Silvia Heinz

Designing usable web forms: empirical evaluation of web form improvement guidelines

This study reports a controlled eye tracking experiment (N = 65) that shows the combined effectiveness of 20 guidelines to improve interactive online forms when applied to forms found on real company websites. Results indicate that improved web forms lead to faster completion times, fewer form submission trials, and fewer eye movements. Data from subjective questionnaires and interviews further show increased user satisfaction. Overall, our findings highlight the importance for web designers to improve their web forms using UX guidelines.

Online ad banners: the effects of goal orientation and content congruence on memory

Banner blindness, the phenomenon that the user will consciously or unconsciously ignore online banners while navigating a certain website, is a big problem for marketers and has been studied in the past. We present a study that tests the hypothesis whether the users memory (free recall and recognition) is influenced by the users goal orientation during navigation on a website and whether it is mediated by the correspondence of the banner content and website content (congruence). Participants in an explorative orientation show better memory for banners than users in a broad or narrow goal orientation. No differences between the congruent and incongruent conditions with regard to recall measures were found but the congruent condition yields slightly better recognition rates. Based on these findings further implications and research possibilities are discussed.

The influence of banner placement and navigation style on the recognition of advertisement banners

This pre-study examined the influence of navigation style (aimless browsing vs. goal oriented information search) and banner placement (bottom vs. top of the page) on recall and recognition of online advertisements. A sample of 83 undergraduate students was randomly assigned to one of four conditions. Subjects were asked to either browse an online shop for jackets or search specific pieces of clothing. Results indicate that navigation style, but not banner placement influences recognition and recall. Further research should look into more subtle differences in navigation style and eye-tracking data could reveal additional insights.

Empirical evaluation of 20 web form optimization guidelines

Most websites use interactive online forms as a main contact point to users. Recently, many publications aim at optimizing web forms. In contrast to former research that focused at the evaluation of single guidelines, the present study shows in a controlled lab experiment with n=23 participants the combined effectiveness of 20 guidelines on real company web forms. Results indicate that optimized web forms lead to faster completion times, less form submission trials, fewer eye fixations and higher user satisfaction in comparison to the original forms.