UserX Blog

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Here’s something you don’t hear everyday.

Gord Hotchkiss, CEO of search marketing firm Enquiro, says eye-tracking studies may explain why Google is struggling in China. Excerpt:

“Chinese Web sites tend to be loaded with graphics that blink, spin and scream at us in bright colors. To Western eyes, a native Chinese Web page is often an abomination in design, completely amateurish and awkward. Our assumption is that the design is this way because of the lack of maturity in the Chinese market and the fact that they haven’t progressed enough to adopt Western design standards. …

“But the fact is, the Chinese prefer a presentation is loaded with visual stimuli. They even have a word for it. Renao. Loosely translated it means ‘hot and noisy.’ If you visit China, this manifests itself around every corner. In the cities, commercial ads scream for attention. A walk down the street is a sensual assault, a tsunami of stimuli that hits you on multiple levels. It’s not necessarily that the Chinese market is less mature than the West; it’s that what the Chinese user wants is not always the same as what the Western user wants.

Referencing an earlier blog post questioning if we really learn anything new from eye tracking, it still remains true, to me, that eye tracking studies fall short of explaining conclusively “why” users behave they way they do; but perhaps, and especially in this case, answering the question of “how users behave” is a huge finding in itself and would warrant further research.

Looking forward to your findings Gord

Full Article: A Tale of Two Cultures by Gord Hotchkiss

Kelly Goto and the people of gotomobile have fashioned a DIY camera for mobile usability tests that truly rocks.

One of the problems with mobile testing is the ability to capture both on-screen activity as well as physical interactions with the phone in the same frame. All this without obstructing the view and the user’s interaction with the mobilephone. gotomobile’s DIY cam does all this, and definitely cheaper than some of the products we’ve seen.

Made out of parts you can get from your local hardware and electronics store, the team’s even put up step by step instructions on how to build it and a sample video from a test session. Clever

Jan Chipchase, Principal Scientist of the Nokia Research Center, speaks at Lift 2007 on the challenges and lessons learnt from research done with illiterate people around the world.

The session raises more questions than answers, but what’s more important and, to me, more interesting really is the approach and broad assumptions that guide Nokia’s work.

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Crazy Egg is a “new” web analytics tool that monitors your visitor’s click activity.

The cool thing about Crazy Egg (besides its name) is not what it does, but how it visualizes its data in a heatmap. Heatmaps have been used for some time to represent findings from eyetracking studies. Crazy Egg uses heatmaps (or more accurately clickmaps) to represent where users click.

Here are 5 things we like about Crazy Egg:
1. The heatmap visualizes areas of a webpage that are clicked. Warm colours (e.g. red, orange, yellow) represent areas clicked more; cool colours (e.g. blue, green) represent areas clicked less.

2. You can define test sessions by pages and period of time (e.g. Log clicks for Homepage for a period of 2 days).

3. If you update a page and want to test it again, you can test a new version and later compare results of the old and
new pages.

4. You see where users ACTUALLY click. Some Web analytic solutions track clicks only if they’re hyperlinks. Crazy Egg tracks clicks even if they are not links. So you see EXACTLY where users are clicking.

5. It’s free for 4 pages and first 5000 clicks/month.

For further reading, check out Eston Bond’s blogpost on how to interprete Crazy Egg’s heatmaps.

This is definitely one of the most interesting innovations in navigation bar design I’ve seen in a long while.

Yahoo’s navigation bar tracks how frequently you access each element behind the scenes. What it then does is it takes the idea of a tag cloud and implements it on the navigation elements.

What you get is a navigation bar that understands your usage patterns, making the font size of nav elements you use frequently larger than others. This is a great idea because frequently used items should take up more screen real estate for greater efficiency of use.

Very clever indeed. I love it!

Recently, I’ve been reading about eye tracking and heat maps again. I did this because those heat maps look so cool, there’s gotta be an amazing lesson to learn here!

Essentially, eye tracking tracks the movement of your gaze as you view, for example, a webpage. A heat map is a visual representation of that movement, with “warmer” regions coloured in red and yellow representing areas that you spend more time gazing at, and “cooler” blue and grey regions representing areas you spend less time gazing at.

The question I’ve always had is: what new things do we _really_ learn from eye tracking studies?

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Before you ask, the answer is no: UX Magazine isn’t a UserX publication

About UX Magazine:

UX Magazine is a collaborative publication by writers, technologists, designers, marketeers & business gurus from around the world. This project was created & developed by C. Demetriadis, H. Mann & A. Schleifer.

UX Magazine sets out to explore, promote & discuss the multiple facets of user experience one article at a time. It is built upon the foundations of ProjectNeo, a global interactive design community.

Of particular interest, to me, is George Papadakis’s post on Web2.0: Revolution or Evolution? . I think a little part of anyone who’s thought about the new-fangled term Web2.0 struggles with defining what kind of animal it really is. Are we talking about technologies like AJAX, RSS feeds and XML? Or is Web2.0 an ideology of bringing web interaction closer to the realm of software?

Perhaps its all of these things. Until you reach a definition that satisfies you, enjoy UX Magazine; and checkout Wikipedia’s definition of Web2.0.

It seems that every year the zany bunch at the Institute of System Science (ISS) gather like nomads to this plot of land in Singapore called the Shangri-La together to eat, make merry and exchange humurous stories related to driving and parking (don’t ask ).

To those of you who don’t already know, I am an adjunct lecturer at ISS (hey guys! how do I update by profile on your website?)…anyway, I was invited as well and I had the great fortune of meeting some really interesting people. Unfortunately, I only have this one blurry pic taken with my Nokia N70.

There’s the effervescent Jenny Russon, with her quaint hat, holding up one of her paintings (Jenny, I enjoyed the amazing conversation we had! Let’s hope there’s a part 2!). To her right is another local artist Emily Por (Emily I really do love the artwork on your business card and I think I didn’t to get your husband’s contact details). Then there’s William “I’ll never wear a singlet again” Foo and Irene Boey from Integral Solutions (the datamining gurus).

Of course I have not forgotten the rest who were not in the photo. Foong Sew Bun the very impressive yet also very humble CTO of IBM, Fiona Ng the Legal Counsel for the National University of Singapore (NUS), Yum Hui Yuen the Deputy Director of ISS and last but not least Howard Russon (Howard it says on the ISS website that you’re the Senior Programme Director at ISS…all this time I had no clue!)

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CSSEdit allows you to quickly change stylesheet elements of websites to see how they look. Traditionally, I’ve done this by changing the stylesheet, not knowing how it’ll look like, then upload it via FTP before refreshing the page on my browser.

With CSSEdit, feedback is immediate. I can change the font and Boom! its previewed. Don’t like it? Change it again.

Ever wondered if a website would look better with a different font? CSSEdit makes it easy. For example: you can enter www.channelnewsasia.com and CSSEdit will immediately sense the CSS stylesheets the website uses. You can then make a copy of the stylesheet on your computer and OVERRIDE the website’s stylesheet with your own.
A really cool app that solves a very real inconvenience