Clicktale (an experience analytics company) published a blog post back in December 2006 smashing the “people don’t scroll myth” to bits. However, 3 ½ years later clients and colleagues still make this claim fairly regularly. So I figured this study is a good one to keep tucked away ready to pull out for myth busting as required.

Users don’t scroll?
In a month long study analysing over 120,000 web pages Clicktale found:

• 91% of the page-views had a scroll-bar.
• 76% of the page-views with a scroll-bar, were scrolled to some extent.
• 22% of the page-views with a scroll-bar, were scrolled all the way to the bottom.

“While 22% may seem low at first, it is actually quite high as many page-views are repeat views where the visitors have previously scrolled all the way to the page bottom and are already familiar with the page.”

Ok, well how long was the page?
Further more, when digging deeper, Clicktale did not find that longer pages performed worse than shorter ones. The graph below shows the percentage of users who scrolled more than 90% of the page relative to the page length.

More excellent articles on myth busting can be found on http://uxmyths.com/

Welcome to 2010! This is our first first weekly blog post for the new year, hopefully to be followed by many more, as well as individual posts by USiT team members. Stay tuned, and please send any feedback to blog[at]usit.com.au

Beyond just demographics

(contributed by Pat)

John Williams gives a good example of why we need to look beyond demographics…

This [...] highlights what researchers refer to as psychographics – emotions, beliefs, attitudes that explore why people do what they do. It adds an important dimension, giving you much deeper insight into consumer motivation – it helps you understand what makes shoppers open their wallets…

A nice overview that you should show clients who fail to look deeper than age, sex and income to see the real people they are describing with market segmentation. Hat tip to the Next Gen Market Research group on LinkedIn for this and lots of other useful research tidbits.

Physiological responses in user research

(contributed by Pat)

A new report from One to One Interactive on user generated content (video and flash animation) gives a good glimpse of the more sophisticated research methods being employed across market research and user research today.

Some of the findings in the report are quite interesting (such as “57% of Internet video viewers intentionally watch Internet videos to change their current emotional state” and “Supporting viewers in the creation of the right expectations for your digital media may be more important than simply getting them to watch your material”) but it is the approach used to study engagement with UGC media that is most intriguing…

While watching their media, participants were connected to OTOinsight’s Quantemo™ neuromarketing research system. Quantemo™ simultaneously records multiple biophysical signals (breath rate, galvanic skin response, heart rate, body temperature) in addition to eye and click tracking information. After recording the biophysical measures, Quantemo™ combines the measures into a single representative measure of physiological engagement. The Quantemo™ Physiological Index or QPI serves as a single point of reference of the overall level of physical engagement (or disengagement) exhibited by a research participant. Positive QPI scores represent stronger physiological engagement while negative QPI scores represent weaker physiological engagement.

A thinly disguised piece of PR for their product it might be, but very interesting nonetheless.

Norman replies to Nussbaum

(contributed by Pat)

There have been many reactions, rebukes and arguments generated by Don Norman’s blog post Technology First, Needs Last (which we mentioned a few weeks ago) but one quite prominent response came from Bruce Nussbaum at Business Week…

Norman tells designers to get over themselves. It is science and technology that drive truly disruptive innovation, not Design’s focus on the needs and wants of people. Ethnographic research, Norman says, can generate small, incremental innovations but the blockbuster game-changing stuff, comes from the lab, not the village or the mall.

Don Norman himself appears in the comments, in an attempt to clarify his position (which I happen to agree with)…

Sorry folks, but I think you miss the point. I too bristled at Norman’s conclusion — and I happen to be Norman. I have long argued that we should seek out the fundamental needs and afterwards build the relevant technologies and products. But as a scientist, I rely upon data, and the data have convinced me that this is simply not the way things happen. I resisted this conclusion for a long time, but the more i examined the evidence, the more I decided that I had no alternative but to embrace this controversial position.

