Archives for July 2012

A typical consent dialog was shown in 223 experimental variations to 80,000 users of an online privacy tool. We find that polite requests and button texts pointing to a voluntary decision decrease the probability of consent—in contrast to findings in social psychology. Our data suggests that subtle positive effects of polite requests indeed exist, but stronger negative effects of heuristic processing dominate the aggregated results. Participants seem to be habituated to coercive interception dialogs—presumably due to ubiquitous EULAs—and blindly accept terms the more their presentation resembles a EULA.

Źródło: Trained to Accept? A Field Experiment on Consent Dialogs (dostęp ograniczony), Boehme, R. and Koepsell, S. In Proc. CHI 2010, ACM Press, (2010), 2403-2406.

For my experience, I noted that customers often make a big deal about having everyone on their team be able to update the content, but then no one makes any updates at all, beyond a few words here and there. Most people want the possibility of control without any of the responsibility to do the work.

All of us agreed, somewhat reluctantly, that none of us has had much success with collaborative authoring.

Źródło: Is Collaborative Authoring Over-Hyped?, Tom Johnson, I’d Rather Be Writing

Measurements of user satisfaction and UX seem to be an artistic rather than a scientific endeavour, with the scope being limited by the imagination and creativity of researchers. Such a diversity of measures not only causes confusion but also fragmentation of the field. Efforts for validating and standardizing these measures are called forth;

ƒTo reduce usability measures into a single measure is bound to lose information, because objective and subjective usability measures may not correlate or even contradict. Similarly, evaluations of UX should not rely on subjective measures – the current predominant type; it is important to develop reliable and valid objective measures (i.e. psycho-physiological and biophysical);

Źródło: Measures of Usability and User Experience – Correlation and Confusion, Effie Lai-Chong Law, Kasper Hornbæk, Towards a UX Manifesto, COST294-MAUSE affiliated workshop