding the usability and user experience design of Google’s search results pages. In short, the study found that users preferred speedy page loads to a greater number of results per page and to ‘highly interactive ajax features’. Although users reported that they preferred more results per page, their expressed desires diverged from their actual interactions. Google’s analysts found that search results pages with 30 results per page rather than the standard 10 per page resulted in lower search traffic and decreased ad revenue by 20 percent.

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On Wednesday Google unveiled a brilliant new tool, the Web Optimizer, at this year’s E-Metrics Summit. It puts the power of multivariate testing on an array of web metrics in an elegant and simple-to-use online tool. What was once a tedious process involving capturing web statistics, downloading log files, importing them in a statistics package, and performing complicated regression analysis has now been made simpler. Users will be able to more easily test multiple versions of a page and the effectiveness of individual elements on those pages to determine which combinations result in the highest conversions.

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An accessibility study conducted last month (via UK’s Webuser magazine) reveals that “not one of the UK’s top 30 retail websites meets the minimum requirements for website accessibility.” These retailers include the likes of Amazon, Dell, Expedia, Apple, PC World and British Airways. See the full list.

Some of the findings include:

• 23 websites had search forms, navigational links or advertising banners that failed to work without Javascript;
• Just two sites, Apple Computer and John Lewis, of the 30 tested, provided appropriate text descriptions for all images which helps people who are blind or partially sighted understand the purpose of visual content;
• 29 websites did not use shortcut links to help people with serious physical impairments navigate through a page.

This finding follows a recent ruling on a lawsuit against Target.com, which has woken up American e-commerce sites. Perhaps we are beginning to take heed on a global scale. These findings, though seemingly discouraging, should provide renewed hope for the disabled community in that the matter is finally getting the attention that it deserves. This new revelation should provide some impetus for change toward greater equality on the web.

For more details on UK’s accessibility laws, visit the Disability Rights Commission website.

Computerworld.com published an article yesterday about the coming and recent changes in graphical user interfaces by Robert Mitchell. The article highlights advancements which are meant to simplify the user experience based on context, whether it be technological (device used) or operational (item selected). Such advancements include voice commands for mobile devices such as PDA’s, customized layouts for different screen sizes, and menus which change based on the item being edited. The latter, most notably comes from Microsoft’s own Office applications which are renown for their feature-richness and consequently overloaded menu items. As Mitchell reports, the traditional drop-down menus will be replaced by a contextual ribbon bar in Office 2007. Therefore, if you are editting the table of contents, the menu associated with this feature would appear. This echoes the manner in which the traditional ‘picture toolbar’ now appears when editting an image.

Beyond contextual menu items, the GUI will also begin to account for screen resolutions in an even more substantial way than we are currently familiar. For the web, the need to adjust layouts to match screen resolutions has been a fundamental principle which has been tackled with elastic and fluid layouts. The desktop GUI is now set to take this principle yet another step forward to accommodate even more real estate; Mitchell states:

Tomorrow’s GUIs will adapt to bigger screens and multiple displays by rearranging the desktop and relegating different content to primary and secondary displays. Larger display acreage could also push gesture-based input devices such as touch screens, digitizing pads and the stylus into the mainstream.

Although the idea is a simple one: to adjust to a user’s perspective and technology, with the variety of devices and plethora of features in modern-day applications, this small target is an ever-changing one. Mitchell’s article presents great promise for enhanced usability for our most pervasive devices as our GUIs begin to catch up with other advancements in the field.