One of the issues at the heart of this debate is ambiguous terminology. For example “design research”, “ethnography”, “design” and “innovation” are some of the most widely misused and abused terms, so much so that many of the (quite often heated) discussions concerning Norman’s post are based on a straightforward misunderstanding. There are many cases of people being “outraged” and disagreeing with Norman, but if you read further it seems they actually agree with him but are reacting to what they think he was saying based on their interpretation of the terminology used.

Value and nostalgia are top consumer trends for 2010

(contributed by Pat)

The folks over at trendwatching.com have given us their predictions for 2010, with consumer-centricity playing a big part:

It is always important to know where consumers are headed, as that is what business is all about – serving changing consumer needs. It is extra-important in 2010 because consumers are insecure and thus any brand that can help them solve their worries, any brand that shows they understand their situation, will be remembered when times are good again.

Webnographers

There’s some great stuff to be found over on webnographers.org for anyone interested in virtual ethnography. Here’s their blurb…

Cyberanthropology is but a fetal field, far from defined. This website was developed in the interest of providing a central hub for those interested in ethnography of the internet. Created by and for webnographers, its success in contingent on your participation.

Ethnography is not constrained solely to anthropologists, and indeed the barriers that divide the various social sciences are at once arbitrary and collapsible. Any individual interested in the complex social, cultural, and psychological facets of humans relating with and through the internet is encouraged to join in this nascent community. Webnographers unite!

This is a very interesting area of research, and an area in which our team is expanding with each and every project.
(forwarded by Pat)

The 10 dos and don’ts of website development (that every CEO should know)

Over on the FatDUX blog, Eric Reiss shares his top 10 list for management:

[...] the web has become more important than ever as a means of communicating with customers/clients/membership. But I have yet to meet a CEO who likes website development. It makes business leaders uncomfortable. The web experts speak in a cryptic language – CMS, KM, XML, CSS. The site seems to take forever to build, costs more than expected, and invariably provides less value than the organization had hoped.

No one likes signing a big check without some idea as to what they’re getting. So if you’re a business leader, here are a few basic, non-technical tips that will significantly increase your chances for online success. And they let you do what you do best – lead.

There are some good points in there, and the central point of reminding business leaders to not get caught up in the detail, but rather to be leaders is excellent. These tips were obviously learned and refined over many, many client engagements!
(forwarded by Pat)

Ridiculous User Interfaces In Film

Over on Gizmodo, John Herrman discusses Ridiculous User Interfaces In Film, and the Man Who Designs Them…

Designing a fake dashboard for an imagined supercomputer or a hovering control panel for a worldwide surveillance system is a different process than creating a genuinely usable UI. Your goal is to imply things: that a machine is powerful; that a villain is formidable; that the software is intuitive, but that the breadth of its powers borders on unknowable. At no point does real-world usability factor in, and nor should it—this is pure fantasy, for an audience raised on Start Buttons, desktop icons and tree menus

He forgets to mention the “Unix system” from Jurassic Park, possibly the most ridiculous of all of these movie UIs :)
(forwarded by Angus)

Dimensions of design/Against ahistoricity

Adam Greenfield talks about looking beyond the obvious sources of insight and inspiration, including those who have come before us…

Let’s face it: brighter and more sensitive people than us have been thinking about issues like public versus private realms, or which elements of a system are hard to reconfigure and which more open to user specification, for many hundreds of years. Medieval Islamic urbanism, for example, had some notions about how to demarcate transitional spaces between public and fully private that might still usefully inform the design of digital applications and services. By contrast, the level of sophistication with which those of us engaged in such design generally handle these issues is risible (and here I’m pointing a finger at just about the entire UX “community” and the technology industry that supports it).

Even if you don’t like Adam’s writing style, this is a thought provoking piece. Especially interesting was the introductory quote from the book Responsive Environments: A Manual for Designers which outlines how design can actually make people do things – as suggested by Jon Kolko and argued against in the recent Sydney UX book club.
(forwarded by Angus)

Walt Disney’s Creative Organization Chart

Delphine Hirasuna writes about the typically unique way in which Disney went about things, in this case the humble org chart…

The Disney org chart, on the other hand, is based on process, from the story idea through direction to the final release of the film. All of the staff positions are in the service of supporting this work flow. Perhaps the question now is what should the org chart of the future look like, given the global workforce, telecommuting personnel, virtual employees, outsourced jobs and contract workers who sometimes outnumber salaried staff? In an idea-based, rather than a manufacturing-based, economy, how should a business organize itself?

