Well goodness me! I’ve been invited to chair this conference next week. Unfortunately I can’t manage the first day (Tuesday 10th October) as I’m already committed to doing something else that day, but I’ve accepted the invitation to chair the second day. Should be interesting! The conference is being run by the Ark Group, and takes place in London. Shame they didn’t think to invite me to participate in the Accessible Websites conference they’re running in Singapore on those days. Heh! Oh well, maybe next year. :)
Mike Abbott | 18/10/2006 at 9:23 | Permalink
Hi Donna, how did the conference go?
Donna | 29/10/2006 at 21:44 | Permalink
Hi Mike - it was quite interesting. Unfortunately the notes I took were in a notebook in my handbag, which got stolen a couple of weeks ago. Aargh. Also unfortunately, Ark Group take details of conferences off their website after they’ve been run, so I’ve had to remove the link that was originally here.
One session that stood out was when Javed Iqbal and John Myatt from the British Council gave a presentation about a recent project they undertook to carry out user testing of one of their websites. As part of that project they trialled the use of eye-tracking technology to see where users were looking as they scanned a web page. They ran several short recordings of parts of these sessions, and it was quite fascinating to watch as the users’ point of focus moved rapidly around the page, often completely missing the feature they were meant to find and use to complete a task! On the basis of what I saw in that presentation, I’d definitely recommend incorporating some eye-tracking sessions into user testing whenever feasible. It really did highlight issues relating to the positioning of features on the page, and also, importantly, to the words and names used for specific features.