Wow, it doesn’t happen everyday to be cited by LukeW in his speech at the IA Summit 2007.

Take a look at the slides.

I’m now honoured to announce that, after a long & working hard weekend we published this night the redesigned version of the Gabetti Property Solutions Agency website and the brand new version of the Gabetti Group website (disclaimer: Gabetti is the real estate group yours truly works for).

From the very beginning we wanted the interfaces to be user compliant and the whole wireframing and mockuping phases to be striclty user centred: a lot of work both from Nurun (the agency that developed the site) and us was spent into this. Moreover, we performed a full optional eye tracking study on all the interfaces throughout the whole design phase, a tough job that rewarded us with great usability, at last - I’ll talk about the study once we formally publish it.

This is a beta version and a lot of work needs to be done in the forthcoming month. I’ll update you on major releases here, preparing for the official launch by owr very own Marketing department.

Stay tuned. Stay foolish.

Blogging
It’s now a year since I switched the blog to the English language and - even if I expected a more vertical growth in RSS subscribers - I nearly doubled my BlogLines subscribers (or, staying with Feedburner, I’m having a media of 35 subscribers: whom I’d really like to thank).
I never blog as much as I’d like, mostly for time constraints; but - counting my 2006 posts - I reach the quote of 64: which means something more then 1 per week. not good, not bad, just ok for me as I use my blog as a life diares for when I’ll grow up (now: when?

Eyetracking
i’ve done a lot of eyetracking in the last 3+ years. most of my activities were centred on RnD (I’ve filed a couple of patents on it) but I’m mostly known for my eyetracking analysises published by UXmatters. I’m really honoured of the results, the last one - published back in June - got more than 40 comments to the article. Further more then any other article published by UXmatters.
The future? Well I’m still in the eyetracking business working with the University of Rome (ciao Francesco) but I don’t feel eyetracking is going to be a 2007 life tag. Making the wheel turning.

Family
I realy enjoyed family life this year. A lot of readings, vacations and time to spend with family. Things are going to change in 2007: during week days I’m able to see my wife and baby just a couple of hours a day. Coming home too late from work: things need to be done.

Flickr
Still enhancing my love for Flickr after 3 more years: got a pro account since 2005 and part of our Christmas present to my sister was a PRO Flickr account. It’s definbitely the killer application for digital photography (and I’m still waiting for GPS wi-fi/UMTS enabled digital cameras)

Francesca
She’s our life. Growing up at the fastest pace. If you’re a friend of mine you can take a look at the Flickr photoset (just the best shots, I’m counting approximately 500 of them). Drop me a line if you’re a friend of mine but have no access to the set.

Gabetti
I’m really honoured to work for this company. A lot of innovation is going on but it’s too early to talk about it. Let’s say we have an appointment late in January 07 and another one late in February 07. But the most groundbreaking one is coming up more or less near April 07. Stay tuned.

Mobup
If you regularly read this blog you couldn’t have missed it. It’s open source, it’s free, it uploads your cameraphones shots to Flickr. Originally born in July 2005 in Consultechnology it’s now available to every developer or cameraphone lover. We now have a top of the notch CTO (Thomas Landspurg) and a dedicated team of developers. We’re improving but we still need your support and suggestions.

Public speaking
I think 2006 has been the most crowded with speaking opportunities year in my life: I featured international conferencies, nation wide ones, universities, and small but innovative ones. I wa sborn for standing on a stage since I enjoied myself being an MC back in early 90s.
2007 coming up with other great seminars!

Second life
I discovered it at the Interaction Frontiers 2006 thanks to Andrea Benassi *see his presentation here). I now say that Second Life is today what the web was in 1995 a great opportunity for trend setters and first movers. I count myself in. more on this coming really soon.

Writing articles
I count more than 50+ articles in the last 4 years published on the web (Idearium, UXmatters and Flashability mainly). I prefere writing in english due to the broader audience I can reach.
A book is oin the air for 2007 but I’m really not sure whether it’s going to see the light or not. At the moment I’m really to busy with Gabetti (see proper life tag) to think about writing.

Have a great 2007!

Never say never could be the claim of this post. And my life in the last months really proves it.

I’d have said I’d never ever abandoned research. But now I’m managing a lot of innovating and interesting projects at one of the leading real estate (!!!) firms in Italy. Didn’t thought that research is just one of the faces of innovation.

I’d  have said that this little italian guy was far to little to be cited by his U.S. UX myths. But then Luke Wroblewsky (!!!) wrote an entire post speaking of my UXmatters article on forms label positioning.

I’d have said that Italy was the farest province of the Internet empire. But then small projects like yours truly’s Mobup and bright minded companies such as Kallideas are taking the worldwide stage (and - BTW - it’s opening an office in Silicon Valley. VPs keep your eyes on them!).

And I have my two loves with me in this wonderful adventure.

