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.

Getting things done

Posted on 16/02/2006 by admin

Ok. Let’s say I’m plenty with things to blog, so that I’ll have to summarize a little bit.

Research: I had the Innovazione+ technical commitee meeting this wednesday and I have to say we came out with some REALLY interesting ideas to be presented to the next IST FP6 call. One of those is based on something we’ve been researching for the last couple of months to support ageing population (cannot say more, sorry); it’s going to be a tough competition but we’re really working hard to win those funds.

Interaction design institute: I’ve been invited today by Aram Armstrong to attend to the IDII thesis presentations next monday. I’m looking forward to listen to the Open Builder project by Vinay Venkatraman: a prototype of a tactile browser for sight-impaired people.
I’m also going to meet with Fabio Sergio for the second time in the same months, this is a guinness that’ll be partied with a Guinness.

I’m also managing a tough delivery for a whole site redesign. It’s going live tomorrow (let’s say: before tomorrow night). Some serious debug to be done. Damn.

Eyetracking analysis on forms usability

Posted on 24/01/2006 by admin

My newest UXmatters article is out: in this one I present findings from eyetracking tests we did to evaluate the best solutions for label placement in search forms.

Just a couple of notes befor you jump in and read the whole article (with a LOT of images):

Form labelling is more important than you usually think
The more compact the form, the better
Never use drop-down lists in search forms, if you can avoid it

We tested a bunch of interesting sistes such as Google, Amazon, eBay, Flickr and useit (Jakob Nielsen’s site). I really hope our findingds could be of any help to you guys out there.