What do we mean when talking about the “chrome” in a user interface design? An attendee asked this question during a recent course on Visual Design for Mobile and Tablet. Whenever someone asks us a basic question, I assume that many more people want the answer as well — and thus, this article on chrome.

• Definition: Chrome is the visual design elements that give users information about or commands to operate on the screen’s content (as opposed to being part of that content). These design elements are provided by the underlying system — whether it be an operating system, a website, or an application — and surround the user’s data.
• Not coincidentally, “Chrome” is also the name of Google’s web browser, though I don’t use the term in that sense here.

I don’t know who came up with the term “chrome,” but it was likely a visual analogy with the use of metal chrome on big American cars during the 1950s: the car body (where you sit) was surrounded by shiny chrome on the bumpers, tail fins, and the like.

Similarly, in most modern GUIs, the chrome lives around the edges of the screen, surrounding the middle area, which is dedicated to the user’s data.

Chrome at Different System Levels

Following are some examples of chrome, which vary depending on the “underlying system”:

• On a Windows PC, the underlying system is the Windows operating system. In Windows 7, the chrome consists of the Start button, the task bar, the system tray, and the recycle bin. We might also consider the gadget area to be chrome, particularly if a user simply sticks to those gadgets that ship with the system. (As many do, due to user inertia and the power of defaults.)
• When using application software, such as a word processor, the chrome is found in the menu bar, the ribbon or toolbars, rulers, scrollbars, and various specialized panes, such as Word’s thesaurus bar or Photoshop’s palette of color swatches.
• In a web browser, the chrome includes the URL field, the browser toolbars, the browser buttons, the tabs, scrollbars, and status fields.
• In a mobile app, the chrome often includes a status bar across the top of the screen and a tab bar with command icons across the bottom. Sometimes, there’s also a navigation bar below the status bar.
• On a website, the chrome includes navigation bars, footers, logos, branding, the search box, and so forth.

Chrome Obesity: Don’t Eat My Pixels

The penalty of chrome is clear: chrome takes up screen space, leaving less for the target content or data. This is particularly bad on mobile devices, where screen space is at an even higher premium than on tablets or PCs. But even on my 30-inch desktop monitor, the combined Windows and Excel chrome means that I can see only 67 rows of data in a spreadsheet instead of the 80 rows that would theoretically fit on the screen. Thus, without the chrome, I’d be able to review about 19% more data.

The spreadsheet example shows another downside of chrome: it accumulates as systems are nested within layers of other systems, each with its own chrome. Let’s say, for example, that you use Facebook. Within a typical desktop browser window, the user’s Facebook wall accounts for only about 48% of the web page; Facebook’s chrome and wasted screen space eat up the remaining 52%. (According to our definition, advertising isn’t true chrome — because it’s useless — but it’s still overhead, so I’m counting it here.) When you further subtract the browser and OS chrome, the user’s wall is allowed less than 40% of the screen space.

When I analyzed a range of website homepages 9 years ago, I found that the actual content was allocated a paltry 20% of the user’s screen. On today’s bigger monitors, the relative overhead consumed by OS and browser chrome is less bloated, so the 40% allowed by Facebook is probably fairly representative of major websites.

Because cumulative chrome often eats more than half of our pixels, one guideline is certainly to beware chrome obesity.

A second guideline is to consider ways of temporarily hiding parts of the chrome and reveal it only when needed. Doing so is dangerous, however, because what’s out of sight is often out of mind — and you definitely cannot rely on short-term memory in user interface design. Chrome that comes and goes works only if you:

• Use a simple and reliable operation to reveal the chrome (don’t use gestures that are obtuse or subject to accidental activation).
• Offer rock-solid consistency so that the hidden chrome’s existence is drilled into the user’s long-term memory through excessive repetition and the absence of any deviations or exceptions that would undermine learning.

Chrome’s Benefits

Although expensive, chrome has considerable benefits:

• Chrome empowers users by providing a steady set of commands and options that are always visible (or at least easily revealed if my guidelines are followed). Chrome also stays in the same spot, liberating users from having to locate it. Further, users are freed from the whims of particular web page or content designers; that’s one reason the Back button is one of the most popular features on the web. Chrome might be overhead in terms of screen pixels, but it’s power at the user’s fingertips that serves as an immediate escape hatch from obnoxious or useless web pages.
• Chrome offers a set of generic commands that work on all the different types of content and data that appear within its framework. Because it’s always the same, users have less to learn, meaning that they can focus on their real-world needs rather than on the computer.
• Chrome promotes consistency and standards in the user interface, which facilitates learnability and makes users feel even more in control of their experiences. (Of course, this applies only if you follow the standard, rather than invent your own weird chrome to confuse users.)

On balance, chrome is good for usability. Just don’t overdo it.

Written by: Jakob Nielsen
Posted by: Situated Research

Related posts:

1. How Long Do Users Stay on Web Pages? Summary: Users often leave Web pages in 10–20 seconds, but...
2. Accuracy vs. Insights in Quantitative Usability Summary: Better to accept a wider margin of error in...
3. Pros and Cons of Major CMS Systems Many companies approach us and ask, “I want to maintain...

Many companies approach us and ask, “I want to maintain and update my own website. What CMS system do you suggest?” When reviewing content management systems (CMS) with clients, we go over the pros and cons of the most popular systems, and evaluate their background and website capabilities to ensure that the correct CMS system is selected for your company. Sometimes a CMS system is not the solution for a company, and an affordable monthly maintenance program is more appropriate.

Following, we discuss the pros and cons of three major CMS systems: Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress.

Drupal

If you are the type of person who would rather hand-code the content of your pages than use a WYSIWYG editor (What You See Is What You Get, similar to document editing software), or if you enjoy tweaking the code that makes up the framework of a website, then Drupal is probably for you. This advanced CMS closely resembles a developer platform, rather than a traditional CMS.

While this system can be used by non-developers, developers will likely feel more at home here than in the other two. However, being more developer-friendly does not automatically make it more user-friendly.

There are dozens of additional functions that can be used to develop in Drupal in comparison to WordPress or Joomla. Every published piece of content (called a ‘node’ in Drupal) has its own set of commands and tags. These commands and tags can be accessed elsewhere (allowing similar functionality to be repurposed without having to be reprogrammed), which makes for a very intense experience (whether or not you know what you’re doing). For those that are not very technical, this can be the trial of their lives. For people who live in code, they can literally get lost developing some very cool websites.

While Drupal websites can act and function in some pretty neat ways, they are sometimes limited by not always looking that great. Just about any look and feel can be built into Drupal, but the nature of the tool puts emphasis on the back end functionality of the website. We have seen few websites built in Drupal that look and feel as good as they function. You can see this in the theme directory on the Drupal.org website, in comparison to other CMS websites such as WordPress. It is a shame, because with all of the development advancements of the software, it would almost be perfect with a stronger design interface and improved usability.

Drupal Pros

• Extremely developer friendly: great if you love coding
• Strong community to help discern the dozens (hundreds) of available functions and tags
• Can be used to create some awesome websites that can outperform the majority of sites around the Internet

Drupal Cons

• Not as designer-friendly or user-friendly, and hard for someone with little code experience to make the leaps required to do the very cool things for which Drupal is known
• Theming of Drupal has been a big limitation (until recently), perhaps because it has been developers (not designers) that are making the themes
• Getting a Drupal website published could cost you more time, and thus more money, than WordPress or Joomla

Joomla

Joomla blends some of the ease of use for beginners with some advanced coding capabilities. Designers will often choose Joomla because of the amazing capabilities that its engine has in making websites look fantastic. Newcomers to Joomla (and website management) will love the fact that it is very easy to use, and is customizable as more developers create tools that are easier to understand. Developers might choose the system because of its capacity for development and customization.

Still, Joomla is not as flexible as Drupal with its coding capabilities. While there are many ways to override default coding functionality, there are parts of the system that cannot be pushed and stressed as hard as Drupal. Also, while Drupal can be used to run multiple websites with one backend and database, Joomla lacks the ability to create multi-sites.

Compared to WordPress, Joomla has a ways to go in being as user-friendly. In cases where people use both systems to manage a website, those that lacked coding experience and a detailed understanding of the back-end of their website chose WordPress over Joomla. Joomla is simple enough that most can learn to use it, but not simple enough that everyone would pick it up easily.

Joomla Pros

• Friendly for most types of users, including designers, developers and administrators
• Huge community is awesome for assisting with website development
• Has been rapidly growing and improving itself for the past several years

Joomla Cons

• Still not quite user-friendly enough for everyone to understand
• Not quite as powerful as Drupal, and can be a bit confusing for some to learn
• Recently rebuilt the entire system from ground-up, and so many still using old versions (1.0.x); new version has some bugs

WordPress

WordPress is an excellent open-source system to use when creating a website that lets you quickly get your thoughts published on the web. While WordPress is often used as a blog platform, it can serve as a website CMS that can incorporate huge libraries of ‘plugins’ (such as social media integration or search engine optimization) to add powerful functionality to a website.

WordPress is extremely easy to use and setup. We have used it with clients that are new to the Internet, and they can pick this system up and use it quicker than any other system out there. Since WordPress is already developed to work as a blog, it can be setup to be a website very easily. WordPress also has an excellent WYSIWYG editor (with basic document editing controls), so content authoring is very easily done within WordPress. A commenting system is built in, as well as pinging services, multiple author profiles (for assigning content editing rights), as well as trackbacks and more. In most cases little needs to be done to set up the system, because it is initially set up to work the way most users want right out of the box.

WordPress allows for graphic designers to develop custom graphics for the website and to easily integrate them as a custom theme for WordPress. In other words, your website on WordPress can have any look and feel that you want. For example, Helen Sharritt Interiors (www.helensharrittinteriors.com) is a WordPress website with custom graphics developed by Situated Research, and you will not find this theme anywhere else on WordPress. Our graphic designers created the custom design, graphics and layout.

WordPress Pros

• Simple to use, no need for modifications
• Excellent for blogging or sharing thoughts sequentially
• Non-technical users can get the hang of it quickly
• Many free plugins for event calendars, social media, and other marketing tools
• Affordable solution to maintain your own website

WordPress Cons

• Not as developer friendly as other CMS like Drupal

Which Will You Choose?

Now it is time to make a decision. Joomla and WordPress are both known for their user-friendly interface, while Drupal may take some time to master but provide advanced functionality for advanced programmers. We recommend that you weigh the pros and cons of each popular CMS system listed above, and discuss these options with those that will be maintaining your website in the years to come.

If you have questions about content management, or any systems you are considering for your website, please do not hesitate to contact Situated Research. You can call us at (630) 522-0855 or email info@situatedresearch.com for more information. We would love to help you make this important decision, and help ensure your business achieves success with its Internet marketing objectives.

Written by: Michel Ann Sharritt
Posted by: Situated Research

Related posts:

1. Why Convert Your Website to WordPress? Why would you want to convert your website to run...
2. Improving Users’ Visits with a Website Audit Last week, we talked about the importance of doing a...
3. Did Your Shopping Cart Survive the Holiday Season? From 2005 to 2010, Cyber Monday sales (the Monday after...

According to research firm Score, Inc., the 2011 holiday season saw a 15% increase in web sales over 2010, for a total of $35.5 billion in online sales (while overall holiday spending was up just 3.8% from 2010).

The holiday season is not just about selling products to your customers. It also involves keeping those that come for the first time, and keeping them there. As said by Jakob Nielsen, “It’s an old lesson: It’s much easier to close additional sales with existing customers than to acquire new customers. People who’ve proven willing to give you money will often give you more. This is true for all sales channels, but it’s particularly crucial for e-commerce because the first order proves your credibility if you effectively handle follow-up and delivery.”