Thank you.

Hope you’ll find it useful.

My post raised some buzz that eventually lent to an invitation from the Crazy Egg crew to their private beta program. I was happy to accept since I was so curious on the effectiveness of the results.

To summarize my position (disclaimer: the company I work for sells Eye-tracking services):

• You should care of what your users sees MORE then of what they click (otherwise you won’t be able to figure out why they haven’t clicked on certain links);
• The users interactions with a web site/interface shouldn’t be summarized to just their clicks;
• Crazy Egg is a cool app for zero-budget websites who care fo some more information on their users’ activity;
• Even though Crazy Egg disappears when compared to Eye Tracking technology it totally stands over all the other log analyzer softwares.

After joining the beta testers group I tried Crazy Egg first on this site (too few clicks) and then on the HOTMC.COM web site homepage, collecting a total amount of 3432 clicks in 10 days.

Have I changed my mind? IS click-tracking the NEW eye-tracking?

Well. no.

As you can see from the above pictures (click on them to zoom in) the results on click hot areas reported (on the left) are completely different from gaze hot areas.

Questions such as:

• Is my logo placement effective (e.g. Is my logo seen/perceived)?
• Is the top-left menu perceived as the main navigation widget?
• Is the design of the central (main) column effective?

remain sadly unanswered in the left image but find some anwers on the right one (the eye tracking one, so to say).

You can also see how click behaviours differ from sight behaviours: you don’t click everything you’ve seen and - interestingly - one of the least seen elements on the page (the Hotboard link nearly the base of the right most column) is the MOST clicked (I can give explanation on this if interested, just leave a note in the comments).

To conclude I’ll say that - where affordable - eye tracking remains the best way to user/reality check you designs (as said before Tobii eye tracking systems record the clicks too) but Crazy Egg is probably the best statistic visualization tool I’ve ever seen (a whole lot more then Webtrends) and let you discover some interesting data on your users’ click behaviours (in the above case we discovered that our users used the HOTMC.COM site to access our community forums).

The Interaction Frontiers organizing

After the Interaction Frontiers 2006 site has been launched we started getting confirmation from the potential speakers we have contacted: names like Pabini Gabriel-Petit (who’s gonna key-noting), Sebastiano Bagnara (Politecnico Design), Christian Peters (Fraunhofer Institute) and Antonio Rizzo (Siena University) are all onboard; but other big names are about to be added!

I’m really enjoining this year organizing: having a sponsor (Kallideas) behind us makes possible have speakers from abroad that otherwise would have been difficult to bring to Italy. I’m pretty confident this year Frontiers’re gonna be such a inspiting and wonderful event.

Writing on Eyetracking

The few days of vacation I had have made it possible to write down the analysis I made on label positioning in web forms. I started the whole lab setup from Luke Wroblesky article “Web application form design” and Luke himself who’s to kind to help me both during test prep and results analysis. Cannot wait to see your feedback on my results (quite interesting, I’d say )

Card sorting

In the last weeks we conduct some interviews at Regione Lombardia key people in order to design a site devoted to security and prevention. This interviews lead to a 140+ cards to be communitary sorted in a 12 people meeting.

The results were absolutely great and I’m sure that site info architecture will rocks (I’ll spend part of the next week analysing the card sorting results and merging them together in a wireframing prototype).

Family life

Tomorrow we’re having Francesca’s baptism: it’s been a tough week organizing the lunch for our friends and relatives, the small cadeaux and Francesca’s dress (Maurizio and Elena finally solved the situation with a present of a couple of wonderful dresses for our little princess).

But I also have been so lucky to have a long chat with Frank Rose, contributing editor at Wired Magazine about the Eye Tracking research projects I’m currenlty working on, stressing those on remote control for Television/Video content: they’re both based on a remote usage of eyetracker in order to interact with the content on the video. In one of those the user can unconsciously rotate the real 3d scene selecting the character/object she preferes.

My opinion is that existing TV remote controls are unusable when the user needs a deeper interaction with the filmed scenes since she has to look down at the remote to find the buttons that need to be presses, while - using eye tracking technology - she could easily watch at the screen and select what she likes/needs without looking somewhere else.

It was a deep 40mins chat that I won’t be able to summarize here, I’ll just wait for Frank’s piece being published.

After receiving the data we elaborate a series of analyses based on position of the eyes (mapping on the correspondent street target), size of the pupil, frequency of saccades, blinking activity, etc. etc.; the system also has networking capabilities in order to propagate the alarm. Being base on eye tracking means we’re using infrared light, thus being independent from light condition and being the HCI interaction absolutely natural, with no side effects to the driver.

I know there’s a bunch of other anti-drowsiness systems based on the use of similar technologies, but I pretty sure our systems outstands all the competitor.

Interested in? Curious? Drop me an email or come for a chat on Thursday.

Update: the slides (Italian only) are online