Beantin

James Royal-Lawson

eyeTracking

19 Articles worth reading… (Spotted: Weeks 46-49, 2010)

A whopping 20 article post this time covering 4 weeks of articles spotted on my web-travels. Enjoy!

I’m not anti-SharePoint

Perhaps it’s not SharePoint thats rubbish, but the way it was implemented in your organisation?

Building Tomorrow’s Organization – without today’s IT?

You get the chance to start from scratch – how would you build your company’s IT organisation? Throw IT into the cloud! A provocative but insightful article.

Global Intranet Trends for 2011 – Sample

Last month the Global Intranet Trends report for this year was released. An executive summary and a some sample pages are included.

2011 Intranet Predictions

And once you’ve read the sample report from the Global Intranet Trends, why not compare and contrast its findings with these 10 predictions for 2011 from the Internet Benchmark Forum.

Building the Intranet Experience

Carolyn gives a few quick tips on how you can build a better intranet and then finishes off the post with a fine list of Intranet Twitter people.

Raising the Bar

It’s a people centric world, individuals are catching up quicker than businesses. Employees are circumnavigating policies and restrictions in the way they work in order to get the job done. Michael gives some suggestions of how you can act from both customer and employee perspectives.

Information flow part 4: Search statistics for our enterprise search

Kristian’s excellent series of posts continues with a look at how his organisation gathers and acts upon the search statistics that they gather on their intranet.

Internal comms at IBM shift from creation to curation

Insights into how the intranet and collaboration works at IBM. With over 400,000 employees IBM is like a small country. The sheer volume of content has forced IBM to embrace employee generated content and curation.

Why Joe Client Doesn’t Care About Standards

Selling web standards is no easy task. Clients need sites that are effective, but it’s our job as web professionals to bake web standards into our work – the client doesn’t really need to know the dirty details, just how (more) effective their website is.

Dark Patterns: User Interfaces Designed to Trick People

A wiki filled with examples of user interfaces (web sites) that are designed to trick people. Forget Wikileaks, this is the naming and shaming you should be reading. Educating and enlightening.

Thumbnail based web design?

Google Preview has the potential to make quite an impact in how people decide to click on a result in SERPs. Just now I suspect previews are not widely seen – but it’s wise to put a bit of thought into how your pages look in it – and an important web management task to check your preview thumbnails.

FAQ: Instant Previews

For anyone managing a website, you should read this FAQ. It pretty much explains everything you need to know about how Google collects, generates and uses the preview thumbnails. Many sites will need some tweaking – and right now i’m not talking about design tweaks, but under the hood stuff.

Web Designer’s Guide to PNG Image Format

The PNG image format has become the de facto standard in web design. This is probably the best guide and explanation i’ve read about PNG.

CSS Vocabulary

Pseudo-classes? Child-selectors? Descendant Combinator? Ever struggled to remember what all these odd sounding CSS terms mean? well now you’ve got an easy to read reference to help you out.

Content Strategy, IA, UX or SEO: What’s My Problem?

There are numerous aspects and angles to managing an effective web site and web presence. In this post Dan details some example scenarios and describes some possible solutions.

Becoming a Storyteller

A well researched and well written blog post by Andreas. My dumb-ass executive summary: Storytelling is da shit.

Social Media. It’s There To Give Your Brand A Body

Johan drums a similar drum sometimes in his posts, but it’s a drum that’s worth beating. He has my permission to keep writing this kind of blog post until the majority of companies have heeded his advice.

Mobile OS usage splits the world

As I highlighted in my blog post almost a year ago, the world-wide distribution of smartphone usage and Mobile OS usage is not uniform. The picture in India and Asia is vastly different to North America and Europe. It’s not all iPhone and Android y’know.

We Will Eye Track Almost Anything!!! (Part 3!)

And finally… More “Will it eye track” fun from the Acuity ETS blog. This time they show off some eye tracking data gathered from abseiling down a hotel. Pointless fun – well, almost pointless – it was for charity…

Eye tracking Google Instant

This week I did held a number of presentations and demonstrations of eye tracking user testing as part of Per Axbom’s course at Jönköping University. One of the tasks we tested was intended to show how people search using Google with Google Instant enabled.