(forwarded by Angus)

Content Strategist as Digital Curator

On A List Apart, Erin Scime examines the role of curator in digital media…

When a site launches, your audience arrives to learn more about what you know most about. It’s critical to create a content experience with purpose, that is consistent and contextual. This helps to assert your brand’s authority, establishes relationships with your audience, and secures a return visit based on your content’s value. The content strategist-as-curator is the one who makes this happen. How?

(forwarded by Angus)

Landline phone numbers in electronic forms

Jess Enders shares the results of her research on how to best format phone numbers…

The research findings: one long string is the clear winner. Like the mobile phone numbers, one long string of digits—including area code—was the most common method of data entry: out of 640 landline phone numbers provided by interested research participants, 39% were entered as one long string of 10 digits (i.e. no spaces and no chunking).

(forwarded by Angus)

4 Out of 5 Viewers Leave If a Stream Buffers Once

Janko Roettgers reveals some interesting video-related user behaviour…

More than 81 percent of all online video viewers click away if they encounter a clip rebuffering, according to a new study by Tubemogul. The Emeryville-based video distribution and analytics startup took a close look at 192 million video streams over the course of 14 days to figure out how much rebuffers matter. The result: 6.81 percent of all streams rebuffer at some point, and around 2.5 percent rebuffer twice.

(forwarded by Angus)

How UCD and Agile can live together

David Farkas sets out a framework in which UCD and Agile can work together:

Diagrams are pretty, Gantt charts set expectations, but reality is far from perfect. At the end of the day, a project manager must own the project and there must be some sense of reporting. Depending on the project manager’s background and personal goals there will tend to be a focus towards the needs of UCD or Agile… Finally, friction exists from misaligned expectations from UCD practitioners forcing their methods too late in the game or agile practitioners trying to wean out hard requirements before purpose is fully understood.

(forwarded by Sophie)

Huffington Post wants to add paid tweets to its articles. Will advertisers bite?

(or, an alternate headline offered by one commenter, “HuffPo Sells Remaining Fraction of Soul for Ongoing Revenue Stream”?)

In Advertising Age, Nat Ives reports…

The Huffington Post has started offering marketers the ability to inject their own paid comments among reader comments and place paid Tweets among the live Twitter feeds the site assembles around news subjects and events.

Marketers haven’t bought in yet, but they seem likely to be intrigued. The biggest question is whether marketers and the Huffington Post can execute the program without marring visitors’ experience reading and interacting with the site.

(forwarded by Sophie)

Should journos have their Twitter profiles taken from them if they change job?

And, on the subject of journalists tweeting, Mumbrella asks whether journalists should have their Twitter profiles taken from them if they change jobs:

There’s an argument both ways. You could view it in the same way as when a reporter changes newspaper, they’ll take their contacts book with them. I’ve now got business cards and contacts books stretching back 20 years. I’m not sure what use the private phone number for Farnborough ambulance station in the UK would be for me now, but I’ve still got it somewhere.

(forwarded by Sophie)

On Friday the 2nd of October, two of the USiT team (Pat and Alun) gave a presentation at the first day of Oz-IA 2009, the 4th Australian Information Architecture conference. The presentation told the story, in 25 minutes, of the research and design for the SuperRacing website. The slides are shown below.

Can focus groups be useful for design research? That is a question I hear a lot (be it in my own head or from actual other people).

A discussion along these lines has played out recently on the AnthroDesign mailing list. I’ve captured the gist of the discussion here. Bridget kicked off with:

…a client wants to conduct focus groups to get people’s reactions to different web sites and web functionality. There will be 8-10 people in the room and the web site projected with the moderator driving. Has anyone had experience conducting a group like this? Are there any tips into making this as successful a session as it can be? I’ve typically conducted usability sessions or concept testing one-on-one.What kind of tasks and questions have built into the discussion guide?

