Situated Research's Blog

From 2005 to 2010, Cyber Monday sales (the Monday after Thanksgiving) have more than doubled, as illustrated above. A recent article from the Wall Street Journal showed an increase of 22% in sales on Cyber Monday in 2011, compared with the 2010 holiday season.

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.” Read more »

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. Read more »

Future athletes will dominate cyberspace

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? Read more »

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. Read more »

How good design can make users effective

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. Read more »

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). Read more »

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. Read more »

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. Read more »

Patent approved for Motion Recognition Clothing(TM)

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. Read more »

Sony is talking crazy, indicating that games may be able to tell if you’re lying or depressed just ten years down the road. We’ll stick with growing crops, thanks.

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? Read more »

Image: The interactive experience at UNSW’s iCinema Centre. Source: The Australian

Lost in cyberspace

You only have to be the parent of a child over the age of seven to know what I’m talking about: the vacant eyes so preoccupied by what’s on screen that they can’t focus on your face for more than a few seconds before being drawn back into the cyberworld.

As you talk, your little darling types or toggles. “Are you listening to me?” you ask, only to be told in a precocious tone: “Yeahhhh. I’m multitasking, Mum.” Read more »

A new augmented reality shopping platform for Xbox Kinect will allow users to try on clothes in true 3-D, share photos with friends, and store wish-listed items on smartphones for shopping on-the-go.

Virtual reality shopping just got a lot more real–and could soon become a lot more mainstream. “KinectShop” (working title), an augmented reality shopping platform for the Xbox Kinect, exploits the system’s new finger-recognition technology to allow shoppers to grab items from an unlimited shelf of clothes, see how accessories look at multiple angles, and share the photos with friends on Twitter and Facebook for a quick thumbs-up or down. Read more »

You are playing a video game, and your avatar is creeping into a haunted house at the dead of night. Suddenly, you freeze in your chair. Something is crawling up your back…

Whether this idea appeals or not, researchers at Disney have made such sensations possible by inventing a system that fools players into thinking that objects are moving against their skin. Read more »

Summary: Websites and mobile apps both frequently cram options into too-small parts of the screen, making items harder to understand.

A computer screen’s precious pixels are the world’s most valuable real estate. Amazon’s Add to Cart button is 160×27 pixels, or 0.003 square feet (0.0003 m²) at a typical 100 dpi monitor resolution. You could crowd almost 800,000 Buy buttons onto the floor space of the average American home, which currently sells for $160,000. Even a single Buy button will often bring in more than that — let alone the revenue from 800,000 buttons.

Normally, when something is extremely valuable, you try to conserve it. But screen space shouldn’t be hoarded, it should be spent. I see too many designs that cram highly valuable content or action items into tiny spaces while wasting vast amounts of screen space. Read more »

Imagine you could drive your car using only your thoughts. German researchers have just made that possible – and they have the video to prove it. Following his recent interview on the Robots Podcast about autonomous vehicles, Raul Rojas, an AI professor at the Freie Universitat Berlin, and his team have demonstrated how a driver can use a brain interface to steer a vehicle. Read more »