Marc L. Resnick

The Impact of Advertising Location and User Task on the Emergence of Banner Ad Blindness: An Eye-Tracking Study

The purpose of this study is to explore the emergence of ad banner blindness in the viewing of e-commerce home pages. Building on the literature on inattention blindness and banner blindness, this article assessed the gaze path of users in goal-directed and free-viewing tasks when viewing pages with advertising banners on the right side of the page and on the top of the page above the main navigation menu. The hypotheses are tested using an analysis of variance. Using an eye-tracking methodology, the results identify significant differences in visual attention for banner ad location and for task type. Banner blindness is strongest for advertising banners on the right side of the page and for goal-directed tasks. Neither participants’ ratings of page visual appeal or of page familiarity could explain the findings. The study contributes to the existing literature by resolving some of the cognitive factors that lead to banner blindness and supplementing previous research that focused on relevant perceptual factors.

THE EFFECT OF AFFECT: DECISION MAKING IN THE EMOTIONAL CONTEXT OF HEALTH CARE

For many years, cognitive science assumed that rational actors would make objectively normative decisions given the time and information they had available. However, research has shown that emotion and value-based judgments can fundamentally change the way decisions are considered and evaluated. This is a greater challenge in the health care domain, particularly the emergency room where life and death decisions are made frequently and uncertainty makes optimal decision making impossible. This presentation will present medical professionals with self-awareness of how emotions may affect their own decision making and administrators with insights into how to develop safer and more error resilient processes and procedures for their Emergency Room environments.

Ubiquitous Computing UX When There Is No UI

Ubiquitous computing is a term used to describe an approach to product and service delivery in which the technology is concealed in the background, requiring little to no interaction with the user to complete the user’s and/or the technology’s objectives. This creates unique challenges for user experience design because the typical methods and tools are not applicable. Input to the system is limited to the technology’s ability to intuit the users’ objectives through their natural behavior. Output is executed on the environment as much as to the user. Several cases are presented to illustrate the common user experience challenges when designing partially or completely ubiquitous systems.

The Impact of Advertising Location and User Task on The Emergence of Banner Ad Blindness An Eye Tracking Study

The purpose of this study was to explore the emergence of ad banner blindness in the viewing of ecommerce home pages. By using an eye-tracking methodology, the study supported a more granular analysis of user behavior. Building on the literature on inattention blindness and banner blindness, we assess the gaze path of users in goal-directed and free-viewing tasks when viewing pages with advertising banners on the right side of the page or on the top of the page above the main navigation menu. The results support existing literature that banner blindness is strongest for advertising banners on the right side of the page and for goal-directed tasks. The eye-tracking results provide new insight into the cognitive principles underlying these differences.

Connecting Accessibility and User Experience in the Mobile Age

Note: Slides from the panelists’ presentations will be available on the User Experience Day archive website and on Slideshare after the meeting for your viewing pleasure. This year is the 25th anniversary of the ADA which gives us a chance to reflect on the relationship between accessibility and experience design practices for the web and consumer products. This panel brings together five viewpoints to discuss how to incorporate accessibility into user-centered design. Accessibility aims to remove barriers for people with disabilities by allowing them to perceive, navigate, and interact with web applications, tools, and mobile devices. These panelists explore the idea that designing for people with disabilities improves the experience for all users. By discussing the challenges in each of their industries, the panelists talk about how and when accessibility enters into their design thinking. Overall, our goal is spur dialogue on how to promote more inclusive practices.

Exploring Medical Device Interface Design: A Case Study of an ACCU-Chek Glucose Monitoring System

An effective user interface has become a key success factor in the use of self-managed medical devices such as glucose monitoring for diabetic patients. As the quantified-self movement expands, more users are adopting this category of device. Adoption depends on technology acceptance by an aging population with limited expertise but extensive experience with a medical condition that requires constant attention to avoid serious medical complications. These patients will have extreme variability in ease of use and usefulness of the product, especially when compared to users with more technology familiarity or with providers of medical care. This study investigates the range of user interaction and subjective perceptions among users with varied domain expertise and health status and compares them with a control group of healthy users. The impacts of social connection with medical professionals on product cognition are examined.

