UX-related open access journals
Having previously bemoaned the fact that, as a UX practitioner rather than academic, there aren’t too many academic journals that I can easily lay my hands on, it’s great to discover that there’s a Directory of Open Access Journals. There are currently more than 2400 journals online and, while this is still scratching the surface, it’s obviously a very positive thing.
Some potentially interesting journals from a UX perspective are:
- Adriadne
- Advances in Cognitive Psychology
- Behaviormetrika
- Brains, Minds & Media
- Contemporary Aesthetics
- Crossings (Electronic Journal of Art and Technology)
- Cultural Analysis
- Current Psychology Letters – Behaviour, Brain, & Cognition
- Current Research in Social Psychology
- Cybermetrics
- Electronic Journal of Knowledge Management
- Equal Access to Software & Information
- Evidence Based Library and Information Practice
- Evolutionary Psychology
- First Monday
- Game Studies
- Human Technology
- IBM Systems Journal
- INFOCOMP Journal of Computer Science
- Informatica
- Information Technology Journal
- Information Research
- Interdisciplinary Journal of Information, Knowledge, and Management
- Interdisciplinary Journal of Knowledge and Learning Objects
- International Journal of Design Computing
- Japanese Journal of Personality
- Journal of eLiteracy
- International Journal of Information Technology
- International Journal of Qualitative Methods
- Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication
- Journal of Digital Information
- Journal of Human Ecology
- Journal of Interactive Media in Education
- Journal of Interactive Online Learning
- Journal of Learning Design
- Journal of Vision
- PsychNology
- Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems
- Systems, Signs & Actions
- UOC Papers
- Webology
- Working Papers in Art & Design
[link to DOAJ via Cognitive Daily]
Leave a CommentIE7 : too much of a UI surprise to force on users?
The much anticipated release of IE7 is imminent. It could be tomorrow. It could be in two weeks. But it’s going to be this month. I’ve no doubt that IE7 will be a huge improvement over IE6 in terms of both functionality (tabbed browsing at last!) and better support for web standards (although it may not go far enough). However, I’m surprised to see that it will be made available via Microsoft’s Automatic Updates as a High Priority update. Microsoft says that this is “To help our customers become more secure and up-to-date”. Since most PC users apparently live in fear of net crime in the UK, and most people blindly install High Priority updates because of the perceived security benefits (myself included), I think it’s fair to say that an awful lot of people will suddenly end up with IE7 as their primary browser.
And that’s where I think the trouble could start. IE6 is virtually ubiquitous unless you are a Mac owner. Pretty much everyone uses it, and has been using it in its current incarnation for several years. While a significant, enlightened minority have migrated to Firefox or Opera, the vast majority of web users have shown little desire to try another browser. Except now they’ll have to. And there’s every chance that it will be a shock. Although it’s better, IE7 just doesn’t feel the same. Everything has moved around. There’s no menu bar by default. Tabbed browsing, a search box and RSS feeds have appeared. All the buttons are in different places. This means that all the actions that users have learned and have become muscle memory over the past few years will no longer be relevant.
Out with the old…
And in with the new…
This is like waking up one morning only to find that your right-hand drive car has suddenly become a left-hand drive car (or vice versa if you are in the US). No warning. No expectation. It’s just there and you have to deal with it and still manage to find your way to work in one piece. It’s still a car. It’s still drivable. But it’s bloody hard work. Instead of being in a blissful, dreamy world of unconscious competence, you may find yourself suddenly dropped from a great height into an icy vat of conscious incompetence.
I genuinely think this is a problem that a lot of people will initially have with IE7. And any negative perceptions may be exacerbated by the fact that it will be a sudden imposition of a new user interface, rather than a polite invitation to try it out. Ultimately, the success of this forced method of introduction of IE7 may depend not only on how learnable the new interface is, but how unlearnable old habits are.
19-Oct-06 Update 1. So much for being secure and up-to-date! The first security vulnerability for IE7 has already been found.
19-Oct-06 Update 2. Some initial signs of discontent with the change to the new IE interface.
Observers influence behaviour
The BBC reports on a study by researchers at Newcastle University who found that people paid nearly three times as much for drinks by putting money in an “honesty box” in a canteen when a poster of a pair of eyes was above the box than when the poster was of some flowers. The interpretation is that people alter their behaviour to become more socially acceptable if they feel that they are being watched.
This, I think, has major implications for user testing and other forms of user research where the moderator/tester/experimenter is present as it’s very likely that many people will alter their behaviour towards what they think the tester wants. I’ve certainly encountered people in user tests who I’d class as “pleasers” – they may struggle with an interface, but are always ridiculously positive about absolutely anything they are presented with. You can actively encourage users to be as honest and open as possible (“I didn’t have anything to do with the design of this site, so please feel free to be to be totally honest about it”, “we’re not testing you in any way at all – we’re interested in the website and trying to make it work better so that people understand it”), but ultimately there must be some bias due the presence of the tester. The real problem for user testing is that we really don’t know how big an effect this is.
More on the usefulness of eyetracking
After Michael Hatscher’s critique of eyetracking a couple of weeks ago, it’s very interesting to see that Jared Spool also has reservations. Spool’s conclusions, based on observing hundreds of eyetracking tests, are very similar to the theoretical objections raised by Hatscher:
...we began to question what the eyetracker was actually trying to tell us. It seemed to us that what the user focused their gaze on was not necessarily what they were seeing. So, if the eyetracker doesn’t tell us what a user sees, what does it tell us? I’m not sure.
Are all football sites ugly?
With the start of the tournament just days away, I took a peek at the official World Cup 2006 website. Unsurprisingly, it looks like an awful lot of other football websites. Which is a shame, because most football sites make MySpace look classy. The football site designers checklist usually contains most of the following:
- Splash screens
- Tiny fonts
- Pop-up ads
- Lots of animations
- No hint of whitespace
- Poor use of web standards
- Incredibly dense layouts
- Registration required to get to the content
Here are a few examples:
Are there any beautiful, elegant football sites out there?!
Is eye-tracking useful?
There’s a lot of hype about eye-tracking at the moment, what with talk of F-shaped reading patterns and the daily presentation of heat maps. So it’s refreshing to see a really thoughtful critique of eye-tracking methods by Michael Hatscher over at user-experience-design.com. The crux of his argument is as follows:
Attention in itself is free of value, it is neither positive nor negative. The processing and the interpretation are the important things about stimuli. The fact that users see something doesn’t mean they will click on this thing, perform their tasks faster, or enjoy a better user experience. True, eye tracking can be used to see whether a given ad diverts the users from the content, or whether a certain link is in an area that’s likely to be scanned at all. But on the whole, visual attention just provides the data necessary for a user to decide on further activity. Thus, for me, eye tracking is a technique that can be used to maybe support a usability test or an expert review, but it’s not a usability evaluation method in itself..
In other words, eye-tracking studies don’t really amount to much unless you can also demonstrate that there’s a behavioural response (user action) based on what is seen. The only thing you can be reasonably sure of is what a user hasn’t seen on a page. And even then there are effects such as peripheral vision that eye-tracking can’t easily deal with.
About
I'm Stuart Church, a user experience consultant with Pure Usability in Bristol, UK. Sensorydrive is my personal blog and covers user experience design, information architecture, product design, psychology, research methods, perception and pretty much anything else that takes my fancy! You can find out a bit more about me if you want...
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