UsabilityNews

Tobii Technology, the global market leader in eye tracking, today announces the launch of Tobii Glasses, a revolutionary, cost-effective eye tracking system. Tobii Glasses will help researchers in commercial, scientific, and government organisations to gain greater levels of insight into the preferences, reactions and personal experiences of people in a natural environment.

“Tobii Glasses are truly revolutionary as we believe the product opens up entirely new possibilities for our customers to conduct research in a way that previously has not been possible,” said Tom Englund, executive vice president of analysis solutions, Tobii Technology AB. “The application of this product to provide insight into human behaviour can include anything from understanding buyer preferences, learning about gaze in operating mobile devices, playing sports, driving or operating machinery. In fact, the number of ways you can apply this technology to conduct research is virtually endless.”

The new Tobii Glasses look and feel like a regular pair of glasses and allow wearers to walk around freely, making it easier for researchers to create a real-world environment in which to capture user behaviour. This can be while they are browsing in shopping environments, using a computer, trying out a new product or reading an advertisement. Being comfortable and lightweight, the glasses have no distracting cameras or mirrors in the field of view nor do they require the user to carry bulky equipment. As a result, the user behaves more naturally giving the data a much higher level of validity.

The automatic data aggregation made possible by Tobii Glasses removes the need for hours of manual coding and compiling of information which significantly reduces costs and time-to-market for study results. This feature ultimately means that more research can be completed at an overall reduced cost to the business.

"We are thrilled to have had early access to the new Tobii Glasses," says Gill Aitchison, Global President, Ipsos Shopper and Retail Research, Ipsos Marketing "Ipsos looks forward to the incredible time and cost savings this will bring to our research organisation. Never before has it been possible to cost effectively conduct quantitative studies in real world environments and automatically see the visual attention a product or display received."

By Mike Elgan


The creation of a consumer electronics product involves input from a wide range of people, including marketers, engineers and usability experts. The task of product leadership is to pick and choose among competing agendas to arrive at the best product. It's difficult to do, because often there is no way to solve a design problem that pleases everyone.

The design priorities of the products we buy often reveal the internal power dynamics of the companies that built them. By understanding the design decisions a company faced, and looking at its choices, you can figure out which types of people are influential in the internal give-and-take leading up to a final product design, and which types are relatively powerless.

WHY THE iPhone 4 REVEALS DESIGNER POWER
The iPhone 4 is a marvel of industrial design. Form and function are united beautifully, and it's an incredibly useful phone. I bought one. I love it. But three design decisions by Apple demonstrate a new boldness, a new level of power by hard-core designers inside Apple - and a corresponding weakness by engineers and usability specialists.

In these three design areas, Apple was presented with a clear decision between design elegance and usability and chose design elegance every time.

By Jeff Sauro


Whether you're conducting an early stage test of a website design or a validation of a live site, these five tips can make any usability test more credible. The tips both temper skepticism about small samples and help you avoid overstating your findings.

1. Count the number of users that experience each problem. Early website testing is all about finding and fixing usability problems. But make those problem lists even more helpful by providing the number of users that encountered the problem. For example 3 out of 5 or 5 out of 7. These numbers will be crucial for estimating impact, prioritizing and for use in future comparisons.

2. Estimate problem impact using confidence intervals: Knowing how many users encountered a problem on your website allows you to estimate the potential impact on all users. Confidence intervals work on any sized sample to provide your best estimate. For example, for a design issue that 3 of 5 users encountered would tell you between 23% and 88% would also have the same problem. While the confidence interval is wide, it's highly improbably fewer than a quarter of the users wouldn't encounter this problem. Problem frequency can be used in conjunction with severity for prioritizing problems as there's never enough time or money to fix everything.

3. State a problem's severity separate from frequency: Not all website usability problems are equal. Assume frequency and severity are independent. Some design problems can lead to crashes, data loss or nuclear meltdowns (OK, the last one is not something you or anyone conducting a test with small sample sizes will ever deal with but you get the point). Rate your severity using a scale with at least 3 categories. You need to distinguish between the trivial many problems and the critical few. I'm a believer that having somewhere between 5 and 11 points on a severity scale will give you enough points of discrimination without going overboard.

