A fascinating afternoon spent with @ferrar and @kelfish from our Digital team down at Essential Travel – a company set up and run by two old friends of mine.
Essential have a business that sells travel insurance, airport parking and other travel-related services over the web. Usability (or lack of) directly impacts their bottom line, and they've spent a great deal of time over the years finding different ways to research and improve their websites. In recent months they have started using eyetracking technology from Tobii that follows the movement of the test subjects' eyes across the screen, and records those movements. The end result is a series of graphic representations of use that show which areas of a screen are looked at (or avoided) and in which order.
It's impressive stuff, but also very challenging. When they first started using it, Essential found entire blocks of painstakingly-authored content were simply being bypassed by users. It provides data that can significantly undermine deeply-held views on aesthetics, and also throws into question the value of some approaches to design and prototyping (pure wireframing, for example: if presentation is stripped bare, how do you know it will work in the same way when coloured and augmented.
As a challenge to the tracking system, we had a look (whilst it was looking at us) at Google Instant. The results? Most people (on a small sample of 10) looked at the keyboard when typing their query: an inability to touch-type in many means that they completely avoiding viewing the instant results whilst they stare at what keys to press. The one (very fast) touch typist in the sample stared resolutely at the search box, and was typing faster than the screen would refresh anyway. The guys at Essential have written more about their findings here.
In conversation, it struck me that Google Instant might be a bit like predictive text on phones. It wasn't until someone pointed out that it was only by staring at the keys, not the random words that predictive appeared to churn out, that my brain could cope with predictive on a Nokia. The fact that different letters from those that I wanted were appearing on screen confused the hell out of my simple brain. Google Instant runs the same risk amongst touch typists. Except those like me who now use the browser address bar to search directly now anyway…
mmitII 