AdesBlog.com

F for fast. That’s how users read your precious content. In a few seconds, their eyes move at amazing speeds across your website’s words in a pattern that’s very different from what you learned in school.

In our new eyetracking study, we recorded how 232 users looked at thousands of Web pages. We found that users’ main reading behavior was fairly consistent across many different sites and tasks. This dominant reading pattern looks somewhat like an F and has the following three components:

• Users first read in a horizontal movement, usually across the upper part of the content area. This initial element forms the F’s top bar.
• Next, users move down the page a bit and then read across in a second horizontal movement that typically covers a shorter area than the previous movement. This additional element forms the F’s lower bar.
• Finally, users scan the content’s left side in a vertical movement. Sometimes this is a fairly slow and systematic scan that appears as a solid stripe on an eyetracking heatmap. Other times users move faster, creating a spottier heatmap. This last element forms the F’s stem.

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Chapter 1: Controlling Your Environment Makes You Happy

Most of the hard core C++ programmers I know hate user interface programming. This surprises me, because I find UI programming to be quintessentially easy, straightforward, and fun.

It’s easy because you usually don’t need algorithms more sophisticated than how to center one rectangle in another. It’s straightforward because when you make a mistake, you immediately see it and can correct it. It’s fun, because the results of your work are immediately visible. You feel like you are sculpting the program directly. read full article

Bad usability in the design of aircraft controls can result in what is cheerfully referred to as CFIT: Controlled Flight Into Terrain.

The usability of your product may not be quite as critical. If you’re lucky, the mistakes you make in usability design will merely cause people to lose limbs, or, heck, even just thumbs. No biggie! read full article

Isn’t it time to shift our sites to 1024×768 screen resolution? I kept wondering how long we (designers) will keep designing sites (including our own) for 800×600? Below is the stats for August 2005 for my site AdesDesign.net, these stats represent a unique visitors of more than 80,000. As you can see a whopping 55% of my visitors viewing internet with 1024×768 resolution. 18% of visitors are having a screen size of 1280×1024 resolution. And only 13% are viewing with 800×600.

As you have already noticed AdesBlog is already targeted for a bigger resolution screens. As for the AdesDesign.net I am currently working on the upcoming version. And yes you guessed it right, it will be targeted for a bigger resolution screens as well. I guess it’s a time for me to shift to 1024×768, how about you?!

Kim Krause Berg of www.usabilityeffect.com is a Usability Expert, that has clients as big as Iomega and Discovery Channel - Travel in her portfolio. However I could not help but notice how bad is her own website, in terms of usability and design. I wonder why she does not fix it if she is really a “Usability Expert”???