scottmacleodsblog

This week’s assignment for Usability II was a culmination of things we’ve been working on for at least the last two weeks or longer.

 Our final eyetracking report was due, based on viewing 5 separate eyetracking sessions as well as heatmaps and gaze plots. This part of the assignment truly brought home to me the almost Jedi-level of competence required in order for someone to thoroughly and accurately de-code eyetracking, heat map and gaze plot data. It reminds me very much of what I’ve seen of satellite photo image analysis. They call it analysis but it seems much more like interpretation to me, with the possibility of huge margins of error (is it a hospital or is it a biological weapons manufacturing plant?).

 I felt the same way looking at eyetracking, heat maps, and especially gaze plots. It’s so voodoo to me that I feel like I have no business even trying to comment on what I see because I think it takes years of training to get even close to being accurate at this type of interpretation/analysis.

 But, despite all this, I’ve re-affirmed, again and again, this is the field for me. Even when it’s hard and I don’t feel competent to make a good call, I still enjoy the effort, the readings and the learnings.

 I have high standards of accomplishment. I’ve gone through law school, passed the bar exam, and I feel the same sense of intellectual and academic challenge in this class that I felt in law school, with the added (finally!) enjoyment and sense of pleasure in what I do. Doesn’t get much better when it comes to education.

I like the exposure we’re getting to the usability of mobile devices. I mentioned in a previous post that I didn’t know much about designing for mobile and now I feel that, although by no means am I an expert, I have a better handle on the topic and some of the problems it can cause, as well as some design methods to deal with them.

It surprised me that, with the current popularity of using mobile devices to access the web, that there isn’t already good usability and gestural capture software. Someone will make a lot of money if they solve that problem well.

For now, it does seem that gestures are deeply embedded in the use of mobile devices. Still, it seems like the same problem I mentioned in last week’s post: the devices are almost all very limited in how much they can allow for (an average) 10mm finger tip to do.

We had a speaker a while back at Intuit and his team had started building an app that was literally based on the one from Minority Report. The funny thing was that, luckily before they had put too much time and money into it, while trying to use paper prototypes on a whiteboard to simulate the gestural movements of Tom Cruise, everyone’s shoulders got way too tired, way too quickly and they had to scrap the idea. I guess even with “simple” gestures, you sometimes have to go too far before you know where the limits are.