People mingling and buying books during the coffee break
It just wouldn't be a conference without Microsoft Surface
Jared Spool (UIE) - Designing for content rich sites
Twitter: #jmspool Slides: -
Jared Spool could probably have ended up a stand-up comedian instead of a usability expert
The main theme in Jared's talk was the scent of information: how we humans track information the same way we would track prey in the forest. In Jared's own words: "Good content must suck". He went on to clarify that he meant like a vacuum cleaner. In the studies Jared conducted he compared the behaviour to a fox chasing a rabbit and where there was good scent the user would find what she was looking for. Here are my notes:
- There is absolutely no truth to the "three clicks theory". Where there is scent people will find what they are looking for.
- Provide good trigger words, they help carry the scent.
- Search logs are an excellent way to pick up trigger words and that users that resort to searching first thing is usually telling you that the scent of information on your site is weak. This is a sort of learned helplessness and after enough times trying to navigate through a site not finding what they are looking for the user will reach for the search box.
- Scrolling has limited impact on the ability to find information but a lot of the reason for the "above the fold" design approach is that users thing that the same design fluff that they see above the fold will continue below the fold.
- Blue and underlined is a terrible markup for links (the colour that we have the least receptors for + cutting of the decender) but users have become habituated and it therefore works. Then Jared went on to make fun of Swiss astrophysicists.
- Banner blindness is also the result of habituation to what Jared referred to as "busy crap".
- Start designing bottom up. The home page is the least viewed of all pages.
- Call reps are a great source of trigger words.
- Using back, pogo-sticking and using search are tell-tale signs that the scent is to weak or as Jared made us chant in chorus: "The back button is the button of doom".
- Users don't want to navigate globally if you spend to much time on that you are solving a non-existent problem. Because users don't search for categories (searching for books at amazon.com is less likely to happend than someone searching or a title).
- Jared says mega-dropdowns suck because they weaken the scent.
- Don't piss them around with irrelevant stuff in order to make the users stay on the site longer, it won't succeed.
Harry Brignull (Madgex) - What you need to know about eye-tracking
Harry held a short en concise workshop where he talked about common misconceptions of eye-tracking. He emphasized that eye-tracking only tells you what the user is looking at and that there is a big risk over over-interpreting the information. These are his 4 things you need to know about eye-tracking:
- It only tells you what the user looked at not what they did or said.
- It only tells you what the user looked at at the end of the seccade but not what they grazed over or what their peripheral vision picked up.
- Eye-tracking is not scientific by definition even though it looks sciency, there is a risk of being carried away and over-interpret.
- To interpret any eye-tracking data you must know the question being asked to the participant.
Justin Davis ( -
Madera Labs)
Make it obvious: Affordance as design tool
I signed up for a presentation by Donna Spencer but it was instead being held by Justin Davis. I'm not quite sure why. Unfortunately this presentation was really beginner level although for people who don't know what affordances are I'm sure it was rewarding to attend. Justin talked about the history of affordances (Gibson, Norman, Gaver etc.) and then how the initial concept has a slightly different meaning than it did in the science of perception which Gibson studied.
An affordance, in Gibsons view, is our perception that something, unbeknownst to us, affords a certain action. The perception that a surface invites to a certain type of action and is relative to the actor: an infant and a grown woman won't perceive the same affordance in a flight of stairs (the baby is to small to use them).
It only included real physical objects in Gibson's original theory.
Norman transplanted the term into HCI and instead of only taking the physical capabilities of an actor into account also made the term include the actor's goals and past experience. The meaning came to shift more to "invite to action" rather than the original "affords an action". Also Gibson never meant to include things on a computer screen because he based his theory on how light bounced of surfaces (ambient optical array).
Gaver expanded on the concept and categorised affordances into false (looks like an affordance but isn't), true (looks like an affordance and is one) and hidden (doesn't look like an affordance but is one).
Then Justin went on to talk about the importance of designing button that look like real world buttons and therefore affords clicking. My question remains whether or not this is the result of habituation only or the fact that the button looks like a real world object.
Justin's three guidelines:
- Mimic in real life properties.
- Watch users, do they perceive a button as clickable or not?
- Respect convention.
Peter Merholz (Adaptive Path)
Product Strategy and Planning Tools
Twitter: #peterme
Slides: -
Peter was really hard to capture on camera, he kept running back and forth as he was talking
Peter's workshop was the first part of the Adaptive Path UX Intensive set of workshops. It was more a set of exercises to use when focussing, defining and setting scope for your design strategy than a lecture (like the previous workshops). The session centred around of how to implement the right design strategy for your product. The most important take-away for me was exercises for deciding which features to cut and how to design a realistic road map for future releases.
After the seminar we there was a screening of the movie Objectified and we proceeded to have drinks at an Irish bar, food at a seafood restaurant and finally some more drinks at the aforementioned Irish bar.
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