The following statistics about shopping carts highlight how website usability problems can impact sales:

21% of buyers said they “decided not to shop at any given site because of security concerns.” (Jan Riley)

1 second delay in page response = 7% reduction in conversion (Sean Work)

54% of U.S. consumers believe companies are more interested in selling products and services (Michael Fisher)

According to Aaron Marcus, Staples.com® in applying usability in their website found:

• 67% more repeat customers
• 31-45% reduced drop-off rates
• 10% better shopping experience
• 80% increased traffic

½ of your potential sales are GONE if customers can’t find merchandise on your e-commerce site

“At HomePortfolio.com we monitored site traffic, observed consumers in usability studies and worked with internal business groups. This helped us make changes that made the site’s purpose clearer and increased transaction rates measurably. The change increased the traffic up 129% the week we put it up.” (Interaction Design, Inc., 2001)

Some issues to consider that cause shopping cart abandonment:
(Charles Nicholls) & (Roger McGershen)

• Customers abandon their shopping carts when the ratio of the shipping cost to the value of the cart approaches 100 percent. Would you buy a $19.99 item if it costs an additional $14.95 to ship?
• Customers are sensitive to perceived price points. $9.99 seems cheaper than a $10.00 item. The same idea goes for shipping costs and how many items are in a cart. One study found that a $99 minimum order to get free shipping encouraged people to add more items to their carts.
• Not able to find contact information (22% abandonment rate): trust is lost if a person has no way, or difficulty in finding, how to contact you.

Nine ways to improve shopping cart retention and visitor experience:

1. Disclose shipping costs in advance.
2. Show security icons.
3. Create trust: Communicate your online store’s trustworthiness by having clear guarantees and contact information. Display company phone numbers on every page, along with hours of business, and place your guarantee and return policies prominently.
4. Easy shopping cart return: make it easy for customers to return to the shopping cart without having to go back through the purchase process.
5. Offer comparison shopping directly from your site.
6. Offer coupons and discounts.
7. Encourage user reviews and reward those customers who give them.
8. Do not have a graphic heavy page.
9. Make contact information prominent throughout your site.

When going over the final numbers of your holiday sales, consider the facts presented in this article. Consider how your potential customers view and interact with your e-commerce website. Review your weblogs and customer comments. Work with your hosting company and see how many shopping carts were abandoned. Most importantly, review the usability of your website.

As Jakob Nielsen said, “Usability rules the Web. Simply stated, if the customer can’t find a product, then he or she will not buy it.”

If you would like some assistance with reviewing your website’s usability, please contact Situated Research.

Written by: Situated Research staff
Posted by: Situated Research

Related posts:

1. How Long Do Users Stay on Web Pages? Summary: Users often leave Web pages in 10–20 seconds, but...
2. Pros and Cons of Major CMS Systems Many companies approach us and ask, “I want to maintain...
3. Overloaded vs. Generic Commands Summary: Overloading different outcomes on similar commands can be confusing....

One way to manage interaction design complexity is to have commands serve double duty. There are two ways of doing this, with different usability implications:

• Generic commands use the same command in different contexts to achieve conceptually the same outcome, even though details of the specific effects might differ.
• Overloaded commands use variants of the same command to achieve different outcomes — sometimes depending on the context and other times depending on where the command appears on the screen.

I discussed generic commands in depth in an earlier article. The most famous generic command these days is the pinch-zoom gesture, which works in most touchscreen user interfaces. In fact, the command is so pervasive that users expect it to work universally — and are sorely disappointed when they encounter an application that doesn’t support it. Pinching outward sometimes enlarges text and other times enlarges pictures. Users don’t know or care about the differences; they simply rely on the gesture as a generic command when they encounter stuff that’s too small and want to make it bigger.

Generic commands increase usability, because they allow users to learn one thing and use it many times. As further discussed in our training course on The Human Mind and Usability: How Your Customers Think, memories are strengthened by repeated activation, so the more places the command works, the better users will learn it.

Overloaded Commands: Often Confusing

You might think that overloaded commands are good as well. Having the same command achieve different (but similar) results sounds like an equally sound idea.

In practice, however, command overloading often confuses users:

• If a single command has different results depending on context, users often overlook the context and don’t understand why they get different outcomes when doing the “same” thing.
• When a single screen has multiple instances of what seems to be the same command, users often assume that the design is redundant and that all instances of the command will have the same effect. Or, when users simply grab onto the first instance they see, they often fail to notice that the command actually appears multiple times.

A classic example of overloaded commands is websites with multiple search fields. I can’t count how many times we’ve seen users issue a query in the wrong search on such sites. (However, there is an exception to the guideline to avoid multiple search fields: people finders on intranets.)

We saw several examples of confusing command overloading in our recent Kindle Fire user testing. For example, the Condé Nast magazine app has one “home” button at the top of the screen that takes users to the list of magazines and another “home” button that takes users to the Kindle home screen:

Two home buttons in Condé Nast’s Kindle Fire app.

These two buttons have different icons and appear in different locations, but they’re still confusing.

Even worse, the “back” button has many different interpretations across different Kindle Fire apps:

• In many apps, “back” means “back to the previous screen” (which is the recommended use).
• In ESPN, “back” means “back to home screen” (and should thus be a “home” button).
• In The New York Times, “back” sometimes means “one step back” and sometimes means “two steps back.” (When our users did a search and clicked through to an article, tapping “back” didn’t return them to the search listing, but rather bounced them back one step further.)

For a decade, one of the primary homepage usability guidelines has been to designate a single page as the one and only official homepage for any given website. Users are confused when several pages are referred to as “home.” In other words, don’t use “home” as an overloaded command within a website. The main page for a subsite should be called something else, such as “foobar main page,” “foobar overview,” or — if you must — “foobar home” (within the site’s foobar section).

For mobile apps, it’s usually a good idea to have an “application home” that users can return to as a safe base after exploring the app’s various areas. This is particularly important for content-rich apps, such as magazines or newspapers. Used this way, the “home” button serves as a generic command: conceptually, it always does the same thing, even though the specific place users return to differs in different apps.

In contrast, offering many different “homes” within the same site or app makes “home” an overloaded command, which is confusing.

A final example of the risks from overloaded command is the swipe ambiguity we found in our iPad user testing. When the same command (a swipe gesture) has different outcomes, depending on exactly where and how the user swipes, confusion results, unless the distinctions are clearer than they were in the apps we tested.

Effective Command Reuse

As these examples show, it can be a bit tricky to determine whether command reuse should count as a generic command (usually good) or an overloaded command (usually bad). There are two key deciding factors:

• Do people recognize that two contexts are different? For example, two different websites are usually so different that users wouldn’t expect the two sites’ “home” buttons to lead to identical destinations. In contrast, the context for two search boxes on the same screen is similar, even if the labels (which users rarely read) are different.
• Do people view the outcomes as similar or different? For example, returning to the previous screen is a strong enough concept that users will view “back” commands as conceptually similar, even though the previously screens will usually differ.

Both criteria depend on how users interpret the user interface. How can you know what they’ll think? Well, you could analyze it yourself and try to judge the strength of the similarities and differences. But empirical testing is safer.

Written by: Jakob Nielsen, Alertbox
Posted by: Situated Research

Related posts:

1. Microsoft’s Vision for Future Productivity From Microsoft’s Office YouTube Channel: Watch how future technology will...
2. BrainDriver: A Mind Controlled Car Imagine you could drive your car using only your thoughts....
3. Accuracy vs. Insights in Quantitative Usability Summary: Better to accept a wider margin of error in...

When Australian Philip Gith realised his pet lizard was a better smartphone gamer than him, he didn’t euthanise it for embarrassing him – he whipped out his camera.

And now the female bearded dragon he calls Crunch has become an internet celebrity due to its fondness for the smartphone game Ant Smasher.

In the video Crunch is shown snapping up the on-screen ants and insects with her tongue to the tune of the Super Mario theme, and when the game stops the lizard looks up expectantly at its owner, angling for another round.

Gith, 21, who works as an apprentice mechanic in Brisbane, uploaded the video to YouTube about a month ago to show his mates and three weeks later it had only done about 300 views. Then he woke up one morning and had 1000 emails in his inbox.

“It’s pretty insane … I had 225,000 views yesterday morning when I checked and now it’s got 1.7 million on it,” he said in a phone interview.

“I’ve had lots of TV shows like Good Morning America contact me and they wanted to play it on their show and I’ve had agencies and advertising partnerships contact me but i’ve got to sort all that out today.”

Gith said he’s had the lizard for about a year and also owns another bearded dragon but only Crunch has taken to the smartphone game.

“I’ve had video responses of people trying to do the same thing and their dragons just don’t react the same way,” he said.

So what is it about Crunch that makes her such a keen gamer? “It was kind of really random because whenever I feed her crickets she just chases them through the tank and just smashes them … every time you dangle something in her face she’s keen to eat it so I was like I wonder how she goes with this game which has got bugs crawling on the screen,” said Gith.

Peter Harlow, manager of reptiles at Taronga Zoo, said dragon lizards were the only type of lizard that could respond to what they see on a video screen.

“They have excellent visual acuity – that’s what they do, they look for little insects and then they go out and grab them,” he said, adding that Crunch would have thought that the on-screen bugs were food.

“He thinks it’s a real edible insect and he’s trying to eat it and he’s looking confused when his tongue flicks but he doesn’t taste it … it’s the first time in his life he’s grabbed an insect and doesn’t actually get to taste it.”

Harlow said he was surprised other lizards of the same type weren’t also taking to smartphone games as they are “very visual lizards”. He said it may just be that the other lizards weren’t as hungry as Crunch at the time.

He said a group at Macquarie University was actually conducting behavioural experiments with dragon lizards using video screens. “They play back a big male and the small male will retreat but if they play back a smaller male the big male will respond aggressively and try to attack the screen in some cases,” Harlow said.

But Harlow doesn’t see a future career for Crunch as a video game stunt lizard. “He seems to be losing interest by the end of it anyway because he’s realising that it’s not a good food source.”

Written by: Asher Moses, The Sydney Morning Herald (via Presence)
Posted by: Situated Research

Related posts:

1. Video Game User-Experience Research: New Situated Research Game Brochure Matthew Sharritt, President of Situated Research, recently created a brochure...
2. Next Generation Technology for Full Body Game Controllers Patent approved for Motion Recognition Clothing(TM) Medibotics’ U.S. patent 7,980,141...
3. Video Game Usability – Why is it Important Usability is an integral part of software development and has...

When conducting a website audit, keep these six points in mind:

1. Analyze your content
2. Update your sitemap
3. Review your URLs
4. Analyze your internal link structure
5. Ensure consistent design features
6. Check for usability problems

1. Analyze Your Content

Your site has been growing since it first went live. Do you really know what is on your site as of today?Did you create a content inventory system when first developing the site? If you did not it is time to do an inventory of your content.

When developing a content inventory, utilize either a spreadsheet or database to categorize and describe the information on every page of your website. Some things to include in the inventory are:

• Central topic or area on website; i.e. ‘Staff’ page is under ‘About’ area
• Page title and URL
• Short description of the page
• When the page was created, and revision dates if any
• Who wrote the page and who is responsible for maintaining the page and their contact information
• If there is a page expiration date
• Other pages linked to this pageImages on the page
• Page status – keep, delete, revise, in revision process, etc.

Once you have this inventory, you will not only have a great tool for maintaing your website, but one that can assist with the future development of your website.

Finally, remember to assign someone (or team) to keep this inventory up-to-date.

2. Update Your Sitemap

Does your website have a functional sitemap? Is it easily accessible to your website users?

Having a functional sitemap will benefit your organization in several ways. Visitors go to sitemaps if they are having any issues finding the information on your website. Helping users find what they came for will enhance their opinion of their visit. If they cannot find information or are challenged in finding information, what will they tell others about the website or your organization?

Sitemaps do not need to be overly stylized; a basic HTML sitemap will work. Search engines also utilize sitemaps as a part of how they rank you.

Have Sitemap → Have improved usability & visitor experience
Have Sitemap → Have SEO improvement / higher search rankings

3. Review Your URLs

Do you have a http:// and a http://www. version of your site? Or, did you move a page ( i.e. www.website.com/about/ to www.wesite.com/aboutus/)? If this is the case, then you need a 301 redirect. This will ensure your web pages retain their optimized rankings after the move among search engines like Google.

When creating your URL’s are you paying attention to how they read? Are they SEO (Search Engine Optimization) friendly? Making URLs with keywords in the URL will help raise your rank in search engines.

Both your visitor and search engines prefer a URL that is clean and concise. A friendly URL is like: www.website.com/about.html, while an unfriendly URL might read like: www.website.com/cgi-bin/gen.pl?id=4view=about.