Some online retailers are updating their looks for better navigation, while others are focusing on the bells and whistles of social shopping. But Web merchants would be wise not to forget the basics or risk frustrating their customers.

According to the “Revolutionizing Website Design” report from digital marketing agency Oneupweb, Web users expect a lot from shopping sites, but their focus is on the fundamentals that facilitate purchasing.

Clearly presented pricing and shipping information, for example, is the most important feature of e-commerce sites, followed by indications of credibility and trustworthiness. Visual appeal and functionality like cost calculators and search were also relatively important. But advanced features such as live chat and social hooks were important to but a small minority of respondents.

By Graham Charlton


ITV's World Cup website has plenty of room for improving the user experience for visitors, with a score 20 points behind that of the four other sites in a recent study by Webcredible.

Webcredible's World Cup usability study found the FIFA website was the most usable, while the BBC, Sky and Eurosport were joint second. I looked at the ITV live online World Cup coverage last week, and it was poor compared to that from the BBC, the actual live footage was hard to find thanks to confusing navigation, while the quality of the coverage left a lot to be desired.

The Webcredible study finds similar issues with ITV's navigation, with key areas such as fixtures and team information being hard to find. Also, news links in each section aren't as relevant as they should be. For example, none of the four news links on the England team page actually relate to England.

FIFA.com tops the study, thanks to a strong performance across all the criteria, including clear navigation and findability of key information on fixtures and team news, though it did lose marks for video content.

At first glance, Stamford Street in South London is a typical, busy London street. Many commuters use it as they head towards Blackfriars Bridge or Waterloo. But hidden away in a small part of Stamford Street is a small miracle.

Someone has decided to grow an illicit vegetable plot on a small piece of public land.

Cabbages, spring onions, green beans and strawberries grow amongst snap dragons, pot marigolds and sunflowers. The gardeners, whoever they are, are anonymous and don’t own the land. Instead, they are part of a movement - the Guerrilla Gardening movement - that is fighting against neglect and scarcity in public spaces by adopting them as places to grow things.

I think of this space when people tell me that they are unable to make user experience (UX) happen within their organisation. They tell me that design research is poorly understood in their organisation. That UX is often treated like an afterthought rather than a core competency. That they just can’t make a difference whilst their senior management fails to recognise the value of user-centered design.

I think of this space because we can learn a lot from the Guerrilla Gardening movement. Perhaps we need to adopt 'guerilla-user experience' practices and lead change from the bottom up. This might sound a challenging task, but it is certainly possible. As American Anthropologist Margret Mead once said, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."

But 'guerilla-user experience' requires us to speak a different language. The language of design and usability just isn’t sufficient to persuade many senior managers. The language we need is the language of business. The key to success lies in improving our skills in the areas of operations management and business strategy.

UXnet, one of the longest-serving professional networks for the UX community, has announced its disbanding. Launched in 2004, the site has been a resource for UX professionals since then, and has attracted contributions from many of the industries' luminaries. Director, Louis Rosenfeld, recently posted this announcement on the site:

"On behalf of UXnet’s board of directors, I have a bit of difficult news to share: we are disbanding UXnet.

"UXnet simply is not structured to achieve its goal of building a sustainable network of UX people. We don’t have the ability to tackle or pay for the kind of development work that such a goal requires. We’ve tried hard for eight years, but it’s time to recognize that our approach isn’t the right one and move on.

"The good news is that much of this good work–developing the infrastructure for speeding the development of user experience–has been taken on by individuals and projects that are not associated with UXnet. That’s fine by us–as long as it’s happening. It’s not important for UXnet to continue to exist for its own sake. We just want the community to grow and flourish by whatever are the best means available, and we’re thrilled to see the progress and success of other initiatives that support the UX community.

"Although we’ve never quite fulfilled all of our goals–all ambitious, and many of which have been a bit ahead of the curve–it’s important to recognize that we have had some successes. Perhaps most importantly, as one of the early facilitators of social networking for the user experience community, we’ve helped UX people connect at a local, often in-person level–stuff that doesn’t show up on the radar, but is the point of a network. All in all, it’s been worth it, and we have no regrets."

