Firefox 3 and Fitt's Law

After my last post on the new firefox browser button, some might have thought: Ok, the button is bigger so it's easier to see, but can that be enough to improve the usability of the browser interface?

Well, there is a physical model which establishes the time to acquire a target as a function of the distance to the target and the size of the target. This model, called Fitts' Law* was first published by Paul Fitts in 1954. The model initially referred to the act of touching a target**, with the advent of graphical user interfaces it has been adapted to pointing and clicking with a mouse.

So, the rational behind the new firefox browser button is this: the position of the button will remain the same (distance to target) so let's increase it's size. With this solution, not only the button is more visible, but according to Fitts' Law, the time to acquire the target should decrease.

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* see the book: Universal Principles of Design by William Lidwell, Kritina Holden and Jill Butler, page 82

** See the article: The information capacity of the human motor system in controlling the amplitude of movement, by Paul Fitts in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, (1954) vol.47, issue 6, pages 381-391.

Applied Usability Research

Those who have already installed Firefox 3.0 could have been as surprised as me with the new design of the Back and forward buttons. The new back button is round and about twice the size of the forward button. Although quite stylish, this design breaks with the conventional layout which web users have grown accustomed to.

This change is in fact a brilliant response to a recurrent usability research result: "When users are navigating, the back button is of the most used browser feature"**.
What was Netscape's solution? Make it bigger than the forward button! Simple! Functional! and visually appealing!


** For more information see:

Catledge L, Pitkow, J. - Characterizing browsing strategies in the World-Wide Web. (http://www.pitkow.com/docs/1995-WWW3-Characterizing.pdf

Stanton, N. A. & Baber, C. - The Myth of Navigating in Hypertext: How a "Bandwagon" Has Lost Its Course!

Google Desktop, here is a good one!!!

Just after I started the blog, I decided to setup Google Desktop. For those not familiar with it, it is like having a google engine on your desktop which can search the files in your hard drive and tell you where they are.

It is a great tool, specially if you are trying to find an article which you want to read or a document you read ages ago which talked about, let's say, 'website genres'. All you have to do is type the words 'website genres' in the neat search field on the windows taskbar and voilá Google Desktop gives you the files which match the search criteria. All sounds very nice, except when you start searching... The problem is, that by default your whole fixed drive (usually C:) is scanned (crawled is the approporiate term) and indexed. This means that you usually get a lot of results (depending on the search, thousands of them). But in my case, I do not want a lot of results! I just want to search the papers and articles I have in a specific folder in my C: drive.

Ahhh, it's simple, just tell Google Desktop that the only place you want it to index is that particular folder!! I wish it was that simple! As far as I could see, there is no way of telling it to scan just a folder in the C: drive! And if it does allow you to do it, the instructions are not easily found.

What you have to do if you want GD to scan just one of your folders is to tell it to exclude all folders from the indexing...except the ones you want to search.

OK, I thought, just open the 'add folder to exclusion list' window, CTRL click on all forlders you want to exclude and I'll be done. WRONG! You can not CTRL click or even SHIFT click...you have to input folder by folder...

Here's a picture of a the first third of excluded folders I had to manually input.
Nice one Google!!!

Long road ahead

It has been more than 15 years since Jakob Nielsen published his 'Usability Engineering' book. in my opinion this book was a landmark in designing products for users.

Although a long time has passed since Mr. Nielsen begun evangelizing the world and many followed his steps, we are still flooded by hard to use products and terrible design.

When I say terrible design, I do not mean aesthetically but in term of user experience. It is very common to have beautifully looking products being rendered useless by not being able to do (or by making it very hard to do) what the user requests.

In this blog I will attempt to discuss all usability issues I come across in my life as a usability researcher and designer...and believe me, I have stories to tell...

Hope you will enjoy it as much as I.