Category: It’s been a tough few weeks as we relocated from the mothership/deathstar (Redmond) to Atlanta, but we’re settled in to our new home now. Here’s a teaser of some stuff in the pipeline.
Back in grad school in 2003 I was working with eye-tracking and studying the visual system. The power of the brain to stitch together tiny bits of high resolution information to create the conscious experience of vision is amazing and I dreamed up the visualization shown below:
The idea in this pic is that the user is looking, at a slightly zoomed out focal depth, at the firefox download page with a fixation at the point of the cursor. The foveal, or high resolution area, is perceived in color, while the periphery is lower resolution and black and white. You can view the subsequent zoom to max focal depth and scan to the download firefox button in this .mov or .mp4 (lower res).
Nodebox, a graphical programming tool for OSX, brought the implementation bar for this viz down far enough for it to make my quick hack list. Big props to a supportive forum community for helping me along. The results were compelling enough that I’ve reimplemented in Flash.
There’s more to come on this work and on sharing some wisdom about how the visual system interacts with web pages — stuff somewhere between HCI research at UOregon and the Usability research at SURL.
For now, I’ll leave you with the thought that the OSX and Mozilla community are somewhat similar in their (no cost tool) hackability and add-on model.
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[...] Andy was search quality analyst at MSFT, now at FreeIQ in Atlanta. Discussing some MSR research on predictive models for user’s search relevance judgment. Going into detail about how MSFT improved search relevance (and what we did right and wrong) since 2004 up till now. Interesting charts of temporal variance. Talks about different models and their uses. Now talking about how you can do this for your own sites, using Google Analytics, Clicktracks, or Omniture. Demonstrating eye tracking. (”Eye Gaze Simulator: Flash Emulation of the Visual Field”) Demonstrating use of heatmaps with AJAX – very interesting technique, does AJAX logging based on DOM. Andy’s professional blog. [...]
[...] We’ve just released an AIR-based browser that simulates human vision, to provide insights into your site design and task flows. Props to the gang at Nitobi, who helped me put this AIR code together from my static image prototype, and to my employer StomperNet, who decided to make a big deal of giving this away for free on Xmas eve! [...]