The very smart Steve Portigal replied with (emphasis added by me):

One thing that we find helps us when given these constraints is an individual workbook. We make ‘em with really big text and activities like a Likert scale etc. And at every point of evaluation, have people do the workbook FIRST independently and then discuss it. Then you have an artifact afterwards you can collect. We try to do exercises to help move people along to a meaningful place of evaluation from just “hey you are sitting in a room and here’s something new and do you like it?” to something closer to a realistic personal evaluation. We might try to get people to do something like “build” what they want instead of evaluating the thing we put in front of them. Or we might do an exercise – be it theatrical or other – to help move the group into a bit more relevant context (i.e., break into two groups and one group is the IT department and the other group is managers who then have to present to each other why this is or isn’t a good idea).

I will note that every time we come up with a really interesting and potentially most effective use of the format, it seems like we get shut down by our clients who have engaged us to use this format because they want something safe and familiar, methodologically, and if you spend five minutes building up a role play activity in order to get more context from their evaluation, that means there’s five minutes less to cram full of questions about something else that’s hard to answer in a focus group room.

Although I’ve not actually used this myself, I really like this technique. Preetham has a similar suggestion:

Want to echo Steve’s comment about workbooks where participants give individual feedback. They are extremely helpful to negate the effects of one or two outspoken individuals.

We have had very good success sending a homework workbook that makes people immerse themselves in the context of use. This also allows them to come into the session with a point of view; makes their feedback so much more valuable and actionable. The cost to make one and send it before hand is negligible when compared to output…

There’s a bit of research coming up where the USiT team might be able to employ this technique. Hopefully we can blog about it afterwards.

Care to share your own thoughts or experiences on this technique?

Update: some more useful stuff from AnthroDesign…from Christina:

…One thing I did that worked very well and was very simple was to have blind votes about each design, with each respondent quickly jotting down one MAIN reason for their vote (Repondents’ comments included, “clean design,” “no contact information,” “Not enough info” etc.). I then collected each vote and discussed with the group why they voted how they did (the votes for respondents were not revealed to other respondents).

This helped to not only get something solid for the client in terms of “yes/no” feedback, but also helped to mitigate for the hated “alpha respondent” influencing the meek during groups. It also served as a cross-check to compare the private vote against the public discussion, and allowed everyone to have an equal voice in this area…

Nancy suggests:

This is a situation where I promote the use of design games, to get the players to interact with artifacts and with one another. People are unlikely to tell you anything unexpected in a presentation format. Plus all the critiques of focus groups as a method are likely to be demonstrated, as you’ve obviously anticipated.

In a similar situation (e.g. getting feedback from existing customers to several candidates for a new visual symbol set), we gathered people for “focus groups” and provided each draft symbol set to a different small team, asking them to mark up a webpage with the symbols corresponding to the meaning distinctions intended. Then the small teams presented to one another and commented on what they preferred about their own solution versus another team’s solution (layout, text+symbol vs text alone, size, color, shape, etc.). We got some striking responses, including where a small team was not satisfied with the symbols we provided and they created distinctions on the spot to communicate the meanings we’d requested. Their solution matched one of the other candidate sets of symbols (though of course less polished) which provided additional support for that one. And the client stakeholders were in the room to watch and listen, as observers, during the event.

The UX book club was pretty interesting last night. This idea popped into my head when Penny Hagen started discussing the fact that “great designers” have an inherent awareness and observational skills so they were really always doing user research. This discussing got me thinking, if there were different levels of fidelity in customer research much as there are in sketching and design deliverables.

What’s the relationship between having a sketchy idea of customers, needs, behaviors and wants and the freedom to design. My first thoughts are that the less you know about your customers the more freedom you feel you have to design whatever you want. However, I guess the risks of designing something that is completely wrong or not fit for purpose is proportionality higher.

