Archive for category visual search

Amazon’s list of products is a mess

Posted by jasonwong in bad design, clutter, visual search on January 29th, 2010

Amazon, like any shopping website should, lets you browse their great deals. Today, there was this:

Oooh, cheap laptops? How could I not click. Then, I was presented with this unholy mess. Seventeen laptops on the same page. All have the same picture, extremely similar specs, and virtually identical names. (Click for full size)

There were some filtering options on the left side but they would not be very good at narrowing choices, considering how similar these all were.

One part shame on Acer for creating SO MANY similar models: the AOD250-1694, the AOD250-1695, the AOD250-1842, etc. etc. etc.

One part shame on Amazon for presenting all of these options in what is quite possibly the worst method for displaying this kind of information. There should be a much easier way to, at a glance, compare these laptops, or the filters should actually involve computer factors.

Either way, I’m not buying an Acer laptop today – certainly not from Amazon.

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I am giving a Google Tech Talk today!

Posted by jasonwong in attention, bad design, clutter, eye movements, good design, visual search on December 16th, 2009

My friend from graduate school, Ricardo Prada, now works at Google in the User Experience Group. He saw that I was in the Palo Alto area for a week on a work project, and he invited me to give a Google Tech Talk. It was an opportunity that I could not turn down (not that I would ever want to!). After about a month of work on this talk and hours of practice, today is the day. Here is the talk announcement:

techtalkannouncement

Google tends to record these talks on video and put them up on YouTube, so I hope this occurs with mine. I’ll link to it as soon as it’s up.

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Safari 4: Top Sites vs. History CoverFlow view

Posted by jasonwong in data visualization, visual search on February 28th, 2009

Safari is a web browser developed by Apple and is primarily used on Macintosh systems, though there is a Windows version available. They just released Safari 4 Beta, so it’s not quite ready for primetime, but it’s close.

There are several great new features. One of which is called Top Sites. In place of a home page (though you can still set a home page), you get a panoramic display of 9, 16, or 25 of the sites that you visit the most. It’s displayed dramatically, arranged so you can see all your sites at a single glance. You can move sites, get rid of them, and pin them to a certain location if you want. The thumbnails are updated periodically and starred if they’re changed. Handy.

safari_topsites

Another feature is a visual browsing history. This is typically shown as a list of sites you’ve visited, going backwards in time. The list isn’t especially helpful, since all you have to go on are the URLs (because http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&item=320344855221 is not helpful) and the page titles, which are sometimes helpful. Having a visual for each page in your history, though, is great – it’s way easier to recognize visual things visually. Apple implements this feature using CoverFlow, which looks like this.

safari_coverflow

Now, it’s visual – the item you’re focused on is presented fully, and the items before and after are pretty visible. Trying to look at sites three or four items away, however, is unhelpful – you can’t see much detail in the site. All you can see if the left or right margin of the page, which tells you very little. Instead, if history was implemented like Top Sites was, where you could see all (or at least more) of each site, the feature would be more useful because you could more easily identify the site you wanted to go back to.

It turns out that this issue has already been discussed here before. Window switching in OS X using Expose (where you can see all the windows) was compared to doing it in Windows (where you can only see part of the window), and it was the same argument. Interfaces where you can see more of each window allows you to pick out the object you want more quickly because you can search in parallel instead of in serial. I think Apple should take this advice and apply it to more of its interfaces.

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From the January 2008 issue of Wired: Found Artifacts

Posted by jasonwong in attention, clutter, driving, visual search on January 14th, 2008

FOUND: Artifacts of the Future

Or, as I would subtitle it: “A Human Factors Nightmare.”

Crazy Car HUD

All kidding and craziness aside, heads-up displays are coming into cars very quickly. Right now, they only display speed. The goal is to put information right in the driver’s field of view to minimize eye movements away from the road, similar to the Honda Civic dashboard. This makes sense from a cognitive perspective, except for one major flaw: people can only pay attention to one depth at a time. Therefore, attention must shifted from the road (relatively far away) to the windshield (much closer) in order to glean necessary information. That still leads to performance problems. What some systems are trying to do is to project the information “into the world” so that the speedometer is still on the windshield but appears on the road, so you don’t have to shift attention in depth. Smart.

Of course, while it’s easy to argue that the dashboard is way too cluttered to make driving safe, complex GPS systems are already part of high-end cars. They can be complicated to use and certainly provide a distraction if they make a mistake. Presumably, you’re driving in unfamiliar territory, and your map breaks, forcing you to fiddle with it?

There is a point of balance, where more information helps the driver drive better or multitask. But this makes human factors research all the more critical to ensure safety at all costs while not making driving an unbearable task.

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GUI Wars: Web Browser Find Functions: Safari vs. Firefox

Posted by jasonwong in attention, bad design, good design, perception, visual search on November 23rd, 2007

This is a great example of using attention research in user interface design. Standard Find functions in programs like Microsoft Word pop up a dialog box. You type what you want to find, then it highlights the word. It’s hard to find that highlighted word a lot of the time.

Firefox improves the search process by making the search box a bar that is part of the main window. Research has shown that attention often is distributed across discrete objects, and switching between objects incurs a cost (Egly, Driver & Rafal, 1994). With this layout, you don’t need to shift your attention between objects (though the search bar is all the way at the bottom):

Firefox Search

The highlighted word is not that hard to find, but depending on where the word is, it can be difficult to do. In this case, you don’t incur an attentional shift cost from the Find window to the main browser window, but you do have to engage in costly visual search for the highlight word! Problematic.

The new version of Safari, however, fixes this incredibly well. It has the search bar right at the top, but it dims the entire page that’s not your search term and pops up and highlights in a bright yellow your search term. Luminance, motion, and color uniqueness. Talk about attention capture (Yantis & Jonides, 1984)!:

Safari Search

Making the Find tool part of the main window: excellent. Using animation to induce motion, brightness, and color uniqueness so that you can easily find what you were searching for? Genius.

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