4. Analyze Your Internal Link Structure

Your website internal link structure is important for a number of reasons. SEO is a theme throughout this post, and internal links are another part to your SEO. For example, if you click on a link titled “Doing a Year-End Business Review”, the page that you are directed to should be optimized for the keyword phrase “Year-End Business Review”.

5. Ensure Consistent Design Features

Are there areas of your site that are still displaying old template designs? Are your graphics up to date and consistent across your website?. While doing your audit keep in mind your overall design, including your page layouts and company graphics. Making some quick changes not only will improve the appearance of your website, but enhance your brand image and level of trust among customers.

6. Check For Usability Problems

How difficult is it to read and understand content and navigate your site? Do users get lost, or can they find what they are looking for easily?

Usability is essential for good websites. When people visit a website, they typically  are on a mission. Once on your website, users want to fulfill their goals: whether it is for entertainment value, searching for information, or for socializing with others. If your website’s visitors experience difficulty, it does not take much for them to become discouraged and go elsewhere.

Usability is a whole article of its own. However, if you do a full website review you will be well on your way to improving your website’s usability. If usability for your website is of interest, you can request a Free Usability Report from Situated Research. This report grades your website on 20 different areas of usability, and is free with no obligation.

If you so choose, you can take your audit a step further by conducting online surveys, doing reviews of materials like your PDFs, white papers, and other material your visitors might download.  You may also review comments that were posted on your blog, or on social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook.  Also, don’t forget to review  customer emails and phone calls that were handled by your customer service department.

A website review should be done on a regular basis, but if you perform it at least once a year you will be well ahead of your competition. More importantly, you will be enhancing your visitors’ time spent on your website.  This will increase the website’s marketing effectiveness, which is why you created it in the first place.

If you would like some assistance in doing your website audit feel free to contact Situated Research.

Written by: Situated Research staff
Posted by: Situated Research

Related posts:

1. Setting Your Business Website Apart From the Competition Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is concerned with helping to raise...
2. Why Convert Your Website to WordPress? Why would you want to convert your website to run...
3. Pros and Cons of Major CMS Systems Many companies approach us and ask, “I want to maintain...

North Idaho College’s athletic department has been geared for many years now to pursue a path of excellence. But with technology changing rapidly everyday, would that ideal hold up if the sports world expanded into a virtual reality setting?

Recently, I had an opportunity to watch both TRON movies, and the game concept from the new and old videos had me thinking about possibilities for the future. In recent generations, we have seen televisions transform from the clunky old cathode ray tube to LCDs and now into 3-D.

Digital convergence is happening all around us, and it won’t be long before we see the sports world begin to collide with the virtual realm. I think that one day our athletes might be able to download their personas into a virtual setting and compete against other players, schools or national and global teams.

Now this is all just speculation, but imagine if we could put a lifelike avatar into virtual reality and control them with our minds. It would be like having the world of “The Matrix” but using the gadget in “Avatar” to control the virtual body.

The ability to modify the physics of the environment could open up a whole new set of sports not able to be achieved in our gravity-forsaken world. Colleges and athletes around the globe would have a whole new arena to earn bragging rights in.

One game I know they would have to include would be very similar to the “Disc Battle” from the movie “TRON:Legacy.” For those not familiar with this game, it is simply a rectangle with a floor comprised of hexagon panels that break when hit with the disc object.

The disc can be bounced off the walls to strike the floor or opponent, but would not maim or decapitate any of the athletes playing like in the movies. When the floor breaks completely and the athlete falls through, he or she loses.

I could see NIC excelling at the “Disc Battle,” even if it was to become an official sport tomorrow. The game of dodgeball is closely related to the virtual game, and Cardinal athletes have already shown a prowess in the field.

On Dec. 1, Rec. Sports held a dodgeball night in Christianson gymnasium and some softball and soccer players could be found competing in that night’s events. If virtual reality came to fruition tomorrow, our athletes could probably top the field.

Games to play would be endless, like virtual paintball, racing, blitz ball (for all the Final Fantasy fans), quidditch, and simulated real world sports, but it definitely wouldn’t be a substitute for competing in the real deal.

Skill and hand-eye coordination would still be necessary and knowledge of how to play conventional sports can never be created virtually.

These games would just offer a new way to think outside the box of conventional sports rules and physics and allow an individual to take it to the next level.

Imagine playing baseball on a larger field with lower gravity or playing paintball in a zero gravity environment.

North Idaho College continues to dream big in the real world and there is no doubt in my mind that the dream would extend into cyberspace. I will continue to dream big for my own chance at virtual reality as I keep my eyes locked on the Silicon Valley.

One day in the not so distant future, may we meet on the virtual frontier and let the best virtual athlete win.

Written by: Eric Rivera, North Idaho College’s Sentinel Online (via Presence)
Posted by: Situated Research

Related posts:

1. Sony Says Games Will Read Emotions in 10 Years Sony is talking crazy, indicating that games may be able...
2. Avatars Can Surreptitiously And Negatively Affect User In Video Games, Virtual Worlds ScienceDaily (Nov. 11, 2009) – Although often seen as an...
3. Illusions Send Shivers Down a Gamer’s Spine You are playing a video game, and your avatar is...

“For example, if you make a gesture, the computer should be able to recognize this as “I want to use the telephone”. So with an iPhone for example, you have everything in a small device and you have to learn how to use it, here we want to do the opposite, the computer will have to learn what you want to do.”

“If you want to use a laptop, you just make a gesture it will recognize this, project the screen, the keyboard and everything, you won’t have to carry a device, no battery or everything, everything is ubiquitous, ubiquitous augmented reality.”

The system won the grand prize at Laval Virtual 2011 in France and was on display at the Digital Content Expo in Tokyo with two proof of concept prototypes. The first demonstration turns a regular banana into a phone. By using a high speed camera to track the banana and a parametric speaker array to direct the sound in a very narrow beam, this creates the impression that the sound is coming directly out of the banana. The second demonstration is a laptop in a pizza box. The video and sound is projected onto the lid of the pizza box and the user can interact with it by moving the playhead and changing the volume.

“For this prototype here we have tracking to get the position of the augmented object and then we project sound on the object as well as video. So usually for augmented reality, we can use goggles, we can use even iPhone or iPad with a camera, and you see augmented reality through this device. Here, it’s special augmented reality so we use a projector to directly augment objects, so it’s multi-user and the particular thing here is that we also have sound as well as the video.”

In the future they want to broaden the range of gestures and objects that the system can recognize and interact with, with the goal being the creation of a ubiquitous AR system which can learn and anticipate the intentions of the user in various situations.

[From DigInfo TV, where the story includes a 2:51 minute video; more information is available at the researchers’ web site]

Written by: DigInfo TV (via Presence)
Posted by: Situated Research

Related posts:

1. The Aeon Project: AR & Virtual Reality In Vehicles Designers Michaël Harboun, Fabien Chancel and Akki Reddy Challa have been...
2. Adidas Turns the Sneaker Into an Augmented Reality Device Can’t find your Nintendo DS? Try one of the new...
3. Microsoft’s Vision for Future Productivity From Microsoft’s Office YouTube Channel: Watch how future technology will...

This review is like a medical physical, and is helpful for both non-profit and for-profit organizations. During a physical your doctor asks probing questions not only about your physical health, but how things are going for you overall. Like a physical, the business review will help point out your good habits and diagnose any potential problems so they can be fixed.

To help you get started here are some of the things you should do as part of your review.

1. Check your balance sheets
   Did you make a profit? How much did you make? This is a great time to look at your return on your investments. You know to look at what you purchased and spent over the year. For example, one area of expense that can get missed is what was spent on education and training for you and the rest of the organization. Was it effective, or could it be done differently or more efficiently?
2. Review paperwork: business plans, contracts, and legal agreements
   When was the last time you took a look at your business plan? Business plans are not just materials to be shown to outside parties. Your business plan is a tool to help guide your internal operations, and should be a living document that reflects the ongoing changes within your business.
   Do you know the status of various agreements, policies and contracts? Many businesses sign long-term agreements, for things like yellow page advertising, lease agreements, and insurance policies which were all fine when they first started out. Some of these items might be out-of-date and costing the business money or an old insurance policy might not be covering your business as well as you might think. Oh, and don’t forget to look at the legal aspects of your business since that too might be out-of-date.
3. Review costs of goods and services
   Have you reviewed your vendors and service providers recently? It is important to actively manage your costs of goods and services. While price increases are a part of doing business, businesses need to keep track so their profit margin is not severely affected. This even applies to those vendors you might be using to supply items like coffee, snacks, and paper for your organization.
4. Evaluate your marketing and public relation (PR) efforts and needs
   This is the point where you take a closer look at what worked, did not work, and what needs tweaking for your marketing and PR campaigns. Take a look at each item separately. Some examples are:
   • Advertising
   • Trade Shows
   • Website marketing materials
   • Social Media marketing
   • Press Releases
   • Annual Report
   • Communications Policies

An important area to analyze is your various communication mediums and what they are doing, especially in this digital age. Website marketing and social media marketing plans are an important part of your communication as a business, and contribute to the quantity and quality of inbound leads for your business. Websites and social media presence not only bring business, but impact your company’s perceived reputation and level of trust among customers. Also remember, review those materials (i.e. PDF’s and PowerPoint) that visitors can download and pass around.

By making a conscientious effort to review your business, you will know exactly how your money was spent and the effectiveness of your efforts for the year. This knowledge can help formulate new strategies and an effective game plan for the coming year, helping your business thrive in spite of the current economy.

If you would like to discuss your year-end review with Situated Research please contact us.

Written by: Situated Research staff
Posted by: Situated Research

Related posts:

1. Has Social Media Helped Your Business? Two separate reports on social media marketing were released this...
2. Setting Your Business Website Apart From the Competition Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is concerned with helping to raise...
3. 5 Steps to Reduce the Pain of Starting a Business Blog Blogging can be intimidating for someone who hasn’t done it...

Summary: Better to accept a wider margin of error in usability metrics than to spend the entire budget learning too few things with extreme precision.

Last week, I made a slide for the new User Experience (UX) Basic Training course with the recommended number of test users for different types of studies. I like teaching foundational courses because they afford me just this kind of opportunity — to distill 25 years of usability process research into a single table. Patterns crystallize when complex topics are condensed to the essence.

For example, why do we recommend testing more users for card sorting than for usability studies? Because the usual rule, “we’re testing the system, not you,” doesn’t apply to card sorting. When eliciting mental models, we’re actually testing the individual users instead of a predefined artifact, and the variability is thus larger.

The thing that surprised me most about my own table: I recommend doing most quantitative user testing with a sample size that typically entails a 19% margin of error.

19% sounds sloppy. How come a fairly low level of accuracy usually suffices in estimating usability metrics?

Two reasons:

• A 19% confidence interval pretty much represents the worst-case outcome. Usually, the error is much smaller.
• The average usability difference between websites is 64%, so even in those few cases where we get a 19% measurement error, we’d usually pick the correct winner anyway.

These mathematical points suffice to defend the idea of saving budget and limiting quantitative studies to mid-sized samples.

But there are two deeper arguments that are even more important.

Focus on Big Problems

You shouldn’t care about small issues in usability. At this stage, we still have bigger fish to fry. When redesigning a website for usability, the average improvement in key performance indicators (KPI) is 83%. Clearly, most websites still contain horrible usability problems. Intranets and mobile sites/apps are often even worse.

Your focus should thus be on the really big design problems, where your user experience is failing to meet customer needs. Typically, there are only a few issues with immense bottom-line impact. Better to invest heavily in those crucial improvements than mess around with changes that’ll gain you only a percent or two.

Wasting your budget on overly precise measurements can easily sidetrack you from the important issues; for sure, you’d have less budget left over to work on them.

Maybe in 20 years, user interfaces will be good enough that our only remaining goal will be to fine-tune them for the last few percents’ quality gain. That’s definitely not the case today.

Ask More Questions: Learn More

If you ask only one question, you’ll get only one answer. That’s why it’s better to allocate any given budget across a wider range of user research, as opposed to spending it all on getting an ever-tighter confidence interval for a single metric.

Worse yet, if you have only that one answer, you might not know what the real question is. In that sense, quantitative usability studies are like a game of Jeopardy. Your study might tell you that the answer is 42 — but why? How should you change the design to score 50 next time?