Useful research document for psychologically-minded UX people, PET Research emphasises the Persuasion, Emotion, and Trust factors that can either motivate or block customers at key decision points.

In this white paper:
- What is PET Research?
- What is the difference between PET Research and a PET Review ?
- How does PET Research differ from market research?
- What kinds of projects benefit from PET Research?
- Do you have a PET design strategy?

Dr. Eric Schaffer talks about doing in-depth PET Research to discover the drives and blocks that motivate your customers to make decisions about your products and services. He discusses the importance of identifying the PET design objectives that match organizational requirements, then doing research to find out which PET tools should be applied to your design to fulfill your conversion goals.

Digital TV software specialist, Ocean Blue Software, has released a white paper that explores the challenges facing health and social care providers, and looks at how assistive TV technology can benefit care communities, whilst reducing costs.

The paper highlights some of the issues and problems surrounding an increasingly ageing population. It also outlines how the NHS, local councils and government are striving to manage the extra pressures of debilitating conditions such as dementia, cancer and heart disease that predominately accompany old age. Will technological advances help to reduce costs, whilst offering a better choice and a greater lifestyle to the elderly and impaired?

Ocean Blue Software Ltd is developing set top box-based healthcare applications that are delivered through a digital TV and an enhanced remote control. Nearly half of older people (about 4.6 million) already consider the television their main form of company.* The system, called Nexus TV™ will incorporate security features, social networking and many more functions to ensure that people feel safe in their own homes. The technology will also help to combat isolation and loneliness as users will be able to interact with the local community; this is all achieved through the television.

The paper illustrates various assistive technology applications and systems that could provide benefits to individuals and care institutions as Ken Helps, CEO of Ocean Blue Software explains: “This is about exploiting familiar technology to give the elderly and vulnerable every possible comfort and security where they most want it - in their own homes,” Helps continues “At the same time, it addresses one of the greatest challenges for the British economy – how to finance support for an ageing population”.

SEO and usability are often seen as competitors in the battle to create effective websites. However, UsabilityOne’s latest report – developed with AtomicSearch – reconceptualises the way we think about SEO and usability.

The report, “Combining the Forces of SEO and Usability”, provides a roadmap of how usability and SEO services can be leveraged to complement each other, improving website traffic, the user experience and ROI. By identifying core areas of conflict and reconfiguring the development process, UsabilityOne’s report demonstrates how usability services and SEO can work together to enhance a website.

Managing Director of UsabilityOne, Shefik Bey, said: “Search engine optimisation (SEO) and usability services all too often exist in competition. Whilst SEO and usability are both crucial to a website’s success, the independent use of both is counterproductive to realising website objectives.”

He added: “Whilst the process of incorporating both usability services and SEO into the development stages of website production should not be oversimplified, by bringing both into the mix at an early developmental stage and keeping a careful balance of the needs and requirements of both, the results can be phenomenal.”

Welcome to 'the uxleadership journal', a new online publication for the UX community, created by Will Evans, Director, Experience Design for Semantic Foundry, and Daniel Szuc, Principal Usability Consultant at Apogee, a usability consulting Services Company based in Hong Kong.

According to its vision statement, the new journal believes:
"....that the world faces great challenges: lack of information access; health care; sustainability and global poverty. User experience professionals practicing the disciplines of information architecture, interaction design, usability analysis and accessibility, are positioned to face these great challenges.

"At its best, user experience design involves more than form and content and behavior, crafted in a meaningful context that leaves an impact over time. The highest aspirations of our profession will only be achieved when leadership and excellence are joined. Our profession as a whole must demonstrate the understanding and perspectives that can only come from the intertwingling of many different backgrounds, cultures and experiences.

"We are poised to lead by integrating our unusual talents across many fields: our understanding of real human needs, our passion for craftsmanship, and a systemic approach to creative problem-solving allows us to face these challenges and design a brighter promise for tomorrow.

"No one organization or discipline “owns” user experience design. It is greater than each of us, just as the challenges today are greater than any one person or organization can face. We must come together, just as the early founders of our nation did, so that we can create a brighter future."


