Top 10 2006 life tags

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!

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.

Busy week

I’d say this was really a tough and busy week, not many like this one in a year!

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).

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.

Eyetracking analysis on forms usability

My newest UXmatters article is out: in this one I present findings from eyetracking tests we did to evaluate the best solutions for label placement in search forms.

Just a couple of notes befor you jump in and read the whole article (with a LOT of images):

• Form labelling is more important than you usually think
• The more compact the form, the better
• Never use drop-down lists in search forms, if you can avoid it

We tested a bunch of interesting sistes such as Google, Amazon, eBay, Flickr and useit (Jakob Nielsen’s site). I really hope our findingds could be of any help to you guys out there.

UXnet community building

UXmatters publishes an article by Pabini Gabriel-Petit, John Ferrara and Louis Rosenfeld on the Local UXnet Ambassadors initiative. The article gives a deep insight on the work we Amassadors are doing, the way we’re doing and the problems we’re trying to solve (on the same subject you might want to give a look at the paper I co-authored for CHI2005).

The goal of the UXnet Local Ambassadors Initiative is to foster the growth of UX communities around the world and facilitate networking among them.

The article reports a small list of sidebars from Keith Instone, Pabini herself, Nick Finck and yours truly. It’s a great honour for me having my humble sidebar appearing side by side within such a cream of the crop stories.

Eyetracking forms

We finished today, with the help of CT Innovative Marketing Research girls, a series of eye-tracking tests on form elements positioning for my next UXmatters article (you might want to read: “Introduction to Eye Tracking: Seeing Through Your Users’ Eyes“).

In brief: a double set of tests has been conducted on three small user groups (rookie, intermediate, pro) in order to fastly evaluate the best possible positioning of form elements and the relationship between each label and its input element.

Even though I’m going to spend my nearly 10 days vacation time (geez, I REALLY need some time off work evaluating the results, some interesting facts have already arisen. But, you know, you’ll have to wait for the article to know them

Eyetracking at UXmatters

UXmatters, the recently born magazine on User Experience and surroundings, publishes the first in a series of articles on eye tracking tecnology/strategy written by me (and perfectly edited by the wonderful Pabini Gabriel-Petit). In this number: Introduction to Eyetracking: Seeing Through Your Users’ Eyes.

Eyetracking can show which parts of your user interfaces users see and which parts seem to be invisible to them�not just by observing users and gathering qualitative data, but also by analyzing their gaze plots and other quantitative data.

Eyetracking provides a relatively quick and straightforward way of conducting studies of any kind, making it possible for me to present reports on eyetracking studies every month in UXmatters. Through these studies, I will evaluate specific user tasks and interactions with Web pages and user interfaces. My reports will demonstrate best design practices through the analysis of quantitative test results.

Next Month�Eyetracking and Field Label Placement in Forms.