August 2007
Chapter Business
- September meeting is Jared Spool at Staples. RSVP early to Jen Hocko if you'd like to attend!
- In October we will have a series of 10 minute talks for our meeting at MIT. Chauncey is expected to be the official timekeeper. Anyone interested in presenting a 10 minute talk should email Jen Hocko.
- November is World Usability Day. We will be announcing a brainstorming session around the topics of health care and/or accessibility in a week or so.
- Tripadvisor is hiring IAs and designers; MathWorks is hiring usability specialists.
- Sept 11 - BostonCHI will have a session on usability at larger companies - bostonchi.org at Sun Microsystems
Several tours of the Fidelity lab were given prior to the presentation, and several attendees participated in a short eye tracking study.
Presentation
Agenda
- Older Adults and the web lessons learned
- Two quick examples from "normal" tests
- Lessons learned about eye tracking
- Results from tonights eye tracking study
Older adults and eye tracking
- Presented at HCI Int. 2007
- Earlier studies show that older adults have more difficulty than young adults
- Is this because of the way we look at web pages?
- Technology: Eye tracker is done by Tobii 1750. Infrared light sources reflect against the back of the eye. The video camera finds reflections of the infra-red. Once calibrates the device can detect where the eye is. Calibration takes 30 sec.
- Studied 20 employees with a prototype benefits website. The eye tracker follows a dot around the screen. There is a lot of data but the core display is either a gaze plot that shows the order of where you look, or a heat map that shows a cumulative diagram of where people looked.
- Findings: Older people take significantly longer to view a page and study the text of the page more. Older folks tend to spend more time looking in Navigation areas. Tend to be cautious clicker. Hypothesis is that they are more cautious although it could be something else.
Specific Examples from a Usability Test
Wanted to explore a new feature for 'secure email'. Added a small link at the top to tell you you had a new message. Because it was out of the core path of sight, users simply didn't see it The reaction was "banner blindness"; users simply didn't see it.The things that looked 'special' or blocks that were prominent were the most ignored. Parts of the page that blend with the rest of the page got the most attention.
Another study
Review a retirement planning dashboard. Watched what happens when people watch for 30 seconds. People don't see the core data bellow the title bar. Small % of people saw the information the right way. Many people misunderstood the data. Subtle differences in text and presentation reflect on what people see and how they interact.Lessons Learned
- Equipment is expensive.
- Once people see it in action they see the benefit. It's a really useful tool for finding issues and understanding how people look at sites.
- Sites that use flash are a challenge.
- Calibration is really quick and works for almost everyone 2-3% can not be tracked.
- Very unobtrusive most users forgot about it.