Week 3: User behavior week

Overview:
We will cover typical user behavior, we'll talk about eyetracking and what it means, and we will start to look at information presentation. This will be another reading and user's point of view task week. There are three assignments, but all are fairly quick to do. Most of the linked articles are short, easy reading.

May include a short presentation on eyetracking and typical user behavior

User Behavior
There are quite a few short articles at Usability.gov on user behavior and how it should guide designers. It's a very good resource, written fairly accessibly, without ads, not focused on SEO, and not requiring a fee for content. I'm also including a number of links to short "alertbox" articles by Jakob Neilsen. Some of the former reference the latter. You'll notice a lot of repetition in how average user behavior is described. That's because there is a lot of predictability in typical user behavior. it's a good thing, because predictable behavior is easier to design for.

Designing to user behavior can improve the performance of any website⁶,even nonprofits and government sites. It can also increase your credibility⁵ in the eyes of the user, which will keep them on your site instead of going elsewhere for the same type of content.

Eyetracking - what is it? How does it apply to an "average" user? Eyetracking is a type of user behavior analysis that uses various methods for following where the user looks, and how long, on a given site. Typically, the user's eye tracks in an "F" pattern, or a "Z" pattern, depending on the content looked at, or what the user is looking for. The F Pattern actually applies to blocks of text content, not the overall layout, and this should be considered. See reading section 3 "Understanding Eye Tracking"

Assignment 1: read resource 1 (Designing for the Average User) and think of someone you may know, who might fit that general description, who you often help with computer or technology tasks. This person is your equivalent to an average user. What is their typical behavior when interacting with a website or UI? How would you build a site so that they did not need your help to navigate it? Discuss.

Assignment 2: go to http://www.yahoo.com/ and use markup http://markup.io/ to show what parts of the page caught your attention, show how you think you scanned the page, and show what you ignored. Example: http://markup.io/v/pqph6b7kv19e Post a link to your markup in the google group.

Resources:

http://experiencedynamics.blogs.com/site_search_usability/2006/04/designing_for_t.html
Eyetracking and Web Site Design at Usability.gov http://usability.gov/articles/newsletter/pubs/032010news.html
Eyetools: http://eyetools.com Understanding Eye Tracking blog series (all are short)
Impact of Aesthetics on Attitudes Towards Websites at Usability.gov http://usability.gov/articles/062009news.html
User Behavior and the "globalness" of Internet http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol7/issue2/taiwan.html - dry, scholarly, but informative regarding languange and culture's impact on usability
Credibility at Usability.gov http://usability.gov/articles/102009news.html
ROI on increased usability http://www.useit.com/alertbox/government-nonprofit.html

Information Presentation

Now that we have looked at typical user behaviors, we need to apply that knowledege to how we present information. What we need to consider is how that behavior should guide our designs.

Eyetracking models can guide layouts
- Menus should be where they can be found easily
- links should be formatted in such a way that userd can recognize them and also use them as a navigational reference ("I've been there already, but not there.")
- Text content should have either the most important content at the top or a summary
Users want to get to content quickly without too many clicks or too much scrolling
Search should be easy to locate, and easy to use
Your site's reliability, professionalism and overall credibility in the eyes of your users are influenced by its design and usability
Most users dislike horizontal scrolling - it is considered "artsy" and many people still do not have an easy tool that allows it (this is something that works best in multitouch displays and is quite intutitive there, but is not yet well implemented in touchpads and is difficult in a standard mouse-keyboard-screen setup)
Stability of design and layout across all the pages of a site increase users' comfort level.