That’s why I recommend investing instead in parallel and iterative design, which exposes diverse user interface solutions to the harsh light of user testing. Of course, with more studies, each one must be smaller, but that’s okay because your insights will sum across the studies. More research = more questions = more answers = better design.

All that said, there are still cases in which it pays to spend on “deluxe usability” — mainly in those rare organizations that have reached a high maturity level with respect to user experience methodologies.

From Small Studies, Big Oaks Will Grow

One final argument in favor of keeping each study at an affordable size is the value of cumulative insights across studies. Year after year, as you keep doing research on your site and your customers, you’ll accumulate learnings.

For example, Nielsen Norman Group has tested 1,600 websites with 4,090 users across our various research studies and client projects. Although we haven’t tested each individual site with hundreds of users, we’ve observed many key user behaviors thousands of times. So, when we say, for example, that users tend to scan content on websites and read even less on mobile sites, that finding doesn’t arise from just one study which might conceivably include 20 participants who were all particularly reluctant to read.

When you see the same behavior on many different sites, with many different user profiles, the evidence mounts and becomes much stronger than the confidence interval for each of the contributing studies.

Written by: Jakob Nielsen, Alertbox
Posted by: Situated Research

Related posts:

1. Castlevania: Good Usability, Poor User Experience Konami recently sent us a copy of their new title,...
2. Overloaded vs. Generic Commands Summary: Overloading different outcomes on similar commands can be confusing....
3. Are Your Users S.T.U.P.I.D? How good design can make users effective It is an...

It is an honest question: how smart are your users? The answer may surprise you: it doesn’t matter. They can be geniuses or morons, but if you don’t engage their intelligence, you can’t depend on their brain power.

Far more important than their IQ (which is a questionable measure in any case) is their Effective Intelligence: the fraction of their intelligence they can (or are motivated to) apply to a task.

Take, for example, a good driver. They are a worse driver when texting or when drunk. (We don’t want to think about the drunk driver who is texting.) An extreme example you say? Perhaps, but only by degree. A person who wins a game of Scrabble one evening may be late for work because they forgot to set their alarm clock. How could the same person make such a dumb mistake? Call it concentration, or focus, we use more of our brain when engaged and need support when we are distracted.

So, what does a S.T.U.P.I.D. user look like?

Stressed

“Fear is the mind killer”, Frank Herbert wrote. Our minds are malleable and easily affected by their context. The effect of stress on the brain is well known, if not well understood. People under stress take less time to consider a decision thoroughly, and they choose from the options presented to them rather than consider alternatives. Stress is often due to social pressures. Car salespeople know to not let a customer consider an offer overnight, but pressure them to buy right away.

Tired

Tiredness is one of the largest causes of industrial and motor vehicle accidents. Interfaces used by tired people should take into account their lowered sense of self-awareness and number of details that the user is likely to miss. A classic example of an interface used by sleepy people, the iPhone alarm clock is typically set right before bed. Unfortunately, it doesn’t ring if the phone is set to vibrate, the default state for many people. When a user sets the alarm, it would be useful to override the vibrate feature, or at least remind them that it won’t ring.

Untrained

Training for enterprise applications is more often discussed then enacted. Users are thrown at an application with a manual and a Quick Reference Card. Applications that are not designed around the user’s workflow have to explain their conceptual model while they are being used: “where” things are stored, how to make changes, who to send things to.

Complex systems that are used infrequently are a particular problem. In the design of the automated external defibrillator, it is assumed the user may have no knowledge of the science or training on the device, and will be using it in a chaotic, stressful environment. The frequency of use should drive design. Yearly processes, like doing your taxes, should assume that the users have never done it before. In rarely used interfaces, customization is likely to be less useful, but a comparison to previous year’s entries is very useful as they remind the user what they did before.

Passive

More important than the user’s mental model of an application is their mental attitude toward the task. Someone sitting in the front passenger seat of a car may have the same field of view as the driver, but unless they are focused on it, they will not remember the path driven. Nothing reduces effective intelligence faster than doing a boring task against one’s will. When a user is passive, complexity becomes insurmountable. Games aimed at casual gamers know to keep the interaction model simple, using a flat navigation and avoiding “modes” (e.g. edit vs view).

Independent

User centered design is a powerful approach because it recognizes that there are many reasons people use a system. Airline booking sites are used to buy tickets, but also to see if the family can afford to go on vacation. The designer should recognize that they cannot solve every problem, but should give users the tools to help themselves, to work independently of the application’s intended method. In internal enterprise systems, the top user request is often “export to Excel”. This often reflects that the system does not meet the user’s needs. Excel empowers the user to do ‘out of the box’ actions. It is the API to the real world.

Distracted

People are multi-tasking more than ever, whether it is simply listening to music while driving or playing Farmville while watching TV. Effective multi-tasking has been shown to be a myth, but it is a popular one. Paying “partial attention” to multiple activities has significant impact to your perception of an interface. Users are often said to be on “autopilot”, clicking on things by shape, rather than reading the text. An interface cannot rely on the user having a clear and consistent working memory across multiple screens. The task and details must be re-stated at each step to remind the user the step they are on and what they need to do. Frequent, automatic saving of user entered data is essential, especially as connections can time out.

Help S.T.U.P.I.D. users by designing S.M.A.R.T.

Start-ups often experience a shock when they emerge from the hothouse of heads-down development. Their intended customers barely have time to listen to their idea, let alone devote time to explore its features. The contrast between a small group of friends working intensely together on a single project with the varied needs and limited free time of their customers can be a disheartening experience.

Projects often fail not because the idea is bad, but because the value their service will provide is not easily understood. The question I ask my team is “What problem, from the user’s point of view, are you solving?” It has to be a problem the user knows they have. If the problem is not obvious to the user, in terms they understand, the solution doesn’t matter. Focusing on the problem keeps a project from drifting into fantasy requirements: solutions looking for a problem.

Design teams often use themselves as model users, but they are almost the perfect storm of differences between themselves and the users.

• They know the product exists and what it is supposed to do.
• They understand the internal concept, including its past and future ideas.
• They care, personally, about the product. Their success depends on it.

The user has none of these things. The user knows nothing about the product, doesn’t understand the concept, and doesn’t care.

What can be done to make S.T.U.P.I.D. users S.M.A.R.T?

Simplify

Why are simple apps popular these days? It is not that people don’t like features, it’s because instant comprehensibility trumps powerful features. In the old search engine wars, Google may have had a better search algorithm, but they became known for having a simpler design. Yahoo and others tried to become portals, losing sight of the users primary goal. I advise people to “Design the mobile version first” to help them focus on the key user benefits.

The down side is that any successful project expands and adds features to address additional user needs. What starts out as “Writer for iPad” can end up as Microsoft Word. Simple is not always better, but keeping the new user in mind helps find the right balance.

Memorable

An app is only as good as the user understands it. That starts with the name – is it cute or does it explain what it does? Is it “pidg.in” or “Automatic Mailbox”? The iPhone / iPad apps’s television ads were effective sales tools, but also trained a generation by simply showing them in use. Each step of a workflow is subject to delays and distractions. Ecommerce sites know to reduce links during the final checkout process. With complex transactions, the risk is greater that the user will have lost their focus. Remind the user what they are doing in big title text. Focus on delivering Clear and Consistent messaging and instructions, for example, adding side notes like Ally.com’s password guidance.

Accept Autopilot

Standard design patterns are good, but they also throw the user into autopilot. It makes sense to break them for critical decisions. The hard part is determining what a critical decision point is. Observing user behavior, customer service records, and identifying risks to the user’s data are good clues. If something is simple enough that the users are mostly on autopilot, for example installing software, make the default action a single click.

Recovery

The dark side of users on “autopilot” is that they will regularly make mistakes by not paying attention. Mistakes are generally not obvious to a system, but it is good practice to highlight destructive actions and enable recovery. Capture data in little steps. Saving form fields instead of form pages, prevents large data loss. It’s a good idea to highlight and ask for confirmation on big, destructive changes, like deleting a database. “Undo”, common on computers, but slow to come to the web, enables the user to recover from errors.

Gmail lets users undo moving a message to the trash.

Gmail also let you restore your contacts if you accidentally make a large, destructive change.

Test in realistic situations

There is an essential flaw in the two-way mirror usability test method. In the interest of copying the form of the lab-coated scientist, these rooms create an artificial aura of “science”. But as ethnographic research can tell you, real world usage is so different as to make the test questionable. It selects for a test population that is free in the middle of the day, motivated by $50, and M&Ms, puts them in an unfamiliar environment with a personal guide to focus on a specific task with no distractions. This is about as unrealistic as it gets.

In reality, the same person may have a child on their lap and only 10 minutes to look up a flight. The fact that an ecommerce session may expire after a few hours is trivial for some, but significant for people who only have a few hours a day to use the computer. “Universal Design” is a great approach, because methods to help specific disabilities tend to be useful to the general public.

Testing should go beyond the user interface and cover the basic business model. The Apple iTunes video download “rental” is for 24 hours. Unfortunately, people tend to watch movies at the same time each day, for example, after the kids go to bed. If your kids wake up, you have to finish it earlier the next day. Would it have killed them to make the rental 27 hours, so parents could actually use it?

Design for the right level of Effective Intelligence

Effective intelligence obviously varies across situations. People are ingenious at figuring out things they really want, but the simplest task is insurmountable to the unmotivated. Both scenarios are solvable, but an application that makes the wrong assumptions about its users will fail. (Interestingly, this study suggests that easier-to-use design can affect the user’s perception of difficulty, and encourage them to complete the task.)

One should adapt their strategy to the user’s desire and the problem’s complexity. Here’s an unscientific matrix for effective intelligence with software interfaces.

This matrix compares the amount a user desires to complete the task versus the complexity of the task to that user type. Different user types will have different measures of complexity, so one might create several matrices.

Low Desire, Low Complexity – The goal here is to finish these tasks as fast as possible. Follow standard design conventions, seek to eliminate steps.

Low Desire, High Complexity Complex – Tasks that the user doesn’t want to do are a danger zone. Can the problem be reconsidered or eliminated?

High Desire, Low Complexity – The easiest quadrant.

High Desire, High Complexity – This is the most interesting quadrant. A self-training interface, (integrated help, training modules) can get the user started; they will often take it the rest of the way. Video games often have a “training” level to train the user on basic skills like moving around.

Get Smart

Effective Intelligence is a helpful concept in the design toolbox. User research and testing are the best ways to know your users, but knowing what may limit a user in reality helps design ways to make them smarter.

Like this article? Want to keep Stephen’s wisdom close at hand? Download the handy, cubicle-friendly, 61kb PDF to hang on a nearby wall and you’ll always remember to design SMART.

Written by: Stephen Turbek (via boxesandarrows blog)
Posted by: Situated Research

Related posts:

1. Accuracy vs. Insights in Quantitative Usability Summary: Better to accept a wider margin of error in...
2. Overloaded vs. Generic Commands Summary: Overloading different outcomes on similar commands can be confusing....
3. How Long Do Users Stay on Web Pages? Summary: Users often leave Web pages in 10–20 seconds, but...

From Microsoft’s Office YouTube Channel:

Watch how future technology will help people make better use of their time, focus their attention, and strengthen relationships while getting things done at work, home, and on the go. (Release: 2011)

There are some interesting concepts in the video involving augmented reality (adding visualizations to one’s environment), new user interfaces and user collaboration, and “Web 3.0″ style communication: where relevant information finds the user at the appropriate time (an intelligent filtering of the overwhelming information now being generated by “Web 2.0″ technologies such as social media).

Any thoughts on the practicality of these concepts? How do you envision collaboration with coworkers in the future? Do you see these technologies as appropriate, or too intrusive? We would love to hear your thoughts, so please leave a comment below.

Video by: officevideos on YouTube (Microsoft)
Posted by: Situated Research

Related posts:

1. Designs for Avionics and Synthetic Vision Link Pilot with Environment Designs for avionics and synthetic vision rely heavily on human...
2. Microsoft Is Imagining a Natural User Interface Future You don’t have to look very far to realize that...
3. BrainDriver: A Mind Controlled Car Imagine you could drive your car using only your thoughts....