Nothing trivial here, then! It's early days yet but let's hope this worthy new website does well.

By Patrick Neeman


1. There’s an unbalanced focus on the “shiny” and not the finished product
Let’s face it – the days of hordes of web professionals walking in with black turtlenecks talking about how we are creating “immersive experiences” that don’t relate to a return on investment are over. Many user experience consultants, however, are still focusing on shiny presentations with pretty wireframes without the knowledge to back up their reasoning. They drive up in the fast cars and present fast wireframes in slick presentation folders. They wave their hands around, doing their best impression of Steve Jobs.

There’s only one Steve Jobs, and even his opinion on products changes as he sees them evolve. Software and web projects should do the same over time. Companies are expecting well-reasoned solutions that will translate to their bottom line, improve their brand and will evolve over time.

The bottom line: Great looking wireframes are just that if there’s no depth.

I would almost say never trust a user experience consultant that delivers perfect wireframes; during the process of many projects, wireframes are used as communication tools and should never match the finished product. The real judge of a user experience consultant is the final result: how did the client benefit. If the consultant can’t answer this, shiny is useless.

By Nate Bolt, Brynn Evans and Cyd Harrell


Our 2-year-olds can use it. It's a brilliant entertainment device. But what sort of business potential does the iPad offer? Several companies have shown interest in mobile payment systems from startups like Square to mega-corporations like Visa. But what is the iPad's user experience in a real-world, business environment?

By now, one thing we know is that the iPad is not simply a larger iPhone, nor is it a smaller computer. Developers have been quick to port their apps from the iPhone to the iPad to ensure they don't miss out on this trend, but there are big differences in the underlying specs and form factor of the iPad that make this a fundamentally different user experience.

Lucky for us, Bolt | Peters likes researching UX, and we thought this topic deserved a little investigation. So we conducted an observation of 14 customers over three months at our neighborhood coffee shop, Sightglass, that just happened to be an early user of Square on both the iPhone and the iPad. We observed and recorded those customers' mobile payment interactions with the Square app, and interviewed select customers. Our first study was in December 2009 (with the iPhone) with a follow-up in April 2010 (with the iPad).

Two important business considerations came from our studies: (1) speed kills (in a good way), and (2) shared is the new private.

Do you like computers, but hate math? Would you love to work on creating cutting-edge technology, but don’t think you have the quantitative aptitude to be a programmer or electrical engineer? Then become a user experience professional! If you can count to 5 (the number of users in a usability test), then you already know all the math you’ll need! Everything else is art! I bet you’re good at art, aren’t you?

Ha! Sucker! It turns out you do need to know some math to work in user experience. Being in UX means that sooner or later you’re going to have to deal with data on user performance or satisfaction, typically from a usability test. Even if you restrict yourself to design and leave the user research to others, you’re going to have to review the results of user research to inform your design work, so you’re going to need some concepts for evaluating that data.

Specifically, you need to know a thing or two about inferential statistics, the branch of statistics that helps you determine what you can reasonably conclude about your population of users based on what you’re seeing in your sample of users.

By Nick Bilton


If you’re reading this blog post on a computer, mobile phone or e-reader, please stop what you’re doing immediately. You could be making yourself stupid. And whatever you do, don’t click on the links in this post. They could distract you from the flow of my beautiful prose and narrative.

This is the alarm currently being rung by some in the bell towers of technology. There is a lively discussion and some concern that computers, the Internet and multitasking are extracting a mental price.

Nicholas Carr argues in his book “The Shallows,” that the Internet, computers, Google, Twitter and the like, are making us into shallow thinkers and the neurocircuitry of our brain that long form reading creates is critical for society to function. Mr. Carr thinks that the Web, with its colored hypertext and endless abyss of bite-sized morsels of information, is making us stupid. And although there are plenty of others in this camp, there are some who argue that not only are our brains just fine on the Internet, but they are indeed better off for it.

Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist and professor of psychology at Harvard, argues on the Op-Ed page in Friday’s New York Times that the current outcry is nothing new. The same was heard, he writes, after the invention of the printing press, newspapers, paperbacks and television. Now, the fear stems from PowerPoint, search engines and Twitter. Professor Pinker points out that our brains are intended to be rewired and learn new things. It’s the way we are built:

"Critics of new media sometimes use science itself to press their case, citing research that shows how “experience can change the brain.” But cognitive neuroscientists roll their eyes at such talk. Yes, every time we learn a fact or skill the wiring of the brain changes; it’s not as if the information is stored in the pancreas. But the existence of neural plasticity does not mean the brain is a blob of clay pounded into shape by experience."

Jonah Lehrer, author of “How We Decide,” also argues that our brains are likely just fine on the Internet. Mr. Lehrer, a former neuroscientist, writes on his blog, The Frontal Cortex, that “given this paucity of evidence, I think it’s far too soon to be drawing firm conclusions about the negative effects of the Web.”

Despite ongoing industrial action and recent reports of heavy losses, British Airways has the biggest potential to generate the most from online bookings and increase revenue by having the most usable travel website, according to a new study released today by user experience consultancy Webcredible.

Webcredible’s 2010 Flights Online Report analysed 10 airline and 10 travel agent websites against 20 best practise usability guidelines which were each assigned a score from 0-5. BA was found to offer the best levels of usability in the online travel sector, scoring an overall rating of 78 per cent. Interesting findings from the report include:

- Budget airlines up their game: Budget airlines made the biggest improvements with EasyJet achieving a score of 77 per cent, an improvement of 27 per cent on last year. Meanwhile Ryanair jumped 12 places from last to 8th with a score of 66 per cent. Both improvements have highlighted that these companies that depend solely on engaging with customers online have recognised the value of a usable website to increase bookings.

- Industry recognises value of online engagement: With an increase from three to five websites scoring 70 per cent or above and an overall increase in the total average usability score of 64.4 per cent from last year’s 55.2 per cent, the online travel industry has been putting serious effort into making improvements to increase the usability of their websites, which has in turn allowed for more competition among companies. Although six out of the 20 websites tested made slight improvements in usability, including Opodo and Lastminute.com, fierce competition has led to a drop in rank for each compared to 2009.

- Still scope for improvement: Despite these overall improvements, 11 websites scored percentages in the 60’s and four websites scored between 40-50 per cent, demonstrating that many companies are still not doing enough to maximise their share of the potential revenue in this highly contested marketplace. The report highlighted that key guidelines that still need improving include supporting comparison shoppers, making pages ‘share friendly’, providing airport information, displaying clear progress bars and providing contact numbers during the booking process.

- Demand for transparency: The report also highlighted key disparities between travel agent and carrier websites, the most significant being transparency. Travel agent websites are typically more transparent with call centre contact details during the searching and booking process which could be due to differences in the types of commercial businesses and their approach to customer service. Furthermore despite customer backlash, carrier sites are generally less transparent than travel agents when it comes to total pricing, choosing to add additional costs later during users’ booking journey.

“Usability is essential so that site visitors can find the flights they’re looking for quickly and intuitively,” says Trenton Moss, Director at Webcredible. “A poor user experience could lead to customers going elsewhere and could make customers reluctant to complete other transactions online, such as checking-in. The online travel market is highly competitive with many companies offering the same flights and packages at similar prices – if customers find one site difficult to use just once, they will often seek out a competitor.”

Smart clothes could soon be helping their wearers cope with the stresses of modern life. The prototype garments monitor physiological states including temperature and heart rate.

The clothes are connected to a database that analyses the data to work out a person's emotional state. Media, including songs, words and images, are then piped to the display and speakers in the clothes to calm a wearer or offer support.

Created as part of an artistic project called Wearable Absence the clothes are made from textiles woven with different sorts of wireless sensors. These can track a wide variety of tell-tale biological markers including temperature, heart rate, breathing and galvanic skin response.

Data is gathered passively and used to trigger a response from a web-based database previously created by the wearer. The clothes connect to the web via a smartphone. When the wearer is detected as being in a particular emotional state, the database will send media to the clothes to help try to change a person's mood. To accomplish this, the clothes are fitted with display made of LEDs and have speakers built in to the hood. The display can show scrolling text or simple images and the speakers can replay music, sounds or pre-recorded messages from friends or family.