Don’t get me wrong (those who know me), I still think that the more you know about customers and their context the better your designs will be and the more opportunity you will have to see the whitespaces and unmet needs. But, to what extent does knowing more constrain exploration outside of the context of use, and is that exploration at all useful?

There’s a short case study over on Marketing mag about news.com.au – increasing user engagement and website traffic through redesign. Here’s a snippet:

The factors that determined news.com.au’s re-design came as a result of extensive prelaunch user and industry research; requirements from a wide range of stakeholders; exhaustive testing and a study of new technological solutions.

Yet another accolade for the News redesign team, including USiT’s own Chris Khalil!

(See our own post on the redesign)

Vicky Teinaki has written an interesting article about Phenomenology over at JohnnyHolland. It provides a very brief overview of what phenomenology is and how this philosophical basis can help inform the work of a designer.

While I tend to take a more symbolic view of the world (semiotics) particularly when doing design research, phenomenology does open up a different way of thinking about interaction design.

The results of a three-year Digital Youth project have been released by the University of California. It seems like an impressive ethnographical study.

Here is an extract from the summary report (PDF 83kB):

Over three years, University of California, Irvine researcher and her research team interviewed over 800 youth and young adults and conducted over 5000 hours of online observations as part of the most extensive U.S. study of youth media use to date.

They found that social network sites, online games, video-sharing sites, and gadgets such as iPods and mobile phones are now fixtures of youth culture. The research finds today’s youth may be coming of age and struggling for autonomy and identity amid new worlds for communication, friendship, play, and self-expression.

Many adults worry that children are wasting time online, texting, or playing video games. The researchers explain why youth find these activities compelling and important. The digital world is creating new opportunities for youth to grapple with social norms, explore interests, develop technical skills, and experiment with new forms of self-expression. These activities have captured teens’ attention because they provide avenues for extending social worlds, self-directed learning, and independence.

I don’t think the findings are hugely surprising, but they are very interesting and do support other research that has surfaced in recent years with regard to how “gen Y” use online media to extend friendships and interests and engage in peer-based, self-directed learning online.

There is some great content on the project website, but there could be better use of multimedia in terms of communicating the findings (there is some video on the McArthur Foundation website though).

[Thanks to Christo who first posted this to the Antrodesign mailing list]

After more than six months of careful planning the redesign of The Australian Business website went live on the 18^th October.

The new business site design was conceived through a comprehensive understanding of user needs for financial information. Contextual enquiry during the research phase lead by Dennis Nordstrom identified a clear user need for the delivery of a wide breadth and depth of world financial information in an Australian context.

Creating the site structure during the collaborative design session

In content terms the site needed to integrate the full business editorial resources of the national newspaper and in a News Corporation first be underpinned by contextual content/market data from other global properties such as The Wall Street Journal, The Times, Dow Jones and MarketWatch.

Therefore the mission from a user experience perspective was to successfully convey the huge volume of financial information available in a fashion that did not overwhelm or confuse.

Collaborative design sketch by Dennis Nordstrom & Alun Machin

The final product design concept was based around a simple contextual three column based solution for the vast majority of site sections. Editorial content is primary displayed in the left column, comparative market data/tools are placed in the centre column and supporting analysis, opinion and multimedia in the right hand column.

The final result

The site also introduces a whole new raft of features including:

• A snapshot of the key markets, currencies and commodities around the world at the top of every site page
• New areas focusing on World Business News, Financial Markets, Industry Sectors, Mining & Energy, Media, Opinion, Wealth and Executive Lifestyle
• Expanded editorial coverage and contextual market data for industry sectors such as Property and Aviation
• Interactive company charting showing key events and trading data such as dividend payments, trading volume underpinned with contextual news reports
• Comprehensive background information on all ASX-listed Australian companies plus data on stocks, stock market indices, currencies and commodities
• Suggested company name functionality when searching for stock quote information
• Display of previously searched company stock quotes
• ‘Story behind the story’ in-depth coverage on major issues such as the current global financial crisis

For further information on the new website a comprehensive guide is available to view in PDF format.

If you have any feedback (both positive and negative) or questions concerning the new site please leave a comment.