Summary:
Many guidelines are similar for mobile and desktop design, but their mobile interpretation is much more unforgiving.

My recent column Mobile Content: If in Doubt, Leave It Out advised site owners to eliminate secondary material when writing for mobile users. Many tweets, blog postings, and other comments on the article all expanded on this theme: Yes, do cut the fluff from mobile content, but also cut secondary content when writing for desktop websites.

In one way, I can only agree. Since 1997, conciseness has been a key guideline when writing for the web. People don’t read a lot on the web and leave in a few seconds if a site doesn’t communicate its value clearly. These findings lead to more detailed guidelines, such as emphasizing the first 2 words of nanocontent (e.g., headlines and search engine links).

So yes, cut the blah-blah from your desktop site.

Mobile Is Less Forgiving than Desktop

However, there’s still a difference between writing for the web and writing for mobile:

• Desktop copywriting must be concise.
• Mobile copywriting must be even more concise.

The high-level guideline is the same: reduce secondary info. The difference is one of degree — certain information that might be acceptable on a desktop site should be removed from a mobile site or app.

Our original research on how people read on mobile devices used the example of sending users a coupon with a special offer. In the study, the best design presented fairly limited information on the first screen. To read “more about this deal” users had to tap a link.

In a desktop design, it would have been better to show all the information on the first screen and save users a click. Why this difference?

• Mobile screens are much smaller: reading through a peephole increases cognitive load and makes it about twice as hard to understand text on a mobile device as on a desktop. Short-term memory is weak, so the more users have to remember after it scrolls off the screen the worse they’ll do.
• Mobile users are even more rushed than desktop users because of the mobile setting.

Both differences support the same recommendation: be more severe when cutting text for mobile than for desktop.

A similar finding applies to the choice of functionality: the feature set should be much smaller for a mobile site than for a desktop site. For sure, desktop sites should offer as few features as possible. For every feature that’s removed, the UI has one less thing to confuse users and thus makes the remaining features easier to use.

But a mobile site should have even fewer features than the desktop site. (Thus the guideline to offer a link from the mobile site to the full site for users who need features that only the desktop site supplies.) The mobile site should have only those features that make sense for the mobile use case. For example, a company’s full site typically includes PR information and investor relations sections, but this info should be eliminated from the mobile site.

Your desktop information architecture (IA) should always feature a simple navigation space that avoids an overly deep hierarchy. But for mobile, the limited space makes it even more important to prevent user disorientation; you should thus limit the navigation options, because you can’t show full contextual information on every screen. (The total screen space allocated to navigation on a typical desktop site is more than the entire screen of a typical smartphone, leaving no room for the content.) That is, your navigation structure should be even shallower in a mobile IA.

Usability Guidelines Are Rarely Dichotomies

People want me to give hard and fast rules: don’t show more than X menu items; don’t write more than Y words per page; nothing should be more than Z clicks from the homepage. Sadly, UI design doesn’t work that way. Usability questions seldom have a single answer. Rather, they are qualitative issues that specify the direction and nature of inevitable design tradeoffs.

Every time your web page’s response time increases by 0.1 seconds, you’ll lose a few percent of your visitors. But it’s not true that everybody will wait 10 seconds while nobody will wait 11 seconds.

As another example, take the guideline about concise writing. The most concise copy would be a word or two, but that would typically make for an unsatisfactory web page. In fact, sometimes longer articles can be better (though even in-depth articles should cut the fluff and be written at an appropriate comprehension level for their target audience).

The simple point remains: it’s best to squeeze the text when writing for the web (as well as follow the many other web content guidelines). If writing for mobile, simply squeeze that orange even more. When considering which secondary content to defer to secondary pages, you need to move the cut-off point between primary and secondary when targeting mobile users. The principle remains the same, but your judgment should be harsher for mobile.

In all areas of user experience — feature set, IA, writing, images, and more — mobile usability requires stricter and more scaled-back design than desktop usability. That’s why you need a separate mobile site. Simply using responsive web design to make the full site accessible on mobile devices results in a substandard mobile UX. (This is actually an old lesson repeated for a new medium: accessibility ≠ usability.)

Written by: Jakob Nielsen, Alertbox
Posted by: Situated Research

Related posts:

1. Accuracy vs. Insights in Quantitative Usability Summary: Better to accept a wider margin of error in...
2. Like Butter, Baby! Excessive HTTP Requests: Saturated Fat for the Mobile Web Butter...
3. The Future of Mobile: Invisible, Connected Devices with Infinite Screens Image: From Introducing the iThink by Paul Mic on his...

Multitouch screens are so versatile and easy to use, why limit them to smartphones and tablets? Researchers have been working for several years to extend multitouch to arbitrary surfaces, but a project called OmniTouch from Microsoft Research and a PhD student at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University may bring it closer to reality.

OmniTouch turns body parts and nearby surfaces into touch interfaces. Users can read and reply to an e-mail by touching their hands or a nearby wall, or even use multiple applications at once on multiple surfaces. The results from a user study “suggest our prototype system approaches the accuracy of conventional, physical touch screens, but on arbitrary, ad hoc surfaces,” the researchers say in a [3:24 minute] video.

The project is led by Carnegie Mellon student and former Microsoft Research intern Chris Harrison and Microsoft researchers Hrvoje Benko and Andrew Wilson. “We wanted to capitalize on the tremendous surface area the real world provides,” Benko says in a Microsoft research article. “The surface area of one hand alone exceeds that of typical smart phones. Tables are an order of magnitude larger than a tablet computer.”

OmniTouch is reminiscent of the SixthSense system developed at the MIT Media Lab, which had students projecting a gestural interface onto the world around them with the help of a device containing a projector, mirror and camera worn around their necks, as well as sensors placed upon their fingers. OmniTouch, however, requires only a device to be worn on one’s shoulder, with nothing special on the hands or arms. A research paper on OmniTouch notes the influence of SixthSense and other similar projects, but says these systems did not create true touch interactions because they “could not differentiate between clicked and hovering fingers.” The limitation was due partly to an “inability to track surfaces in the environment, which also made it impossible to have the projected interface change and follow the surface as it moved.”

The proof-of-concept OmniTouch system consists of a depth-sensing camera and laser-based pico-projector. It is tethered to a desktop computer in its prototype stage, so is not yet truly portable.

Using technology principles similar to Microsoft’s Kinect, OmniTouch starts by generating a depth map of a scene, while isolating fingers from appropriate touch surfaces, including a hand, forearm, notepad, table, or wall. While researchers say the system generates few false positives, it is sensitive to the angle at which fingers appear in front of the camera. Some sophisticated computation is performed to differentiate fingers touching a surface from fingers merely hovering above a surface.

“In this case, we’re detecting proximity at a very fine level,” Benko says. “The system decides the finger is touching the surface if it’s close enough to constitute making contact. This was fairly tricky, and we used a depth map to determine proximity. In practice, a finger is seen as ‘clicked’ when its hover distance drops to one centimeter or less above a surface, and we even manage to maintain the clicked state for dragging operations.” In user trials involving 12 participants, 96.5 percent out of 6,048 clicks were correctly perceived by the system. In the remaining 3.5 percent, the system either did not perceive a click or incorrectly detected more than one.

Potential applications include projecting a full keyboard onto a table, zooming in and out of a map projected onto a notepad, or turning a paper document into an interactive surface for the purpose of adding annotations.

“It is now conceivable that anything one can do on today’s mobile devices, they could do in the palm of their hand,” Microsoft says on the project website. Although the shoulder contraption is bulky, Microsoft says there are no significant barriers to miniaturization and the entire system could eventually be the size of a matchbox and worn as a pendant or watch. But there’s no indication of concrete plans to turn this into a commercial product.

Beyond tracking a person’s fingers and environment, the system must also project interfaces similar to what we might expect in a smartphone. OmniTouch uses several methods, including creating a “lock point” to provide an interface that will stay on the surface—such as your hand—as it moves. OmniTouch can automatically generate interfaces on easily distinguishable objects, like a notepad, table and wall, but researchers say more sophisticated depth-driven object recognition will be needed to make the system capable of recognizing literally any surface. They have introduced one way to sidestep the complications, by letting the user define the surface by “clicking” to create a generically sized area or by clicking and dragging to create one of a custom size.

Once the surface is defined, projecting the interface is relatively straightforward “since our projector is precisely calibrated to the depth camera coordinate system.” The prototype projects a 2D interface, but the team says “our approach easily lends itself to experimenting with 3D interfaces that take into account the true geometry of the projected surface.”

OmniTouch is one of two similar Microsoft projects being unveiled this week at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology in Santa Barbara, Calif. The second project is called PocketTouch, and lets users interact with their smartphones without removing them from their pockets.

Instead of taking your phone out of your pocket to dismiss a call or quickly respond to a text, PocketTouch lets you manipulate the phone simply by touching the outside of your pocket. For example, a user could trace letters on the outside of a pants pocket in order to write a text message. Researchers tested the prototype on 25 types of fabrics to ensure responsiveness. While the prototype is unwieldy, with extra hardware and a cable attached to the phone, it could theoretically be modified to work with a smartphone’s capacitive touchscreen.

Written by: Jon Brodkin , Ars Technica (via Presence)
Posted by: Situated Research

Related posts:

1. Microsoft Develops Shape-Shifting Touchscreen Microsoft this week filed a patent application covering a novel...
2. Microsoft’s Vision for Future Productivity From Microsoft’s Office YouTube Channel: Watch how future technology will...
3. Microsoft Is Imagining a Natural User Interface Future You don’t have to look very far to realize that...

I joined YouTube in 2005, back when it was cool and you could actually find interesting content. At the time, I was most interested in indie-acoustic guitar covers and performances of aspiring artists.

Now YouTube is clearly aimed at and for professionals and it’s dominated by major brands and labels. This is problematic for the average person or professional starting to build a fresh audience and competing with people who manage their channels full-time and have a staffs seems imposing to say the least.

Additionally, most of the search results are limited by this and thus good content becomes very difficult to find. The corollary is that organic leaders are hard to find and organic audiences are hard to attract. People just don’t have the willingness to sort through the corporate “sponsored” content, or lackluster search results.

However, that can change drastically for those of us who are in the know. The principle reason that YouTube is can be un-useful to the disadvantaged is because of the relevance searching mechanisms, search-engine-pruning that Google conducts and the volume of paid content showing up first in the search results.

However, this can all be circumvented via some elbow grease and a neat little tool called TubeToolBox. Before we can really discuss the tool, you need to be aware of how YouTube thinks about you. Youtube, via Google is attempting to draw conclusions based on your usage, subscriptions and subscribers and thereby filter appropriate content on your behalf. This is evident based on their subscription suggestions on the home page when you first login.

For the professional this becomes tricky because now personal activity and professional activity affect each other and thus your results. Since YouTube is all about social interaction, finding other ‘tubers, has more to do with finding their content than it does finding them personally.

Accordingly, unless your search string is perfect you’re more likely to find the content YouTube “thinks” you want to see, rather than the content you might actually be looking for. There is however, no need to be deterred if your aim is to make the most of YouTube for audience development. Let’s look at the tool. Consider a marketing message directly from their website.

“TubeToolBox – Get Subscribers, Get Friends, Get Video Views all with the Best YouTube Marketing Software available!”

TubeToolBox does what is advertises. Not by magic, or trickery, but rather vigorous channel management and maintenance. The developers understand that in order to maintain a channel and grow an audience you must actively promote it.

This tedious task is accomplished through the automation of all the channel maintenance operations, such as accepting friend invites, subscribing to channels of interest and sending out mass messages as well, including videos! This is no small feat, since the effort by itself is so tedious and time consuming that without the tool, managing a sizeable Youtube Channel would be a full-time job; literally!

The most interesting thing about how the tool will help you build an audience is the fact that it uses keywords and common interests, as well as demographics to target people to be friends with. This is important because becoming friends with someone, in the YouTube sense, is the first step to getting them to look at your content and possibly subscribe. The tool is easy and intuitive to use and you can download a trial here.

Lest you think that this contraption and novelty of post-modernity is a cheat, you must know that the process that TubeTool Box uses is well within the parameters of Youtube’s Terms of Use policies.