Smart meters represent a fork in the road for energy suppliers, reports experience design consultancy Foolproof in a new whitepaper: engage with customers now and build value-added experiences that re-energise the supplier-consumer relationship, or do nothing and run the risk of third parties exploiting customer data and further eroding brand loyalty.

A new paper released by Foolproof today reports findings from consumer research conducted with UK energy consumers. The research explores potential applications of smart meters, and the opportunities this rich data source could create beyond basic energy consumption monitoring. A number of scenarios were presented to consumers in focus groups to explore their potential impact.

Foolproof observed that customers currently see little or no value in the relationship with their energy supplier. They also feel little engagement with, or responsibility for, impending problems with supply and higher prices. Smart meters are to be installed in every UK home between now and 2020. But when they arrive, consumers will expect free access and portability of what they consider to be ‘their’ data.

This presents a challenge for the industry, says Foolproof. Energy suppliers need to think and act now about how they will use smart meter data to strengthen and deepen customer relationships using the clues in this report. To do this, supply companies need to quickly promote customer experience to being a senior discipline.

Tom Wood, a partner at Foolproof, comments: “This paper shines a torch into the darker corners of this important new area. On the one hand smart meters could be used to build value and loyalty by offering value-added services driven by consumption data. On the other hand, smart meter data could allow third parties to intrude into the customer-supplier relationship and further erode value.

“It strikes us that while the industry gears up for the operational challenge of getting smart meters installed into UK homes, very few suppliers seem to be thinking through the relationship implications: where’s the customer in all of this?”

This is the latest update to our Innovation Report, which is an ongoing guide to all that is original and pioneering in the world of e-commerce and online marketing.

The report is a distillation of ideas and suggestions provided by digital marketing experts as well as innovative developments spotted by the Econsultancy content team. Focusing on cutting-edge digital marketing tactics and strategies, the report looks at examples of innovation that clearly add value for consumers and help them achieve their goals more effectively. Rather than citing 'technology for technology's sake', we are looking for inventive and pioneering approaches to online marketing.

CONTENT
The techniques, tactics and companies cited in this report are divided into the following sections:
•Affiliate marketing
•Email marketing
•Online advertising
•Online video
•Mobile marketing
•Multichannel marketing
•Social media and online PR
•Search marketing
•Usability and user experience
•Web analytics and optimisation
•Business models

By Jonah Lehrer


In “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” the technology writer Nicholas Carr begins with a melodramatic flourish, recounting the pleas of the supercomputer HAL in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The machine is being dismantled, its wires unplugged: “My mind is going,” HAL says. “I can feel it.”

For Carr, the analogy is obvious: The modern mind is like the fictional computer. “I can feel it too,” he writes. “Over the last few years, I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory.” While HAL was silenced by its human users, Carr argues that we are sabotaging ourselves, trading away the seriousness of sustained attention for the frantic superficiality of the Internet. As Carr first observed in his much discussed 2008 article in The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” the mere existence of the online world has made it much harder (at least for him) to engage with difficult texts and complex ideas. “Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words,” Carr writes, with typical eloquence. “Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

This is a measured manifesto. Even as Carr bemoans his vanishing attention span, he’s careful to note the usefulness of the Internet, which provides us with access to a near infinitude of information. We might be consigned to the intellectual shallows, but these shallows are as wide as a vast ocean.

Nevertheless, Carr insists that the negative side effects of the Internet outweigh its efficiencies. Consider, for instance, the search engine, which Carr believes has fragmented our knowledge. “We don’t see the forest when we search the Web,” he writes. “We don’t even see the trees. We see twigs and leaves.” One of Carr’s most convincing pieces of evidence comes from a 2008 study that reviewed 34 million academic articles published between 1945 and 2005. While the digitization of journals made it far easier to find this information, it also coincided with a narrowing of citations, with scholars citing fewer previous articles and focusing more heavily on recent publications. Why is it that in a world in which everything is available we all end up reading the same thing?