We tested 6 people, all but one of them were students in their early 20s. The test environment wasn’t exactly how I’d normally set up eye tracking tests (being in a lecture room with 20-30 people watching on a projector screen while you try to solve the task will of course have an impact on the results!).

It’s always fascinating to watch people search – which is why I wanted to show the students a test involving a search engine and information foraging. This though was the first time I’d done any testing with Google Instant enabled.

No-one looked at the ads

Here are some quick findings.

  • No-one paid any attention to any adverts. Not once. Not a single fixation on an advert during about 7 minutes worth of Googling by 6 people. What does that mean for paid search?
  • When someone did stop typing for a moment to look at the Google Instant SERPs, they looked at the first result.
  • Those that looked at the keyboard whilst typing didn’t see the Google Instant results at all.
  • Results in positions 1-4 were, by and large, the only ones that received any attention.

It would be nice to do some more digging into the data and pull out a few more findings for you, but time is limited and I want to make sure this post makes the light of day this week rather than next year!

Google Instant Heat map showing concentration of fixations around the search box, suggestions, and first snippet

Pulling out heap maps and the like from an Eye tracking test of Google Instant is awkward as the positions of each item in the SERPs varies depending on how many suggestions appear directly below the search box. Sometimes position 1 is where position 2 would be on a normal Google search without Instant enabled.

First result wins

You can see from the heat map above that there is a concentration of fixations around the search box, the instant suggestions, and then the first result. The first result can at times be an advert – but during this test no advert appeared in that position. Note the lack of fixations in the right hand column. Adverts regularly appeared there throughout the tests.

It’s worth noting that Google chose not to do any eye tracking testing of Google Instant before launch, claiming that they didn’t have time. Others have since found the time and published their findings.

The SERPs are more and more complicated

This was by no means a controlled test, and the sample size was just 6 people – but all 6 searched in a way that was clearly their normal and ‘natural’ way of searching. All of them had to solve the same task, and the task had a specific answer that they were unlikely to know before searching. Most of them hadn’t used Google Instant before, so perhaps their behaviour will change as they adjust their search techniques over time.

Nevertheless, Google Instant creates a whole load of issues, and has a varying impact on behaviour. Google search results were already complicated, but the addition of new features such as Instant and Preview during 2010 have pushed this complexity up to a whole new level.

7 Articles worth reading… (Spotted: Week 44-45, 2010)

Photos as Web Content

Anyone who has done any eye tracking tests knows how true this Alertbox article from Nielsen is. Visitors to your site only pay attention to images that are relevant to their task, other pictures used to “make the page pretty” (and indeed banner ads) are ignored. Flash film on start page? ha!

Google Instant Previews – Eye tracking shows it’s game changing

Some eye tracking testing of Google’s new Previews feature. It basically supports what I’ve suspected. Once a user has learnt that the preview feature exists, it’s a game changer. How your site looks in this preview is going to become crucial, and another thing to check as part of your regular routines.

New data proves your mobile marketing strategy must include Android

Gone is the time when you could make an iPhone app and consider your mobile strategy done and dusted. Ignoring Android is becoming the modern-day equivalent of making a web site “Internet Explorer Only”.

Intranet strategy – planning a successful intranet

Do you have an intranet strategy? Far too few organisations actually do. Toby Ward outlines a strategy, offers a methodology and even a model. Must be Christmas!

Intranets in 2011: a turning point

Extended “highlights” by Jane McConnell from the soon to be released Global Intranet Trends 2011 report. Highlights of the highlights: Governance more important than ever, employee generated content and collaboration are essential, people focused, accessible, real-time.

Could Yammer be the death of your organisation?

An alarmist title to this article, but it does have a good message – Enterprise collaboration is here, you can’t ignore it, and you need to have suitable policies in place. What the article doesn’t do though is give you much advice regarding governence of networks like Yammer. I’ve got a blog post brewing about that.

