Eyetracking and forms. Again.

Posted on 07/03/2006 by admin

Ok. I’m back again with a new lab setup for my next UXmatters article on eyetracking. This is going to be number 2 on 3 on forms usability, I’m going to evaluate the best possible form label placement.

As I already said in my previous article,

Forms are the primary – often the only – way users have of sending data to Web sites.

that’s why we (me and Pabini, the UXmatters founder and Editor in Chief) think that eyetracking tests (and reports) on forms could be so useful.

I’m going to use Luke Wroblewski‘s article on Web application form design as a starting point for my Eyetracking lab setup and task prep. I’ve been in touch with Luke (thankyou very much) during the last few days in order to have the test pages and the tasks fine tuned by the article author; I’ll start tomorrow with the forms design and have the eye tracking lab prepared by Magda Giacintucci from CT|IMR.

On TED and eTech conferences

Posted on 07/03/2006 by admin

I had a pretty free from urgent tasks morning, so I decided to go through the highly granular report on the TED conference by Bruno Giussani. I met Bruno during the LIFT days in Geneve and I know how well he can blog about live events he’s attending to, that’s why I’ve chosen him as primary source of information on the TED conference (BTW he’s also the producer of TED Global).

It took quite a lot to go through all his TED posts and to follow interesting links, it’s was really tought not to use them as starting points for a broader navigation. And Mike Lee’s Flickr photos was useful to give me a broader scenario awareness of the conference (as for the written report I’ve chosen to restrict my navigation just to one user in order to save time).

Now it’s time for the eTech and I’m missing it this year too (job and personal stuff are keeping me strictly bound to Italy), I consider my self fortunate to have a couple of friends there, I’m really looking forward to their reports.

Trofie and Pesto alla Genovese for the bloggers

Posted on 02/03/2006 by admin

My pesto pack I think this is one of the first experiments of this kind in Italy; It’s indeed the first I participate in: a gourmet gift for Italian bloggers consisting in 500gr of Trofie pasta and a small jar of pesto alla genovese.

(note: my RSS subscribers might have already read this coming out from the Flickr feed, I apologize with them)

This package is part of an interesting marketing campaign organized by the Italian typical food maker “San Lorenzo” focused on the blogosphera word of mouth power: they’re sending some packages to the italian bloggers that make request of (and, as a side note, without any explicit request of advertising via their blogs).

My personal opinion is that this is a cuttin edge guerrilla marketing tecnique for the Italian Market, were everything in the digital marketing arena is stuck at the 468×60 gif animated banner (more or less, I’d say )

After a little bit of research and link following I found that one of the heads behind this lovely initiative is Antonio Tombolini, one of the brightest Italian new technology entrepreneurs (he was the man behind the Esperya firm).

Even if I see a nearly complete frozen innovation market in Italy, something is slowly moving. And whether you’d want to test the effectivness of this campaign just take a look at the list of blogs that featured the product.

Update: the initiative has been upgraded to “permanent edition“. If you have a nearly 6 months old blog, subscribe to receive the free pack on your blog half year birthday. (I’d say this decision is kinda brave since most of such young blogs in Italy could be far from being well-known).