Usability Blog Posts

What can my 3 year old tell you about usability?

Wednesday, August 4th, 2010

Usability

Well I’ll be honest, she wouldn’t necessarily put her feelings into words that well (despite an astounding vocabulary – where do they get it all from?) but after watching her interact with apps and websites on my iPhone, it tells me a lot about how valuable an intuitive interface can be.

We spend a lot of time advising clients on their PPC & SEO campaigns and increasingly on the conversion rate and usability of their website. Why break our backs with best in class PPC & SEO if everyone hits a brick wall with the destination website? (more…)

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Eye Tracking Studies

Friday, July 3rd, 2009

Digital Marketing, SEO, Usability

Eye-tracking studies are great for understanding how the public view webpages, but it can often be hard to translate the results of these studies into real web design implementations. Recently I have been reading over studies such as Eyetrack 3, which was a study performed in 2003 by Steve Outing and Laura Ruel, as they observed 46 people view various mock information sites for an hour.

After reading over the study I decided to pick out a few nuggets of information that web designers can often overlook.

  1. Visitors read in the shape of an F. Visitors were found to generally scan WebPages in the shape of an F. Make sure important elements of your content are in these key areas to keep readers engaged. Place headers, sub headers, bullet points, and highlighted text along these lines so readers will be enticed to read more
  2. Headings draw the eye. In the majority of cases the first things readers have been found to look at on a webpage are the headlines. Make sure your headlines are not obstructed by other items on the page and that they are engaging enough to draw the reader into looking further through your site.

    3. (more…)

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Eye Tracking – How I see it

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

Conversion Rate Optimisation, Usability

Eye-Tracking software is a tool used in website optimisation.  It involves asking test subjects to interact with a website whilst you track their eye movements.  A clear picture is built of exactly which elements of a page are seen by visitors.

As an experienced website optimisation specialist, I want to highlight what I feel are the advantages and disadvantages of such software:
Advantages

  • This technology is unrivalled in terms of providing data of attractive elements of a website.  It can be ascertained exactly which areas of your website are being seen and which areas are not.  This data then allows you, with changes to the website, to ensure visitors are seeing the products/messages you wish them to see.
  • You can run more effective website optimisation tests by concentrating your efforts in the areas which are seen more often by visitors.
  • Taking note of areas which are rarely noticed, you can remove or change the content in these areas to improve the overall effectiveness of your website.

Disadvantages

  • This technology is very expensive.  Now, to achieve reliable results, you would need to run in the region of 20 tests.  Typically this would cost in the region of £8k – £10k.  Running fewer tests than this would only highlight the most obvious of patterns, which could easily be obtained with cheaper, less sophisticated technology.
  • Each test case is clearly aware that they are being tracked.  Under test conditions it is well known that a user will behave differently than they would in their own privacy.  This makes the data less reliable than other software such as click tracking, which is recorded without the user’s knowledge.
  • The data only tells you where the user looked – it does not tell you why.  Often, when setting up website optimisation tests, it is more important to understand why visitors behave the way they do.

Conclusion
In Summary, I believe that with unlimited resource, Eye-Tracking is an excellent tool in the arsenal of a website optimisation specialist.  However, looking at the current costs, compared with how much improvement can be made to a website as a result of this technology – I would suggest it is not worth using.  There are many other, very effective tools that are much cheaper and would provide data of almost as much value.

For further reading I recommend http://websitetips.com/articles/usability/eyetracking/

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