The best way to think about the tool box is to consider it an automaton. It simply does what you would normally have to do to successfully promote your channel. The tool provides workflows for users to schedule the work they would normally being doing in the wee hours of the evening, after the kids have gone to bed.

The tool is easy to use and simple to setup. It’s the easiest way to build an audience and attract the kind of content that you’re interested in. The tool comes in a free version and also has a paid version. The license is based on a subscription, so the cost is pretty low. If you’re trying to leverage YouTube to build an audience and spread your message, there is no more efficient way than to use TubeToolBox. I am a subscriber and love the tool. My only regret is that I didn’t know about it sooner.

Written by: Joshua Barnes, The Big G & Business magazine
Posted by: Situated Research

Related posts:

1. The Fastest Way to Increase Your Google Ranking: Blogging How many times have you heard someone say, I just...
2. Setting Your Business Website Apart From the Competition Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is concerned with helping to raise...
3. The Social Media Revolution This video is a refresh of the original video with...

Excessive HTTP Requests: Saturated Fat for the Mobile Web

Butter makes it better. Anyone who has enjoyed a nice French meal knows what we mean. Nevertheless, if you have a weak ticker and your arteries cannot handle it, fat can be a killer.

HTTP requests are the butter of the Web. They enrich the desktop experience with unperceivable impact; but on the mobile Web, the added latency can bring your site to its knees. The impact is devastating when you’re dealing with inherently slower processor speeds and are dependent on a wireless mobile network.

Just as it has taken society years to learn the lessons of a healthy diet, the Web development world needs to take a similarly critical eye when it comes to maintaining a healthy mobile website. Each request made adds to the amount of time needed to download your site, and increases the chances of user abandonment.

There are avoidable ways that websites routinely make excessive HTTP requests, which add latency to their mobile sites. These excessive HTTP requests negatively affect the user experience and yet we commonly see how URL redirects, JavaScript requests, CSS requests and too many object requests in general can quickly result in a website experience few will tolerate.

URL Redirects

There have been many historical uses of URL redirects as they relate to Web page navigation in the desktop browser. The redirection process is handled automatically within the browser and is transparent to the end user waiting for the page to load and become visible.

URL redirects are very useful and common when serving up desktop-based Web content. The redirect process happens very quickly on most desktop Internet connections and for the most part a real person never knows or perceives what is happening.

For mobile Internet content, one might guess that using URL redirect guidelines would be the same as in the desktop world. Because the mobile Web is the regular “Web” just viewed over a mobile device, it seems like using URL redirects to help manage mobile content is just as valid as it is in the desktop world.

Many owners and creators of desktop Web content re-use the same content creation and management techniques that have proven to be reliable over the previous years of desktop Internet usage.

In the image above, the browser makes a URL request to the content server for the mobile homepage of a popular retail site. Instead of returning the base page that would begin to render on the browser LCD screen, the content server instead returns a URL redirect.

If you look closely at the graph, you see a series of four redirects sent back from the server to the mobile browser. Every time the mobile browser receives a URL redirect, it has to process that locally and then send the new URL received in the redirect back to the server. Processing a URL redirect requires that the mobile device send another request over the carrier’s RF radio network.

All of the time highlighted in yellow in the graph is time spent by the mobile browser processing URL redirects sent by the server. During this 36-second delay, the URL redirect does not return any displayable content, so from a real user’s perspective the site is slow and not loading.

There is probably no way to ever know the exact reasons why the owners of this content created a mobile URL redirect chain that goes four levels deep. When building a mobile site, some of the techniques and methodologies used to build desktop Internet sites have to be re-thought when creating your mobile content. Something done as an afterthought on the desktop Internet can magnify itself into an ugly user experience when accessed over a mobile connection.

It could be that for mobile, you might have to do things in a different way that requires more work, but in the end you can create a better user experience. In this example, if there is a way to cut out even one or two of the redirects, the overall pageload time would dramatically improve.

Too Much Fat

Requesting too many objects is another way to slow mobile Web performance. The New York Times is a good example of a mobile site that has pared back content for a good mobile experience.

How much faster is their mobile site? We examined data from our public index and looked at website performance collected in New York, requested by a Motorola Droid X. For a 24-hour period download times were consistently under 10 seconds. During the same period of time we collected data from an iPhone 4 in the same New York location and relatively few downloads happened under 30 seconds.

What explains the performance gap? The New York Times server does not redirect iPhone 4 users to the mobile site. Consequently, the iPhone users are downloading a tremendous amount of content. Setting aside the questions of usability of a full site on a relatively small screen, the impact on performance is quite noticeable.


Chances are that many users won’t stick around for the 60-second homepage download. Not only is this a potential lost sale for an online retailer, users are not very likely to return.

There are several images downloaded, but that may be needed to generate an impulse sale. But before that first image is downloaded there are other areas to improve this site. The retailer should consider a single redirect and combining style sheets. Moving JavaScript to the bottom and combining them is another W3C best practice not being followed. The JavaScript download is blocking the site from taking advantage of parallelization capabilities available on many of today’s popular smartphone browsers.

Your mobile website is much more than a website on a smaller screen. It’s used differently, the wireless networks are inherently slower and processor speed simply can’t replicate the desktop experience. Yet, your customers will have similar expectations for speed and reliability.

Build a site with the expectations of the mobile user in mind and they’ll be much more likely to come back.

Written by: Tim Murphy, Keynote Systems (via Website Magazine)
Posted by: Situated Research

Related posts:

1. Mobile UX Sharpens Usability Guidelines Summary: Many guidelines are similar for mobile and desktop design,...
2. Utilize Available Screen Space Summary: Websites and mobile apps both frequently cram options into...
3. Accuracy vs. Insights in Quantitative Usability Summary: Better to accept a wider margin of error in...

Even when you are following all of the more recognized SEO rules, when is optimization overdone and how can you prevent this from happening on your website? Are there Tsunami warning indicators to get out of the game before Google’s next Panda or Farmer update? And how do you find the ideal balance for your site, not overdoing SEO but also not leaving organic search traffic to your competitors?

High Tech Meets High Touch

In the last few years, savvy marketers have learned that sometimes less really is more when it comes to website optimization. It has become too overblown for its own good. There are clear indicators that it is time to get back to basics, be true to your brand and serve as that expert source, while not adding to the clutter.

As the SEO market has matured over the last 15 years, many advances have enabled online marketers to make smart decisions based on usable data. Many SEO enhancements have revolutionized the way we think about online marketing, and how we help educate consumers while personalizing their online experience.

But at what point does this cross the line and get too tangled up in itself? How you use tools to ensure that your website is found by the right audience at the right time and in the right place is part science, part art and part human nature — a blending of high tech and high touch.

To help you drive a balanced SEO campaign, we offer a few observations as well as tips to tuck into your hip pocket. We will help you recognize the signs that indicate you are about to jump the SEO shark. Search engines continue to release updates, and each one of them will have an impact on your website’s success.

What Rules?

In the beginning, there were keywords — and they were good. Along came spiders, ’bots and other Web crawlers and indexes. Then page ranking. Algorithms and meta-tags. And they, too, were good.

Companies aimed to use the right keyword mix, building them into a campaign’s design, even modifying HTML code to get their websites to appear at the top of searches. An entire SEO/SEM industry has grown up in a remarkably short period of time to help companies navigate this strange new world. Specialists would offer their services to companies, and the rallying cry became “optimize everything”: websites, news releases, advertising, articles, videos and shopping carts.

People became quite giddy with each new optimization discovery. There was no end to the madness.

Spamdexing, or black hat SEO, was inevitable because there were no specific rules at that time. As search engines recognized the false rankings were often caused by data manipulation, they developed more sophisticated algorithms and approaches to rank content and to out those dabbling in what became known as black hat SEO practices.

Stuffing, Cloaking and Link Building

Companies started using so many keywords, also known as keyword stuffing, that it became impossible to read. Some tried cloaking, which is attempting to make keywords invisible to the reader. Through the phases of SEO, it reached a critical point where a majority started to abuse it, losing sight of how much is too much.

Most recently, search engines said the more links the better, that they provided an authority to a site. So build links is what the marketers did. With link juice as the currency of SEO, marketers paid for, posted and exchanged links like mortgage-backed securities until the search engines noticed. Search engines realized that a big link budget could really impact results, and a new set of rules was born. JC Penney, being one of the most infamous recent cases of questionable link building/buying practices, was made an example of to deter others from contributing to the proliferation of spammy links.

Content for Content’s Sake

Noticing a pattern yet? The search engines went on to say that content-rich sites are good, and more keywords are good. So, create is what the content marketers did; some using automation, some just hiring writers — not experts — to pump out loads of content around keywords.

As a result, “content farms” such as About.com sprang up, featuring a page on just about every topic under the sun. These sites became mammoth, providing hundreds of pages of keyword-rich but often shallow and, even in some cases, inaccurate content. This has made it difficult for smaller, more authoritative sites to be found. Also, marketers forgot the most important thing — users want quality content.

Google introduced its Panda update earlier this year to combat low-quality content and those that produce it. If weak content is discovered on your site, Google will now pull down rankings of the entire site. Next, Google is going after content scrapers or scraper sites that copy content for use on their own websites without linking, attributing or acknowledging the original sources.

The New SEO World — The Way Forward

You can’t blame marketers for being confused, but it’s clear that companies forgot that they first are made up of humans working for humans. Marketers would do well to reduce search optimization fat to help users actually find the information they want them to find.

The truth is that it is really competitive out there, so the best thing that you can do is to be strategic and use your resources wisely. Set reasonable goals and understand that SEO is a long-term investment that will continue to evolve. We recommend the following strategies:

Diversity of approach: Use different tactics without focusing on one thing, even if it appears to be working well. Search engines “appreciate” diversity in link building, along with quality content written for human beings, not ’bots. SEO changes all the time, so what works today may not work tomorrow.

Write for people — optimize later: It is possible to overoptimize. When you lose sight of your intended audience: your customers, your readers -— and what is important to them — because you want to please Google, you hurt yourself. Think about the person who will read and be motivated by your information.

Test, and test again: Don’t be afraid to test new methods and discover new techniques because search engines are changing every day. Just don’t throw everything that has been working for you out of the window and similarly evaluate old tactics to ensure that they are still effective.

International search requires special consideration: This will depend on the dominant search engines in a given country or market and how they work, including culture and language. Research and understand those parameters.

Use the right tools: SEO tools are advancing every day to help marketers be strategic and make informed decisions. Take advantage of tools that help save time, provide insight and keep up with the ever-changing search engines.

Finally, remember when you were in school you were told to write about what you know and write from the heart? The same rule applies when successfully writing — and optimizing — for the Web.

Written by: Dr. Horst Joepen, CEO of Searchmetrics (via Website Magazine)

Related posts:

1. The Fastest Way to Increase Your Google Ranking: Blogging How many times have you heard someone say, I just...
2. Key Performance Indicators for SEO Success Key performance indicators (KPIs) are the only means by which...
3. Setting Your Business Website Apart From the Competition Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is concerned with helping to raise...

How long will users stay on a Web page before leaving? It’s a perennial question, yet the answer has always been the same:

• Not very long.

The average page visit lasts a little less than a minute.

As users rush through Web pages, they have time to read only a quarter of the text on the pages they actually visit (let alone all those they don’t). So, unless your writing is extraordinarily clear and focused, little of what you say on your website will get through to customers.

However, while users are always in a hurry on the Web, the time they spend on individual page visits varies widely: sometimes people bounce away immediately, other times they linger for far longer than a minute. Given this, the average is not the most fruitful way of analyzing user behaviors. Users are human beings — their behaviors are highly variable and are not captured fully by a single number.

Leaving Web Pages: The Weibull Hazard Function

New research by Chao Liu and colleagues from Microsoft Research now provides a mathematical understanding of users’ page-leaving behaviors. The scientists collected data from “a popular Web browser plug-in,” analyzing page-visit durations for 205,873 different Web pages for which they had captured upwards of 10,000 visits. Suffice it to say: these guys crunched a lot of data.

The result: the time users spend on a Web page follows a Weibull distribution.

99.9% of readers will now ask: What’s a Weibull distribution?

Weibull is a reliability-engineering concept that’s used to analyze the time-to-failure for components. The model’s hazard function indicates the probability that a component will fail at time t, given that it has worked fine up until time t.

