Usability Week in Hong Kong
Sorry, my blog has been a bit quiet the past couple of weeks. That's because I took some time off to celebrate Chinese New Year. Hope all my readers had a great New Year as well!
This week is an interesting week. The Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g) is in Hong Kong for its Usability Week conference. The "father" of Web usability, Dr. Jakob Nielsen, was here to give talks, as well as his NN/g colleagues including Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini, of the AskTog fame.
The week-long conference covers a lot of very interesting usability topics. From basic general usability guidelines to application usability, intranet usability, user testing, interaction design and B2B websites. The talks are very practical in nature with techniques that can be immediately used for any Web sites.
I had a chance to attend the usability guideline talks, which were generated by NN/g from analyzing hundreds of Web sites and thousands of users. The guidelines were illustrated with lots of examples using videos or screen captures of real usability testing sessions. The Nielsen Norman Group made extensive use of newer remote eye tracking technology that works without having the user to wear any special devices. Extensive number of "heatmaps" (aggregated eye tracking results of a number of users) and "blue dot" (single user) screens were shown to illustrate and justify the guidelines.
The heatmaps show a lot of interesting findings, such as the fact that for most Web sites, the photos that are supposed to make the Web site look prettier are more often than not totally ignored by the users and are picked up only by peripheral vision. Heatmaps also show how results from various search engines are read and give clues as to how to optimize your marketing dollars. It is also interesting that the same advertisement space, if done with text, instead of images, gets more eyeballs.
All in all, the NN/g talks proved that the usability of any Web site can be made a lot better simply by following a set of straightforward guidelines and good common sense!
If you missed the Hong Kong workshop, they will be giving similar talks in San Francisco, Washington DC and London.