UsableWorld — “This blog is about my personal goal, as a psychologist, to improve people’s lives through better design and use of technology.”
A personal blog about “real” usability. Smashing!
“The focus of your blog should be decided before your first post and then committed to. Random blog entries about a melee of topics might work for a personal blog read by friends and family, but is not a good approach for a serious, professional blog. The lifeblood of any blog is in its loyal subscriber base. And readers are more willing to subscribe to blogs that talk about their area of interest on a consistent basis.”
Looks like WebWord is middle of the road. I definitely “sin” too much considering this is a usability blog. Time to whip me! ** crack!! **
“So let’s get right to it: software EULA’s are broken. They’re unusable. And not just for the reasons you might think. Pretty much everything about the EULA experience is horribly, horribly wrong.”
“This article discusses users’ visual scan paths of web pages containing text and/or pictures while conducting browsing and searching tasks. User performance on three usability tasks on an e-commerce website is described. Results show that users follow a fairly uniform scan path when browsing through pictures, and a more random path while specifically searching through them. Additionally, users appeared to follow Nielsen’s ‘F’ pattern (2006) while both browsing and searching through text-based pages.”
Eye Gaze Patterns while Searching vs. Browsing a Website
If you like pretty images, including eye tracking or gaze tracking heatmaps, this is a good article for you. Nothing revolutionary here but it’s a solid research article. Don’t miss this one.
“The results from this study suggest there is a relationship between typeface selection and the reader’s perception of an email.”
“The appropriateness of the typeface also affected the perception of the email author in that the email using Gigi created a perception of an author who is less professional, less trustworthy, and less mature.”
“When choosing a typeface for a document, the level of appropriateness should be taken into account in order to avoid sending unintentional messages.”
Bottom line: Typeface has an impact on how people perceive you and your message.
The great frontier in Human-Computer Interface design is the Brain-Computer Interface.
Here’s some evidence of this shift: Thought-Controlled Computers.
Tell me I’m wrong and why. ;-)
Registration – Last chance for first impressions (Gerry Gaffney: Apogee) — “We often see registration processes that are designed to get the maximum amount of information. In a social setting, this is like being a person who is ‘only interested in what they can get’. If marketing or sales requirements have prompted you to ask for more information than is actually needed to complete the registration process, then you are running the risk of being seen in this light.”
Nice little article.
Six techniques for advocating design in your organization (Liya Zheng: Apogee)– “Changing a company’s product development process is not something we can do alone. The key to our success is in effectively collaborating with people from different perspectives: marketing, sales, development and other business entities in our companies.”
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