BlobFisk.com

Fitt's Law - size and position!

Hick's Law - 7 plus/minus 2!

Ok, so I’m not saying that we need to know the maths, but the underlying principles are important! Fitts’ Law tells us that the time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target, so the size of a link area and it’s position on the page (and relative to other elements) is important.  Hick’s Law says that the time it takes for a person to make a decision is a result of the possible choices he or she has. More choices mean a longer decision process – which gives us the 7 plus/minus 2 rule.

These are two of the fundamental rules that I use in user experience architecture. I’d recommend Tog’s (Bruce Tognazzini’s) First Principles of Interaction Design for some more.

I recently had a “conversation” on Facebook with a colleague here at Channel4 and a friend from Ireland. They had responded to a status update (courtesy of twitter) which said that I was having an interesting conversation about Agile UX with a couple of people over a beer.

How User Experience fits within an Agile process is something that I’ve been really interested in and, indeed, in a former role I was part of the PIG (Process Improvement Group) where we came up with our flavour of Agile which ingrained UX into the methodology.

User stories:

All stories need to be user centric in my opinion, “As a user I want to…”. The means that your development process is completely user centric and end to end. I’ve seen this done as an Epic being the user centric component and the Stories and Tasks being more system focussed . Agile is flexible, the methodology can be tailored to suit your needs… As long as the user is at the center!

Iteration Zero:

The all important one. This needs to be a few weeks at the very least, depending on the size of the project. This is where the IA and UX work gets done and the design work. Here’s where I may get some criticism, but I don’t think that estimates and actuals from Iteration/Integration Zero should be used to calculate your multiplier. This is the thinking, experimenting, prototyping, brainstorming and researching phase. It’s different to the build phase.

But, it should be iterative in itself (which is why I prefer the term Integration Zero). Try ideas, discard, try something new… cycle and iterate.

More

A really interesting video of an interview with Don Norman, which I spotted on UX Design.

User experience is really the whole totality. Opening the package… good example. It’s the total experience that matters. And that starts from when you first hear about a product… experience is more based upon memory than reality. If your memory of the product is wonderful, you will excuse all sorts of incidental things.

Heatmap of the Channel4.com homepage (click to enlarge)

Many people have been asking me to share more of the results of our user testing on channel4.com. I posted my initial takeaways from the testing and also posted about the methodology we used of mixing eye tracking with qualitative user testing techniques.

Methodology

We captured the initial 30 seconds of eye movements (using a Tobii Eye Tracker) to get an insight into the initial fixation points on the page and what elements users looked at first. We then carried out traditional qualitative task based testing on that page, still tracking eye movements.

The initial 30 seconds of eye tracking information was aggregated into traditional heatmaps for the pages we tested. The note takers in the observation room noted the eye movements during the task based testing.

More

There is a lot to be said in favour of testing with paper prototypes, the main advantage being that you can test concepts very early without a large overhead of design and/or development. I found these videos linked to on an article on the Interaction Designer’s Coffee Break.

“Drive-thru” interface testing

More