So, after replacing a spare part in a piece of equipment, Weibull analysis predicts when you’ll have to replace it again. It also lets you conduct risk analysis beyond simplistic mean-time to failure. And, if you own a lot of equipment, you can use aggregate analysis to, say, manage your spare parts inventory.

Of course, when analyzing Web visits, we simply replace “component failure” with “user leaving the page.” In their research paper, Liu and colleagues provide intensive statistical analysis to show that the Weibull model closely matches users’ empirically observed behavior.

According to earlier research, there are 2 different kinds of Weibull distributions:

• Positive aging: The longer the component has been in service, the more likely it is to fail. In other words, the hazard function increases for larger values of t. This makes intuitive sense, because the longer stuff is used, the more it wears down. Thus, something that has been in use for a long time will be approaching its breaking point.
• Negative aging: The longer the component has been in service, the less likely it is to fail. Here, the hazard function decreases for larger values of t. This makes sense when individual components vary in quality: poorly made components usually fail early, so anything that has been in service for a long time is likely to be particularly robust and will usually survive even longer.

Negative Aging: Leave Quick or Stay Long

The researchers discovered that 99% of Web pages have a negative aging effect. In human–computer interaction (HCI) research, it’s extremely rare to get this strong a finding, and Liu and colleagues should be credited with discovering a major new insight.

Why negative aging? Because Web pages are indeed of highly variable quality. Users know this and spend their initial time on a page in ruthless triage to discard the dross. It’s rare for people to linger on Web pages, but when users do decide that a page is valuable, they may stay for a bit.

The following chart shows the hazard function — that is, the likelihood of leaving — for the median Weibull parameters fitted across the scientists’ humongous data set:

It’s clear from the chart that the first 10 seconds of the page visit are critical for users’ decision to stay or leave. The probability of leaving is very high during these first few seconds because users are extremely skeptical, having suffered countless poorly designed Web pages in the past. People know that most Web pages are useless, and they behave accordingly to avoid wasting more time than absolutely necessary on bad pages.

If the Web page survives this first — extremely harsh — 10-second judgment, users will look around a bit. However, they’re still highly likely to leave during the subsequent 20 seconds of their visit. Only after people have stayed on a page for about 30 seconds does the curve become relatively flat. People continue to leave every second, but at a much slower rate than during the first 30 seconds.

So, if you can convince users to stay on your page for half a minute, there’s a fair chance that they’ll say much longer — often 2 minutes or more, which is an eternity on the Web.

So, roughly speaking, there are 2 cases here:

• bad pages, which get the chop in a few seconds; and
• good pages, which might be allocated a few minutes.

Note: “good” vs. “bad” is a decision that each individual user makes within those first few seconds of arriving. The design implications are clear:

• To gain several minutes of user attention, you must clearly communicate your value proposition within 10 seconds.

Written by: Jakob Nielsen, Alertbox
Posted by: Situated Research

Related posts:

1. Are Your Users S.T.U.P.I.D? How good design can make users effective It is an...
2. Did Your Shopping Cart Survive the Holiday Season? From 2005 to 2010, Cyber Monday sales (the Monday after...
3. Overloaded vs. Generic Commands Summary: Overloading different outcomes on similar commands can be confusing....

Medibotics’ U.S. patent 7,980,141 for Motion Recognition Clothing™ (MRC) has been approved. MRC is an innovative technology for translating body motion into computer-readable signals that could power the next generation of full-body game controllers. The market for translating body motion into computer-readable signals is already very large. For example, over 10 million units of an existing camera-based full-body game controller system have been sold. With further development, MRC could be used for a variety of applications including not only computer gaming, but also virtual reality in general, sports training, medical therapy, virtual exercise, weight management, and telerobotics.

Motion Recognition Clothing™ (MRC) integrates air-filled or fluid-filled tubes into clothing that longitudinally spans multiple body joints and then uses changes in the pressures within these tubes, as they bend, to measure the motion of these body joints. Multiple tubes can span each joint. The results capture human posture and motion. Although MRC is not yet a commercially-available product, preliminary prototyping results are promising. Medibotics has tested different tube diameters, wall thicknesses, durometers, and materials (eg. latex, silicone, EPDM, polyurethane) and found that non-linear functions of changes in tube pressures are highly correlated with changes in the angles of the human joints that the tubes span. Medibotics also measured the dynamic gait of a knee in motion during a 1-MPH walk, 2-MPH walk, 5-MPH run, and 6-MPH run. They achieved gait results that are similar to those in the biomechanics literature.

The use of Motion Recognition Clothing™ (MRC) technology for full-body game control could have several advantages over current camera-based full-body game control technology. For example, when used with a mobile transmitter, MRC can be portable. MRC could be used almost anywhere… jogging outdoors, playing golf, and even swimming. MRC does not require that users to remain in front of a stationary camera. MRC can also be used with multiple users who interact and overlap. MRC does not require a direct line-of-sight between users and a camera. Also, MRC can measure small-scale body motion, such as that of fingers, in a manner that is not possible with camera-based systems that only recognize large-scale skeletal configurations. In general, MRC can have advantages over other competing motion recognition technologies in terms of: freedom of motion; ambulatory use; washable clothing; freedom from occlusion; real time use; lower cost; body safety; durability; and high/low motion scale. However, one motion recognition sub-market in which MRC would not likely compete is in high-end “Motion Capture” systems used for animating figures in motion pictures (such as Gollum in “The Lord of the Rings”). Film makers spend a lot for high-precision systems with multiple cameras and facial motion recognition technology. It is unlikely that MRC would provide the level of facial motion precision required by this sub-market.

There remain several challenges in the further development and commercialization of MRC. Although MRC may work well for close-fitting clothing, it may work less well with loose-fitting clothing whose location over joints shifts as a person moves. This may be addressed by incorporating multiple tubes around joints and using pattern recognition software to identify shifts in clothing location. Another challenge for MRC is calibrating measurements to ensure accuracy for different people (and potentially each time the same person takes it off and puts it on). Another challenge is maintaining measurement accuracy while making tube size smaller so that the clothing is non-obtrusive. These challenges are not insurmountable, but they will require more work in order to launch MRC as a successful commercial product. Medibotics welcomes inquiries from manufacturers and investors in the fields of computer gaming, sports training, medical technology, and/or telerobotics who may be interested in partnering with Medibotics in the next stage of product development for Motion Recognition Clothing™.

Medibotics LLC is an innovative Minnesota-based technology company with an intellectual property portfolio that includes: ambulatory human motion recognition technology (including Motion Recognition Clothing™); wearable technology for energy generation from human motion; flexible human-to-computer interface devices (including Blob Mouse™), and sound-masking devices and systems for enhancing sleep (including HushBand™). The CEO of Medibotics is Robert A. Connor, Ph.D., an inventor on over 40 patents and patent applications.

Media Contact: Robert Connor, Medibotics LLC, 612-339-1442, info@Medibotics.com

Posted by: Situated Research

Related posts:

1. Ford Ergonomics Lab: Optimized by Gaming Technology When Glenn Harrington donned a motion capture suit complete with...
2. Motion Controllers & Revived Classic Titles Rule at E3 2010 appears to be a breakthrough year for gaming technologies. ...
3. HyperReality Helmet Uses Kinect To Create An Out-Of-Body Experience Maxence Parache’s experimental augmented-reality system lets you detach your point...

As one study participant noted:

Games have previously been denigrated as socially isolating, with the stereotypical, petulant and portly adult playing a viscerally violent game in his parents’ basement: the quintessential ‘gamer’ image that has existed for many years in popular culture. With grandparents now playing Wii Tennis and my cousins in Australia and Canada playing Xbox Live with each other, games are fulfilling [a much more social role] than they were a decade ago.

The study offers 3 key insights into the evolution of gaming (explained in more detail below):

• Games go beyond the screen
• Life becomes play
• Social matures into societal

The study included a Web survey amongst 290 smartphone owners between the ages of 15-54 who self-identified as at least “casual gamers,” with nearly half labeling themselves “game enthusiasts.”* The survey assessed technology usage and future orientation, attitudes and behaviors around gaming, and possible interest areas for new game experiences.

Who are the New Gamers?

The infographic below offers a snapshot of the emerging gamer: he or she is not bound by platform or location, and has many different motivations for gaming in addition to just having fun.

To view a larger version, click here. Infographic created by Latitude in collaboration with ffunction, (cc) some rights reserved.

A Video Portrait of the New Gamers

Latitude also conducted a series of in-depth interviews with game makers and gaming enthusiasts, culminating in the production of a video documentary: The Future of Gaming: A Portrait of the New Gamers, featuring Buster Benson, CEO of Health Month (currently, Co-founder/CTO at Habit Labs).

The Future of Gaming: a Portrait of the New Gamers [8:52 minutes] from latddotcom on Vimeo.

Video created by Latitude in collaboration with In The Car Media, (cc) some rights reserved.

In addition to investigating tomorrow’s gamers, the study pinpointed three key insights for the future of gaming:

1. Games go beyond the screen

While mobile devices have had a huge impact bringing games into offline life, true seamless integration will come through technologies like The Internet of Things and augmented reality. These technologies get beyond smartphone screens, foregrounding the experience in a way that makes the device itself seem, more or less, invisible. Study participants expressed an overwhelming desire for immersive integration of digital content with traditionally offline spaces and activities:

* 95% would like to see more games that do a better job of combining digital content with the real, physical world.

* 90% agreed that current and future technologies will play a critical role in extending games beyond the traditional screen environment, moving them out into the real world.

To view a larger version, click here. Infographic created by Latitude in collaboration with ffunction, (cc) some rights reserved.

“The gamers of tomorrow won’t be limited by platform or location. As technology becomes more seamlessly integrated with our lives, everyone will be a gamer, and the world around us will become the ultimate playing field,” explains Natalie Stehfest, a senior research analyst who led the study and who heads up Latitude’s qualitative research team. “Technology will allow us to measure—and, ultimately, improve—ourselves in the context of our daily activities and surroundings. Many people making small changes can have a large impact in society, and this study suggests that the new gamers are ready to ‘level-up,’ and be challenged in this way.”

2. Life becomes play

Not only did participants want games to be well-integrated with the offline world in a technological sense, they requested games that better fit into the context of their everyday life activities and which motivate them to do things they want or need to do anyways. Currently, a variety of “life games” exist, including ones that that motivate people to eat healthy and work out, learn science and complete household chores.

* 92% would like to use more “life games” (e.g., games that fit into the context of daily life routines)

* More than 2/3 would like games to help them achieve their personal goals (e.g. be healthier, more productive, etc.)

3. Social matures into societal

The social aspect of gaming makes it particularly well-suited to tackling larger societal issues, as people can now connect easily around meaningful, shared experiences in real-time. Obstacles related to engagement, crowdsourcing, and logistics are removed as mobile platforms make it easier to become an engaged community member or to get involved with socially good causes in a way that feels game-like, either overtly or in a broader, “social adventure” sense.

* 96% would like to see more games geared toward creating positive change in society over the next 5-10 years. (Only one-quarter have played games like this before.)

* 3 in 4 people would be more interested in getting to know their neighbors and the people in their communities if local meet-ups were designed to be more game-like (e.g., involving neighborhood “teams,” scavenger hunts, etc.).

“You’ll be able to use gaming to create a social network that could influence our world for the greater good—and that’s something that already exists to some extent,” explained Michael Critz, an interviewee in Latitude’s The Future of Gaming video documentary.

Special Acknowledgments

Latitude would like to thank The Future of Gaming video documentary interviewees:

• Buster Benson, CEO of Health Month (currently, Co-founder/CTO at Habit Labs)
• Michael Critz, UI designer and game enthusiast
• Amber Cyr, game enthusiast
• Jack Graham, game designer for Eclipse Phase and science fiction writer
• Dan Robles, director at the Ingenesist Project

Lead Researcher: Natalie Stehfest
Video Director: Dan Hemmerly-Brown

*Note: Smartphone ownership was a criterion for survey participation, but engagement with mobile games was not. See infographic above for gaming platforms preferred by participants.

