Category — Usability and Web

It’s rare for me to get this excited about software. Even rarer for it to be a Microsoft product. In this case, I think they’ve done something absolutely brilliant. Microsoft Pivot is kind of interesting, as a proof of concept of Silverlight’s capabilities and the traversing of complex sudo-database driven taxonomy. Yeah, yeah, that’s all cool and fun to play with, but what stands out is the innovation of an often overlooked universal user interface element: the scrollbar.

When was the last time we saw a change to the scroll bar outside of the mouse wheel? Pivot’s approach may be a solution the age old problem of the scanning of huge amounts of data, and the scrolling of mobile web content all in one fell swoop (even if they don’t realize it.)

The vertical scrollbar appears just like any other. Upon click-dragging the bar towards the content area of the screen, the content zooms out proportionality. You can then move up and down as you normally would to scroll the zoomed out content. A box moves over the content on the screen to identify which part of the screen you will see when letting go of the mouse button.

This  serves a secondary purpose, as a controlled speed scroll. Try it with your current browser. Click and drag the scroll bar from the top to the bottom of a long page of content (try it with Boing Boing.) The mixed content flashes by without giving anything a chance to catch your eye. With Pivot’s scroll bar, you can see what is ahead and what is behind of the page focus. This gives you a unique ability to scan, even peripherally for something of interest without sacrificing scroll times.

Sure, one could argue that they would never use this. Well…then don’t. The option to use it in the browser would be just another tool like the ‘search page’ functionality; not everyone will want to use it. The beauty is that the function is so subtle that it hides in plain sight. If you want it, it’s there. If not, it wont effect the way you browse the web.

This type of modest functionality is exactly what we need. Perfect for both large content pages and small display interfaces such as mobile devices. The simple interaction necessary to access this zoomed scroll is so intuitive and simple, that I feel embarrassed that I never thought of it. I guess that feeling is a cue to its effective simplicity and its genius.

It’s been a busy winter this year. Mostly filled with snowboarding. I think I set a new personal best by riding every weekend since New Years until last week. The snow hasn’t been great, but trips to Jay are fun regardless of weather. Recently I’ve had a full plate between building myself a digital portfolio of my work and rebuilding the Northeasern Cycling Team website. I’ll post links to both once they’re finished. I’m currently in the home stretch.

I’m also working on a concept to submit for the Mozilla Labs current design challenge. The challenge is to redesign a transcription tool for streaming Internet video in order to make it intuitive and easy to use.

For now:

Listen to: Groundation to get ready for warm weather.

Eat: Cholula with everything. It’s my new obsession.

Web users are known to be efficient at scanning large amounts of information in order to satiate the user’s goals for visiting the site. These goals rarely include attention to advertisements; which web users have learned to effectively avoid without the need for direct attention. It is clear that web users are able to easily separate these advertisements as they typically appear with a visual disconnect (both in styling and location) from relevant web content. In this study I attempted to validate that this type of inattention can manifest itself in actual web content that may contain the user’s desired goal. I did this by asking participants to search a content rich website for a word while I manipulated the location and style of the target word in a way that would intuitively bring attention to the location of the word.

The results established that the styling of content with shading or a border has negative effects on a web user’s visual search through a web page. Users process visual cues that are not consistent with a web site’s visual treatment and purposely do not attend to these areas. Web users also use expectations for the location of non-relevant items in order to give priority to goal oriented content during visual search. By defining the avoidance of content in a visual search task in terms of banner-blindness, these findings demonstrated the existence of content-blindness.

Download the complete study (you can skip to the Discussion section for the fun stuff)

Content_Blindness.pdf