Future Practice User Experience Webinars

User Experience guru and author now turned editor, former UXnet colleague and - last but not least - good friend Louis Rosenfeld has just launched a brand new initiative for all you UX professionals and practitioners out there: the Future Practice User Experience Webinars.

The webinars will cover the cutting edge of contemporary user experience research and design methods and will be hosted by top nocth UX speakers (such as Modern Web Form Design with Wroblewski - you might also want to take a look at my article Label placement in forms on the same subject).
These 60-minute webinars are initially available as live classes, and then are made available in a recorded, edited format.

There’s a 25% off special discount (for the live and, ultimately, recorded webinars) for the loyal readers of Yellow Line that will use this promo-code:

PENZOWBNR

Lou and his crew are doing a wonderful job with the UX related books adventure; I’m sure they’ll produce high quality webinars too!

Cited by Luke Wroblesky

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.

Gabetti site redesign - BETA version online

Just 8 months ago the Gabetti website looked as picted below, starting from July 2006 we worked hard to publish a brand new website with all the bells and whistles a website should have in 2007 (XHTML+CSS, accessibility, cool interfaces, some ajax magic, usability and a little bit of web2.0ness). The first result was a dead-man-walking, low budget version of the site created in a couple of weeks and useful to convey the Group new identity.

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.

Speaking at the World Usability Day

As previously posted, tomorrow I’ll be at the Bicocca University premises to hold a small talk at the World Usability Day 2007 (see details about the event). I’ll present UXnet - the User Experience related org I represent in Milan - introducing WHAT it is and HOW it can practically help other organizations.

Set your agenda on November 14th from 10.00am to 2.00pm (CET+1), Marco Martini Room, U6 building - Milano-Bicocca University. There’s also going to be a live webcast so you can follow the talks from your computer; stay tuned on the event official web site.

UXnet and the World Usability Day

As many of you probably know i am the UXnet ambassador for Milan, which actually means it’s my job to create connections between companies and the UX community, UX professionals and UX associations and son on.

In this continuing effort I decided to volunteer for the organization of the UPA World Usability Day at a global level becoming one of the UXnet provided Regional Liasons.

Since there’re just two of us in EU I’ve had the chance to get in touch with a whole lot of UX people from a lot of countries: UK, Spain, Belgium, Poland, France, and the list might continue… it’s been a WONDERFUL experience.

UXnet also recently welcomed Michele Visciola as ambassador for Turin and Rome. Michele alsso happens to be the President of the Italian UPA chapter and the organizer of the Italian WUD event in Milan (here’s the program and a list of speakers in English).

I think there shouldn’t be a better chance to talk about UXnet; yours truly has been invited for a short (short short short ) talk about our community. See you there.

Interfacce06

This year I’ll be involved - as part of the efforts of the divulgation of UXnet related themes in Italy - in the organization of the interaction day at Interfacce06 (Interfaces06) a whole 2 days on usability and user interfaces that will be held in Rome on the 10th and 11th of October 2006.

The call for papers is still open, you might want to give it a look (note: it’s written in Italian); don-t hesitate to contact me should you need further infos.

Eyetracking study on label placement in forms

UXmatters publishes today my latest article on the usability of web forms studied using eye tracking technology; I think that some interesting patterns arose, give a read if you’re building forms intensive applications and leave your feedback in the comment area of the article, I’d really appreciate that.
I based the test setup on Luke Wroblewski’s (principal designer at Yahoo) article “Web Application Form Design.” Luke himself provided valuable insights and feedback during both our test preparation and results analysis.

Hope you’ll find it useful.

Is Click tracking the new Eye tracking?

A couple of months ago I wrote a post to point out my personal view on what was considered the low cost alternative to eyetracking: clickrtracking, via a web 2.0 application called Crazy Egg.

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).

Clicktracking VS Eyetracking

It’s a while since I’ve noticed a Web 2.0 application called Crazy Egg which will show you (for free!) were the users clicked on your page using eye tracking analysis derived graphics such as heatmaps and some brand new visualizations for the overlays (colophon: my employer sells eyetracking services).

Let’s take a deep breath and try to understand whether or not this amount of data could be useful “to improve the effectiveness of your web site”.

I’d say that if you’re a part-time blogger or run a small ezine this kind of data could be of some utility to you, but if you’re a serious web application developer/designer or want to test the usability of your company /client site interface well, this kind or data are more or less garbage.

I strongly disagree with what is being said by Nick in the Weareseencreative post on the subject : you should really care what your users are looking at, otherwise you won’t be able to understand (and thus fix) why they aren’t clicking on a particular link or button (BTW Nick, the Tobii eyetracking suite we’re use tracks also the users’ clicks).

Moreover the users’ interactions with a site/interfaces cannot and shouldn’t be summarized to just the clicks, there a lot more: the images, the texts and the page designs which actively participate in designing the user experience.
The click is just the final step of a longer decision path thus showing where the user clicked definitely doesn’t explain WHY she clicked: I think that the most significative quote I can place here is that what really impressed me when I first approached eyetracking technology is that the mouse pointer is completely STOPPED during the whole decisional process; out of sight, I’d say).
And I think that is really important to designers and developers to understand WHAT the user looked at before clicking and WHY they looked at or interacted in a given way (and this is simply impossible with a mousetracking machine).

I don’t want to be misunderstood: my opinion is that Crazy Egg could really help to improve the overall usability of small and simple sites showing their creators what is clicked in a graphical way (a more complexe alternative could be a deeper stats/logs analysis, and my friend Lou could say more on this) but once compared to Eyetracking technology, its benefits simply disappear.

Eyetracking and forms. Again.

Ok. I’m back again with a new lab setup for my next UXmatters article on eyetracking. This is going to be number 2 on 3 on forms usability, I’m going to evaluate the best possible form label placement.

As I already said in my previous article,

Forms are the primary—often the only—way users have of sending data to Web sites.

that’s why we (me and Pabini, the UXmatters founder and Editor in Chief) think that eyetracking tests (and reports) on forms could be so useful.

I’m going to use Luke Wroblewski’s  article on Web application form design as a starting point for my Eyetracking lab setup and task prep. I’ve been in touch with Luke (thankyou very much) during the last few days in order to have the test pages and the tasks fine tuned by the article author; I’ll start tomorrow with the forms design and have the eye tracking lab prepared by Magda Giacintucci from CT|IMR.