Northern User Experience

Entries from February 2009

Design – it’s a team sport!

February 26, 2009 by petebagnall · 4 Comments

Talking to Rachel after tonight’s meeting (more about that later) I had a thought for next month. Rather than talking about it – why don’t we do it. How about we design something as a group. We have more than enough people to make a spectacularly over-staffed design team (or two more sensibly staffed teams). It would really interesting to see what we could come up with. Either it will be fantastic or it’ll start a huge fight and we’ll all spend the rest of the evening is Casualty.

This is a half-baked idea so I’m not exactly sure what we’d design just yet. A few of us tonight expressed irritation at banking websites, so some aspect of that might be one idea, but I’m sure we can come up with something more exciting than that. Or some common widget or tool which you always find frustrating that you’ve always wanted to fix.

Ideally it should be something none of us have designed before.

So if people are generally up for this start thinking of things we can revolutionise!

Categories: News

Eye-tracking studies: more than meets the eye

February 9, 2009 by Mike Little · 1 Comment

There is an interesting eye tracking story over on the Google Blog, covering their results from some usability studies they carried out.

Specifically: eye tracking to test the use of thumbnails in search results.  Though the blog report is fairly brief, they did come to specific conclusion.

Our studies showed that the thumbnails did not strongly affect the order of scanning the results and seemed to make it easier for the participants to find the result they wanted.

There is a real time eye tracking video and some heat map images in the article too.

Go read the original and let us know what you think in the comments.

– Story from Official Google Blog.

Categories: Accessibility · Information Architecture · News · Usability
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