Why you need more than one.
Posted on 12. Jul, 2009 by indolering in Ubiquity
Ahh finals week, you will get more videos sometime after Friday at 12:30. To tide you over, here is a synopsis of the last test which didn’t go very smoothly. The screen capture software failed to save today’s video, so only a description today : )
The user watched the initial video, I told him to press opt+spacebar, he typed in the map command and stopped. No location, no space, nada.
The user explained that he was waiting for a preview to load and show him his location or another input field. He conceptualized the command as a shortcut to get to Google maps, not a mapping function.
The user then browsed to the wikipedia help page, read “Tap option+spacebar” outloud, and then typed just map again.
Example of the help page.
Unfortunately, the short-form videos embedded into the help pages were not working. It would have been interesting to see if the these would have solved his problem.
He then navigated to the Google command help page where he took a cursory glance of the whole page and even moused over Ubibot’s speech bubble. Either he didn’t read the example or didn’t register the differences in the example and his mistakes because he again type in just google and waited.
This is one of the few cases where it would have been nice to have eye tracker data. We would know if the user had read the suggestions at all but they were ineffectual or had skipped over them entirely, etc.
After an awkward wait, the user finally tried putting in a space followed by a search term. He then proceeded to gripe about how it wasn’t any better than the search bar. The map function was interesting, but not that much of an improvement. This strongly suggests that any video marketing clips needs to use page keywords and browser cookies in selecting which video to show.
The user seems to have either not read or not understood the commercials or the help information. So, how do I make that easier?
- The intro commercial should be larger.
- Despite what my designer tendencies, I need to rip out the intro bubble and push the core help information to the top.
- I think that the in-line suggestions should be highlighted, somehow. Perhaps in yellow instead of the muted gray. Yellow has special properties that, like grey, let people skim over it but, unlike gray, still bring attention to itself.
If I get another user who has similar problems with the text, but is helped by the short help videos, maybe animating the example pictures will grab the users attention- something that the written instructions and static images fail to do.
Finally, I will try to hack together some kind of eye tracking solution. There are a few open source projects that do eye tracking, sadly they only work on Windows (and not on VMWare)- so I need to repartition my computer.
I think that my built-in iSight camera won’t be of high enough resolution to capture the corneal activity. So maybe I need to apply to the the Mozilla things and get an infrared camera, or even rent some higher=end eye tracking solutions.
If anyone knows some HCI professionals in the Seattle area who could loan me some eye tracking equipment for the weekend- let me know.
