LISNews Librarian And Information Science News

Does this mean that people don't see the giant turkey we have on our homepage?

Eye tracking studies are not really used much anymore. While the technology to perform such studies has become more unobtrusive, the studies themselves have become less valuable as web design has changed in the last few years.

Quantitative analysis - how many people can do a specific task, or how quickly can a task be completed is far more useful when designing use interfaces. You may wish to check Human Factors International for information on design and usability analysis. I don't shill for them, however in the last few months I have completed their Certified Usability Analyst programme. If you can afford it (it is not cheap) or can get your company to pay for it, I think it is an excellent programme for those involved in web design. (If you look hard you can find me on the list of CUAs on their site)

Sure users will tell you what they think you want to hear, most of us prefer to make others happy, and of course eye movement studies don't lie, but then again neither do task oriented studies, and they produce valid reproducible quantifiable results.

The blog post author is listed, but not linked to a biography and the about us link provides no further information about the author so it is not possible to draw any conclusion about the authors credentials and thus the authority of the article itself
The article to which it links seems to be authored by two journalists or professors of journalism and seems to be little more than an advertisement for a product called eyetools. While they may be fine journalists they are not experts in web design

There is a caveat from the article

It is a preliminary study of several dozen people conducted in San Francisco. It isnot an exhaustive exploration that we can extrapolate to the larger population. It is a mix of "findings" based on controlled variables, and "observations" where testing was not as tightly controlled. The researchers went "wide," not "deep" -- covering a lot of ground in terms of website design and multimedia factors. We hope that Eyetrack III is not seen as an end in itself, but rather as the beginning of a wave of eyetracking research that will benefit the news industry.

Some of the 23 actionable lessons are simply laughable.

# 2 - Initial eye movement focuses on the upper left corner of the page, well sure for some user populations. Check out the website of the City of Tel Aviv, or Tokyo.

#15 Bigger images get more attention. Yeah so does the blink tag, but people stopped using that a decade ago too.

To suggest that chatting with a few dozen people in San Francisco can produce 23 actionable design lessons is simply not true and Ms. Laun does a disservice by suggesting it does. If you are looking for a cursory look at unreviewed eye-movement studies, specifically tailored to the 'news industry' involving small populations that do not provide an adequate sample from which one might draw statistically significant conclusions then this is for you. However as librarians we should recognize this for the advertising puff piece that it is and call the professor out on it. While they do admit that it is fairly useless, it is obvious that it was used for purposes far beyond that for which it was intended.
If we want to return academic respectability to our profession - of which usability and design - can most certainly be a component we must call a spade a spade. This most definitely is not acceptable research on which one should re-design their website. Librarians can read and learn user centered design, and learn how to properly design a website from authoritative sources.