Written by: Kadley Gosselin, Latitude (via Presence)
Posted by: Situated Research

Related posts:

1. Is Your Life Just One Big RPG? – Mind-Blowing Speech From DICE 2010 You might think making games is all about putting 40...
2. Transmedia: The Experience of the Future? With the former glory of old, linear media fading, Melody...
3. Microsoft’s Vision for Future Productivity From Microsoft’s Office YouTube Channel: Watch how future technology will...

Seriously, when do games stop being games and cross over into virtual reality? This was the question I asked Nvidia months ago at ECGC 2011, and was told there will always be a market for the high-end PC gamer with the rig nearly the size of a bookcase. But putting visual realism aside, what will happen when games suddenly stop acting like games, and become more like a self-aware super AI that could possibly one day sing you happy birthday or annihilate the human race?

According to Sony Worldwide Studios chief Shuhei Yoshida, platform holders will be able to offer “almost dangerous kinds of interactivity” with the player within the next ten years. Games will know more about the player on a whole, know how they could be feeling by reading more than just player movements. Titles will be so “immersive” that players will serve as actors, as a true participant within the virtual realm.

“As far as I’m concerned, the motion control of today is like the 8-bit phase of video games,” Yoshida said last week at a behind-closed-doors Gamescom panel debate. “There are so many limitations. Talking about sensors, the game will eventually know more about the player. Not just movement, but where you are looking and how you could be feeling. It’s really difficult to judge this, but I’d like to think that in ten years game developers will have access to player information in real-time. We can create some really… almost dangerous kinds of interactivity.”

Mick Hocking, a senior director at Sony Worldwide Studios, chimed in when asked if Sony was currently testing technologies relying on biometric data. Naturally he dodged answering the question directly by stating that Sony does lots of R&D in these areas.

“Having a camera being able to study a player’s biometrics and movements [is possible],” Hocking said. “So perhaps you can play a detective game that decides whether you’re lying due to what it reads from your face.”

“In ten years’ time I’d like to think we’ll be able to form a map of the player, combining other sorts of sensory data together, from facial expressions to heart rate,” he continued. “You can see how, over a period of time, you can form a map of the player and their emotional state, whether they’re sad or happy. Maybe people in their social network can comment on it. The more accurate that map can become, the more we can tailor it to the experience.”

Hocking seems to hope that AI in ten year’s time won’t still feel like “acting,” but will react more naturally, independent of scripts and pre-determined movements. “In Uncharted you can see games are getting closer to lifelike actor performances, but [despite] the more accurate they are becoming as an acting performance, it’s still acting. Will we have AI that allows us to talk to and truly interact with a character? Will we be able to show the character objects it can recognize?”

Do gamers really need that kind of interaction? Again, when do games stop serving as games, and become more like virtual reality experiences? As long as the AI doesn’t start popping off family members in fear of being disconnected from the (home or space station) network, we should be good to go.

Written by: Kevin Parrish, Tom’s Guide
Posted by: Situated Research

Related posts:

1. Sony Predicts Return of Virtual Reality Not content with attempting to usher in the advent of...
2. Games for Good: Read Our Article In the Cognitive Technology Journal Matthew Sharritt, President of Situated Research, has an article titled...
3. Illusions Send Shivers Down a Gamer’s Spine You are playing a video game, and your avatar is...

For those unfamiliar with the term “title tag,” it describes the text that appears in the top line of a user’s Web browser. It is also used by search engines as the actual title of a search listing.

If you run an SEO campaign, then you should be very interested in how title tags are currently used — and how they can be improved — on your site. If you run an SEO campaign and are a savvy SEO, you’ll also notice how competitors use title tags on their Web properties.

Writing descriptive title tags is a vitally important aspect of optimizing a site to rank well with the search engines and getting clicked on by visitors on search results pages. A well-crafted title tag can stand on its own, generating interest from users who know nothing of your website or company, pulling them into the conversion funnel. That is the expectation an SEO department should set when making title tag modifications.

Any effort to modify title tags site-wide should not be entered into lightly. Among the considerations that should be made are the sales and marketing strategies of the Web enterprise or the business running the website. It is also imperative that the SEOs working on the behalf of a company benchmark the competition as well as those outside the industry to understand how the most popular websites leverage their title tags.

So, what do the title tags of the most popular sites have in common? Website Magazine examined the search results pages of both Bing and Google for the answer. While only one category is represented it is highly competitive in nature. The keyword phrases used were “grocery coupons” and “printable coupons”.

Presence of Keywords

Experienced SEOs know plenty from years of title tag tweaks —such as to include at least one targeted keyword or phrase. That certainly makes sense, but you might be surprised at how few of them actually make the effort, opting instead for using generic terms that do not distinguish a page, much less excite users — particularly on long tail keyword phrases.

Still other SEOs realize the importance of using the title tag as an opportunity to achieve rankings through keyword association, as in the case of CouponMom.com below.

Prominence of Keywords

It is also relatively well known that, whenever possible, keywords should be used early in the title — it is most common to have the keyword or key phrase used in the first half of the full title. This helps search engines and the visitors they send identify the main subject of the page quickly, not to mention to ensure that page titles do not get cut off by search engines. See the Coupon- Mom.com image above as an example.

Brand Inclusion

You might also notice the inclusion of brand elements on a high percentage of competitive search results pages. Coupon- Cabin.com (image below), for example, even includes its name (without the dot com), and even Coupon Divas (image above) includes its registered trademark. If the brand is strong and provides clarity as to what a user might find, using brand elements should be considered for inclusion in title tags.

Special Character Omission

The verdict is out on the role that special characters may play in ranking and click-through rate (which many believe are inextricably connected). For now, it is best practice to avoid many special characters in page titles — doing so will put your site at least in line with the vast majority of Web properties.

It’s compelling (and, some would argue, attractive) to include colons, hash marks, dollar signs and ampersands — but the top sites typically do not and you shouldn’t, either. That being said, there may just be something to being different — as might be the case with wow-coupons.com (image above).

Length of Title Tag

Finally, but perhaps most importantly, understand that search engines have limits as to how many characters are used from the title tag and can display up to 70 characters. There is little in the way of statistical data about the role that title tag length may play in generating clicks (is longer or shorter better?), but focusing on readability and establishing expectations for users should be the primary objective anyway.

There is no silver bullet to title tag optimization. Simply take great care in selecting the right keywords and phrases, leaving out the unnecessary elements, and focusing near exclusively on readability and the value that visitors will find upon arriving at your site.

Written by: Website Magazine
Posted by: Situated Research

Related posts:

1. Search Marketing Trends for 2011 Few Web professionals should be surprised by the 2011 forecast...
2. Setting Your Business Website Apart From the Competition Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is concerned with helping to raise...
3. Key Performance Indicators for SEO Success Key performance indicators (KPIs) are the only means by which...

Designers Michaël Harboun, Fabien Chancel and Akki Reddy Challa have been working in collaboration with Dassault Systems to explore augmented reality inside vehicles. In the future, when our cars are autonomous and can drive themselves, Harboun and his colleagues have been questioning what we’ll be doing while travelling along. The Aeon Project features three levels the user can select from the heads up display (HUD): augmented reality, mixed reality and virtual reality. So they can choose from text information, 3D integration and complete virtual immersion.

Harboun explains:

“When travelling inside Aeon, the user can live unique experiences by selecting different applications. While experiencing a quest, he can decrease or increase the amount of virtual information appearing on the window via a meter. Such as light or temperature, I think that virtuality will also become a common unit which we will be regulating in our everyday life.”

This project took 1st Place at this year’s Imagina Awards for Best Design and Communication. Watch the [4:57 minute] video for more details:

Written by: Emma Hutchings, PSFK (via Presence)
Posted by: Situated Research

Related posts:

1. Invoked Computing: Device-free Ubiquitous Augmented Reality A research group at the University of Tokyo are creating...
2. Sony Predicts Return of Virtual Reality Not content with attempting to usher in the advent of...
3. Whatever happened to virtual reality? [Image: Google Trend shows the steady decline in searches for "Virtual...

The maxim that “people buy from people” remains true, but how the selling is done needs to change rapidly. Continuous face-to-face selling can become very expensive where the buying cycle has changed dramatically from how it has been in the past. Unnecessary travel to prospects who are not ready to buy will have a huge impact on your sales effectiveness.

Selling over the Web is the obvious answer to these issues, but it remains challenging for a lot of companies to adopt Web selling due to salespeople’s continued over-reliance on in-person meetings to do their selling. These days, modern collaboration tools and the phone are the only means required to sell sophisticated products; while face-to-face meetings can still be helpful in some cases, the necessity of continuously meeting with prospective customers has been largely removed.

Therefore, changing the mindset of your sales force has become critical for Web-based sales effectiveness. Common sales force mindsets that may stand in your way may include over-reliance on “telesales” or “selling on the phone”, protestations that “our product is too complex” to sell on the Web, or that Web sales constitutes “junior-level selling.” This may be true not only for your current sales force, but also among those you may wish to hire or transition to a new model.

So, where do you start?

First, your C-level executives will need to break their old model and start planning for a sales hub that has on the following core functions:

• Quota-carrying sales executives
• Marketing specialists
• Sales development representatives (inbound and outbound)
• Sales consultants

Next, the executive team will need to decide which market segments will best lend themselves to this approach. Typically these will be a range of SMB (small business) companies in the target market. An Enterprise-level sales group, which will travel more frequently but not exclusively, can manage any companies outside of the SMB segments.

After these two first steps are complete, then you can start thinking about recruitment, training and process such as lead management – and that’s when the fun really starts!

Written by: Fergus Gloster, Marketo
Posted by: Situated Research

Related posts:

1. Setting Your Business Website Apart From the Competition Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is concerned with helping to raise...
2. Search Marketing Trends for 2011 Few Web professionals should be surprised by the 2011 forecast...
3. LinkedIn Secrets to Success Plenty has been written about Facebook and Twitter, and how...

We take our first-person visual perspective for granted every second of the day — we have to, because our eyeballs are attached to our heads. But what if you could detach your personal “camera angle” at any moment and float away from your own body while still inhabiting it, like an on-demand out-of-body experience? Designer Maxence Paranche has created the next best thing in his HyperReality system, which uses a Microsoft Kinect to scan your physical environment and display it inside a virtual-reality helmet, so you can rotate the visual angle any way you like.

Granted, the visual display inside that weird yellow helmet isn’t exactly Tron-quality: your local environment is rendered as an array of monochrome dots. And rotating a camera angle separate from the virtual “body” you inhabit is something that video gamers (and Second Life enthusiasts) do all the time. The interesting thing about HyperReality is how it combines these two interfaces into one, physically embodied experience. Using an Arduino-powered glove equipped with force sensors, “the user is able to rotate the 3D view around the virtual (scanned) environment, change his point of view and enable new behaviors,” Paranche tells Co.Design via email. In other words, you’re still able to physically interact with all the “real stuff” around you, but you can also pan your “mind’s eye” around the scene separate from your own body, just like you would in a video game.

In fact, you have to — the Kinect-powered visual display is so coarse that “the user needs to activate the 3D rotation to give some depth to objects and be able to appreciate the notion of distance in space,” Paranche explains. “This vision is a bit constraining at the beginning, [but] in my opinion a digital experience trying to enable new behaviors has to be constraining for the user.” You wouldn’t expect a radical upgrade to your physical sensorium to feel easy, now would you?

Paranche sees HyperReality being useful for fine art galleries who want to offer visitors a way to experience exhibits in an augmented way. He’s already done test runs at the Geffrye Museum and The Last Tuesday Society. “The museum is experienced as a whole, as the user is navigating from the large-scaled architecture of the rooms to the smallest pieces of art thanks to this virtual vision,” he says. “Behaviours are being modified, the notion of scale is being distorted, all this pushing the boundaries of the physical space.” Hey, it sure beats those lame guided audio tours.

Written by: Yanko Design (via Presence) (view additional pictures and videos of the design here)
Posted by: Situated Research

Related posts:

1. How Microsoft’s Xbox 360 & Kinect Help Surgeons in the OR Image: The avatar for Dr. Brian Ross welcomes participants to...
2. Next Generation Technology for Full Body Game Controllers Patent approved for Motion Recognition Clothing(TM) Medibotics’ U.S. patent 7,980,141...
3. Invoked Computing: Device-free Ubiquitous Augmented Reality A research group at the University of Tokyo are creating...