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I am really enjoying IA TV, a blog I subscribe to and visit regularly. This blog posts regular videos of speeches, presentations and interviews from leading people in the fields of Information Architecture, Interaction Design, Seach/SEO, User Centered Design/Human Factors, Usability and User Experience. Some are very short 3 or 4 minute videos, some are longer – all of the ones I’ve watched so far have been enjoyable.

I’ve embedded (with appropriate link backs!) a couple already – but I really enjoyed this one by Bill Moggridge on design as a collaborative process:

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.

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I saw this really nice example of showing a wireframes in situ on the Pulse Laser blog. The blog says of this image:

One technique that S&W has been using recently to illustrate design work is placing sketches or wireframes in situ. Whilst wireframes themselves are incomplete artefacts, designed to be work in progress, they still suffer for being uniformly incomplete. Wireframes themselves can be almost too beautiful, and this means that it becomes all-too-easy to criticise them as only wireframes, rather than as part of a product that exists in the world. Contextualising the sketches into the photograph places the design into the world. This enables the design to be understood within the world, and also (importantly) to highlight the seams between the unfinished design and the finished world around it.

I really like this technique, which (as they say) puts the concept in context.

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

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