Usability
Measuring a Site’s “Blinkâ€? Response
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To more accurately assess users’ first impressions of designs, we’ve developed what we call the 5-Second Test. The main purpose of this variant of traditional usability testing is to assess a user’s Blink response to a site’s design and content.
5-Second Tests: Measuring Your Site's Content Pages
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s the name suggests, the 5-Second Test involves showing users a single content page for a quick 5 seconds to gather their initial impressions. Five seconds may not seem like a lot of time, but users make important judgments in the first moments they visit a page. This technique unveils how those judgments turn out, giving the team insight into some essential information about the page. Using this technique, we've found the information we've gathered essential for making huge improvements to our clients' sites.
:rolleyes:
Google vs. Yahoo! Interface Design
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At a high level, Yahoo! has better integrated business goals with their product designs. For example, their comparison shopping site features multiple entry points that better match consumer shopping behaviors (browse by brand, browse by category, featured products, etc.) than Froogle’s single search box. Yahoo! also has more robust answers to vertical information finding (Travel, Finance, Movies, etc.) than Google’s Web Search features. That doesn’t negate the value of Google’s simple solutions to these tasks. It’s just that a simple solution sometimes requires something in addition to (or other than) a search box.
Google's pragmatic, data-driven approach to user interface design
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Marissa Mayer director of Consumer Web Products at Google, spoke at BayCHI on Tuesday evening. Some interesting points she made:
( a ) When she first got involved in User Interface Design at Google, she was asked not to spend more than one day a week working on the interface! Also, she was asked not to give her opinions, but to provide data. So right from the beginning, design at Google has been very data driven.
( b ) They do a lot of usability testing (mostly discount tests), both task-based and think aloud. From what I understood they do look at statistical significance of such test results.
( c ) The method she talked about the most was fairly sophisticated log analysis (seems to be Google's staple method). They make small changes, present it to sections of user population and watch the results (both the log based metrics, and emailed customer feedback). Also, they use the logs to understand any user experience problems on the site. Based on such tests, they decide on design direction.