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In preparation for some work I’ll be doing this summer, I read Nielsen and Pernice’s Eyetracking Web Usability over the past few days. The book reports on the results of a massive eyetracking study that they performed to analyze how people use the web. My primary interest, actually, is in their methodology, which is not part of the book but is available free online as a separate report, “Eyetracking Methodology: 65 Guidelines for How to Conduct and Evaluate Usability Studies Using Eyetracking. But I thought I would start with the publication of the results, both to see what they had to say and as a bit of a crash course in web usability, which I know woefully little about.
Being a bit of a novice there, I thought the book was quite good. As someone with quantitative leanings, it was compelling to have design principles interspersed with heat maps or gaze charts illustrating the data they used to derive their principles. Much of it was common sense; I was not shocked to learn that most of us don’t even notice banner ads or aspects of design that look like banner ads anymore. But seeing how dramatically we ignore them was fascinating. The short section of the book about differences in what men and women attend to in images was also quite fun – as was the fact that everyone likes looking at dog genitals!
There were a few places where I felt that the authors were stressing their assumption of the purpose of a website or the intended audience too strongly, and critiquing sites for not maximizing their usability for the specific tasks being tested. Particularly when measuring how quickly a fact can be found on a fact-filled page, not everything can be the most prominent piece of information. But if the examples are taken as illustrations of what you should or should not do in presenting what the site authors perceive as the most important information, the principles are valuable.
One thing I am curious about is the focus throughout the book on not making users read – to the extent that textual precision should be sacrificed in some cases in order to save the user reading a single extra word. The specific example I am thinking of involved a webpage with a variety of bolded headings, one of which was a two word phrase. The contention was that the adjective within the phrase should be omitted since users might reach that adjective, not have it be specifically the word they were looking for, and move on before seeing that the second word of the phrase matched their goal.
Now, partially this goes back to my previous point about the intended users of the site, and their expected goals and familiarity with the language of the site. But as an educator, it troubles me to see evidence that if the information someone is looking for is not apparently within the first word of a heading, the instinct to move on instead of continuing to read is so strong. I can concede that the web is filled with so many competing information sources that sites must design themselves for easy perusal and navigation. But I had no idea that the pressures against reading text were so strong. It is distressing.

I am teaching information security this term, so expect more security related content over the next couple of months. First up, if you’re wondering how easily traceable you are on the internet, visit Panopticlick. A project from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the site looks at what unique information it can collect about you via your browser – even if you have cookies off. Based on information like your time zone, your screen size, what fonts your browser has access to, and what plug-ins you have, a “fingerprint” is created for you, and the compared against the fingerprints of all of the other users to try the site so far. My browser tested as unique against the 610,703 tested at the site so far. While that doesn’t prove that my configuration is 100% unique, and certainly most if not all of that information is easily changeable if you are trying to hide, it does suggest that if sites (whether corporate or government) were interested in tracking visitors and sharing information about what people are doing to build up profiles, it would be quite plausible.

It is a convenient coincidence that a number of interesting articles about different aspects of gaming and gaming culture have surfaced in time for the last week of my intersession course.

• Develop magazine recounts the stories of the ten biggest flops as games in the past decade – the reasons behind the failures are the most interesting part
• MSNBC reports that the size of certain portions of your brain predicts your ability at playing video games – an odd claim given that “video game” is a very broad category and I don’t tend to think that there is a single set of skills that lead to success in all games, which is consistent with some of the details buried later in the article
• In good news for my students, learning how to create computer games can improve other student skills and can be effective in broadening interest in computing
• On the down side, they may find themselves at reduced risk for rickets if they play too much
• One game player muses on how to compute the value of a game based on a combination of cost, enjoyment and time spent playing it – seems to me there might need to be an exponential in there somewhere
• Besides describing a neat Project Natal game, 2 Finger Heroes, that is on the scrap heap, this article alludes to the problem of localization in games, in this case that gestures do not always translate across cultures
• Finally, if you think the life of a game developer seems like fun and games, take a look at this open letter from wives of Rockstar employees protesting their work situation – though be aware this is just one person’s presentation of the situation; there is also an interesting implied gender to the developers at Rockstar in the letter

There are a lot of interesting angles to the possibility that Google is developing technology to detect billboards and other ads in Google Maps street view images and replace them with their own ads. This news is based on a patent application, so it may not even happen. But it raises the question of whether Google even wants to get into doctoring their images to such a degree. Blurring out a detail or removing an image is one thing, but if users know that what they see may not be reality, will they lose faith in the reliability of the system? Having the imposed ad integrate seamlessly with the image would probably be necessary for it to be effective, but I would personally prefer to be able to identify imposed content.
There actually seem to be a set of patent applications that the articles I have seen are talking about and merging the discussion of – one that automatically finds ads in images and one that manages auctions of advertising space. The image-processing patent (application number 20100004995) is quite long so I’ve only skimmed it, but I would be very interested if this were pursued on how exactly an advertisement was defined and if there was an intention to include a person in the loop to ensure that only actual advertising space was being treated as such. Near me there are giant “Welcome To Pennsylvania” (or West Virginia…) signs that could look like ads but which convey map information that ought not to be lost. Simply finding large rectangular details won’t do it.
This also seems to raise the possibility that billboard advertisers will start acting like spammers, carefully crafting ads that both advertise and yet are missed by Google’s algorithm. Google’s online actions might end up changing the way our real-world advertising looks.