Future Visions of the User Experience

What will the user experience look like in 20, 30, or 50 years from now in health care? In retail? In education? Of course, the way these experiences unfold depends on a lot of factors outside the HF/E domain. We could experience a persistent economic malaise that results in a strong shift towards simplicity and minimalism. We could experience health advances that vastly expand the need to design for the elderly. A new scientific advance in teleportation could eliminate the need for transportation systems (OK, perhaps we are thinking too far outside the box here). We asked five leading user experience visionaries to think outside the proverbial box and imagine what the user experience in their domain might look like in the future. Here are some of their ideas.

Placement of Call to Action Buttons for Higher Website Conversion and Acquisition An Eye Tracking Study

Online shopping abandonment is often a sign that consumers failed to achieve their objectives, which often leads to frustration and reduced brand engagement. Several visual scan path patterns are presented to represent different user activities. For landing pages, it is proposed that the Gutenberg pattern is the most effective at supporting customer shopping needs. A series of tests using eye tracking and qualitative page evaluation confirmed this hypothesis. Across over a hundred web sites from a variety of sectors and industries, landing pages that support the use of the Gutenberg pattern consistently showed simpler user scan paths and more user fixations and clicks-through on the Add to Cart button.

Examples of How to Present Human Factors Testimony to the Trier of Fact

The forensic human factors specialist is an advocate, an advocate of our discipline’s value in determining the cause of accidents, errors, and system failure. It follows that when we appear before the trier of fact – be it judge, jury, or attorney – we want to effectively convey our opinions and their foundation. The purpose of this session is for four practitioners of forensic human factors to share methods of providing testimony that are readily understandable and helpful to the trier of fact. In addition, a practicing attorney will give her take on criteria and concerns in retaining a forensic human factors specialist.

User Experience and Agile Development

Agile product development has been defined as a process that involves rapid and frequent design updates using cross-functional teams including marketing, manufacturing, procurement and design. A second stage brings in customers, suppliers and other external stakeholder groups for additional enhancements. Risk analysis and requirements analysis are integrated throughout the process and at each stage. There appear to be many similarities between this and modern approaches to user experience. However, there are also significant differences. Allen (2011) contrasts the two outlooks by defining the focus of user experience as multi-revision, iterative design whereas agile focuses on incremental growth. While these may seem similar, agile is primarily linear whereas user experience is cyclical. The difference in mindset can make the two hard to integrate into a single process. Spool (2011) adds a third dimension in order to resolve the difference. Lean UX, he claims, is the formulation of user experience that fits best into the agile development process. Finally, he concludes, the waterfall model must be left behind. In a later commentary (Spool, 2012), he describes agile development as a welcome positive shift that opens up new opportunities for user experience to break in earlier to the overall design process. In an interview for SpoolCast, Hugh Beyer describes some of these challenges (Carmichael, 2012). The first challenge occurs when the existing relationship between UX and engineering is disrupted from the shift to agile development. Lines of communication and patterns of interaction need to be modified to align with the new structure. As the timeline is compressed for the agile environment, deliverables that pass between UX and engineering also need to change in structure. Finally, both teams need to recognize that the changes need to fit the way agile is being implemented in practice, rather than fitting the ideal theoretical model of agile development. Ferreira, Sharp, and Robinson (2010) discuss the pervading trichotomy for the relationship between agile development and user experience in industry. Established user experience teams and agile development teams can operate separately, passing designs between them as milestones are reached. Alternatively, user experience and agile can be fully integrated into a development process where user experience and product development are implemented by a combined team. Finally, a new user experience or agile process perspective can be added to an established user experience or agile team in an attempt to newly integrate them. This change may be challenged by a greater status and prominence of the existing, stronger program. Each of these organizational interventions has different implications for the overall development process. The dearth of rigorous and comprehensive research studies is notable. The difficulty of creating valid and generalizable research approaches forces most authors to provide insights into lean and agile UX through workshops (Sy and Miller, 2008), panels (Miller and Sy, 2009), and case studies (Kollman, Sharp, and Blandford, 2009; Budwig, Jeong, and Kelkar, 2010). This panel will be similar, except that it will bring together a multidisciplinary set of speakers from a much wider variety of industries and organizational structures. Further, the organization of the panel will focus on the tensions between user experience and agile development. The panel will focus on the productive friction (Hagel, 2005) that most often leads to advances in strategic thought.