The Art and Science of SEO Site Audits

Nice overview of SEO Audits from Search Engine Watch – Even for the non-expert this is useful to show just how many factors are involved in auditing a site, and also a reminder of how important it is to take care of your SEO (even more so during redesigns!)

5 Paper.li Twitter newspapers

Previously I’ve created and shared with you 5 social memetrackers using Twingly.

Now it’s time to present to you 5 Paper.li created “newspapers”. Paper.li organises links shared on Twitter into easy to read newspapers. You can create newspapers from Twitter lists, Twitter hashtags or advanced Twitter searches.

So, if you aren’t active on Twitter – or you simply don’t have time to keep up with the incredible pace of the real time web – then take a look at these papers. Bookmark the ones you find useful, add an alert for the ones you really don’t want to miss – and if you’re a Twitter user, log in and create a few of your own.

I’ve spent a little bit of time trying to make these newspapers relevant and on topic. A bit of digital curation if you will.

Included in the list is a bonus paper from Jens Wedin – The UX Daily featuring articles about user experience.

The Intranet Daily

Based on my Intranet Twitter list that includes the prominent Intranet bloggers and experts. Intranet managers everywhere should add an alert for this paper!

The Eye Tracking Weekly

A Weekly newspaper created from an advanced Twitter search in order to pick up all eye tracking related tweets.

The Swedish Daily

Based on my Swedish Twitter list that contains people based in Sweden who are following me on Twitter or whom I follow. A great number of the articles featured are in Swedish.

The QR Codes Daily

Another paper based on an advanced Twitter search, this paper gives you a daily digest of articles about QR Codes. Great source of example and inspiration for using barcodes.

The UX Daily

A bonus paper – Created by Jens Wedin and features articles about user experience design. This too is a paper with focus and a high relevancy rate.

Enjoy the newspapers! Have you created a useful Paper.li newspaper? Let me know about it in the comments below.

8 Articles worth reading… (Spotted: Week 37-38, 2010)

Children’s Websites: Usability Issues in Designing for Kids

9 years on from their first survey, Nielsen have produced a new study into the usability of Children’s websites. “It’s now common for a 7-year-old kid to be a seasoned Internet user with several years’ experience.” – If we think that the millennials are the internet generation – in 10-15 years this wave of 7 year olds will be in the marketplace.

No One Is Looking At Google Instant

A small eye tracking study (14 searches by 7 users) but contains some interesting finding – one such finding was all of their test participants didn’t look at the screen whilst typing their search phrase!

New navigation for our intranet – please help!

More practical advice from The Intranet Professor. A lick of paint for an un-respected, un-loved, un-used intranet, or full renovation?

A Comprehensive Guide Inside Your <head>

Excellent guide to the <head> section of HTML. As technically the head is limitless, there are a number of additional things Alex could have included (but you have to draw the line somewhere!) Nevertheless, one link reference that really should have mentioned is rel=”canonical”.

HTML5: The Facts And The Myths

I Had the pleasure of listening to Opera’s Bruce Lawson evangelise HTML5 at Disruptive Code this week. This Smashing Mag article by him and Remy Sharp is a good primer for those of you who don’t know that much about it.

Internet Explorer Extinct by 2013? 2010 Update

In 2008 web dev & design site Sitepoint predicted that they wouldn’t be receiving any visits from people using an Internet Explorer browser – here’s their 2010 update. Interesting stats and interesting to see the continued trend of browser usage in the dev/design world.

Let’s create a neat graphic and pretend that it’s true

Read Jesper’s Churchil-eqsue post, then read Amber Naslund’s post 3 Reasons B2B Social Media Makes So Much Sense. Two boxers each waiting to pounce from their respective corners of the ring? Is one of them half-way up the garden path? Can you apply behaviour analysis and “CRM the living shit out of all the data” to B2B customers in the same way you can B2C consumers?

Japanese Mobile Users Can Sign In to Facebook Using QR Codes

Facebook are experimenting with using QR codes generated whilst you are logged in to the standard site in order to authenticate your log-in to the mobile site. All done in a couple of clicks rather than a load of fiddly typing. Sounds like a usability win to me.

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