"usability" in Weblog

.Net magazine asked me (amongst dozens of others) to give them my predictions for next year. The article’s now out and I feel a little bit mis-represented - they seem to have missed my point entirely. To set the record straight here’s what I wrote for them:

I think that next year is going to be incredibly exciting for interaction and user experience design. Right now we are seeing the reinvention of the web application. AJAX has been met with rabid enthusiasm and Dale Dougherty’s Web 2.0 label has crossed over into the mainstream press.

Microsoft recently announced that they will be moving Office online and unveiled live.com to tap the online services market. Google has already made its intentions clear with service offerings like GMail, Google Maps and Google Reader. Yahoo! has entered the fray with some very interesting experiments in user experience, Flickr being my favourite but Yahoo! Mindset is an ingeniously simple enhancement to organic searching. Then throw delicious, Basecamp, Listal, Remember the Milk, Sproutliner, Netvibes, Technorati, Num Sum, Writely, Rojo, ProtoPage, TiddlyWiki and all the other independent apps into the mix. Finally, add the new or forthcoming offerings from high profile web designers like 37 Signals, Adaptive Path, Firewheel Design and Shaun Inman as they establish themselves as application developers. Everyone seems to have a web app in the oven. That’s a very rich and diverse online platform in the making…

These applications require more intense workflows than anything we’ve seen before on the web. I expect to see masses of experimental interaction accompanying new and existing web apps in the name of user experience while everyone figures out what works and what doesn’t. If anything, I think the high end Flash designers probably have a head start, having dealt with interaction issues like latency and interface feedback before. I am looking forward to plenty of experimentation in rich interaction with some blazing successes that change how we use the web but many, many dismal, unusable failures.

I know I’ve been quiet for a while but this is why: Fixing the Back Button and Enabling Bookmarking for AJAX Apps. It’s been a couple of weeks in the writing and researching but I’m hoping it’s going to be popular. I don’t really know how to release this one though. For my CSS articles I knew that CSS-D is the place to go. This new one coveres usability, AJAX, javascript and maybe general web development… I guess I’ll just have to leave it and see what happens.

Christ, business.gov.uk got a commendation at the BIMA 2004 awards in the Best usability or accessibility category and I had no idea! Great stuff. That’s to add to the IVCA gold in the Websites category. Blimey.

Developing and working with CMSs is a subject close to my heart at the moment for a couple of reasons, neither of which I think I can talk about, and two articles have helped me along no end.

The first was Scrivs’ timely MT vs. WP vs. TxP: Entry Page Design, in which he critiqued the design and usability of the 3 most popular blogging tools. He reached the same conclusions as I had but he seems to have used a lot more reasoning…!

Next is a set of articles called Building a Web Application that document the development of a CMS by Jonathan at Snook.ca. This set of articles run through the full development cycle from initial design decisions, through requirements gathering and specification to debating release license options. There’s a lot there.

The Eyetrack III appears to be a device that follows people’s eyes as they look at things… What’s this used for? Helicopters? Fighter pilots? Observing people as they look at websites? Yeah, the last one.

46 people were observed for an hour while they looked through ‘mock news websites and real multimedia content’. The findings are, apparently, not intended as a definitive exploration of user behaviour but they definitely offer an insight into people’s use of websites.

So first up, users scan the top portion of a page starting with the top left and then move right. The the eye looks for the dominant headline text (generally ignoring images), with priority given to the top left of the screen.

The most interesting thing for me is the text size findings. Apparently people tend to scan large type but read small type. If you want someone to focus on a portion of your information set it small. Having said that, if the blurbs accompanying a headline are smaller than the headline text then they get ignored.

On the subject of blurbs, it appears that website blurbs only have a few words to grab the user. Eyetrack found that people will generally only read a couple of words before deciding whether they’re interested. Man, we’re an impatient bunch aren’t we?! On top of that headlines only get a second of attention before being passed over so the first few words have to be ‘attention-grabbers’.

Interestingly, it was also found that people are quite happy to read below the fold. The eyes go in search of an interesting headline or keyword, again suggesting that you invest in some good copy.

On the navigation front, top-placing garnered the most attention, getting a good portion of time spent on it. Surprisingly, the next best spot for navigation appears to be the right hand side of the page.

Based on this stuff the Eyetrack folk have broken down the home page designs of the sites they tested on along with statistics for each so you can make you own mind up about what you prefer.

For body copy the findings suggest using short line lengths with single column text. Text gets attention before photos and summaries leading into articles appear very popular. Oddly, paragraphs containing a portion of bold text got the attention of 95% of people tested.

That’s everything that grabbed me but I highly recommend reading the whole article. I haven’t seen a study like this in a while and the findings are facinating…

In the article Reading Online Text: A Comparison of Four White Space Layouts it is revealed that people read fastest when text has no margins and sub-optimal leading. Conversely, comprehension is best with some nice margins and leading. That sounds a bit bizarre to me. but it reminds me of an article I read a couple of years ago. I can’t find the original link but the same findings are given in What is the optimal line length when reading prose text from a monitor? The 1999 experiments by Youngman and Scharff found that text on screen is read faster and more reliably with longer line lengths (8 inches at 12pt) but people preferred shorter line lengths (4-6 inches), while Dyson and Kipping determined that shorter lines (1.8 inches) were hard to read.

The obvious conclusions are that users prefer onscreen text displayed in blocks of 4-6 inches with margins and leading (even though they read fastest with longer lines and no margins).

I’d suggest that these findings support fixed line-length layouts over fluid layouts. I browse the internet on a wide-screen monitor with my browser maximised and fluid sites generally look terrible. Fixing columns, at least using ems would give me comfortable readability despite my extra-wide browser, and would take into account those folk who are viewing with larger text browser settings…

This is an interesting little story illustrating the importance of questioning your design assumptions. User testing? Talking to your target audience? Yep, all that stuff.