Andrea Wiggens has written a good article over at Boxes and Arrows discussing why IA’s need “to understand why visitors come to the site and what they seek, so that the content can be best presented to meet user needs and business goals.”

Using heuristics
Providing a context for heuristics is the most useful application of web metrics in a site redesign: a framework for measurement is critical to future evaluation of the success and value of strategic but intangible investments like information architecture. Analyzing pre-existing web traffic yields insights to user behavior and measures how well a site meets user needs. By comparing analytic data to an information architect’s heuristic evaluation, a basic validation emerges for otherwise subjective performance measures. In addition to heuristic validation, web analysts can use the information to engineer effective key performance indicators (KPI) for future evaluation, and the information architect can use the information to provide direction for the design.

(Via Boxes and Arrows.)

Mark Sullivan over at Light Reading has posted an article with an interesting look into Microsoft TV’s Usability Lab and some interesting findings related to the IPTV User Experience…

According to Microsoft TV usability director David Sloo, the reaction time of other IPTV features, such as programming guides, can appear to be faster than they really are if a viewer is experiencing highly reactive channel change response times…So Sloo’s team doesn’t just study responses to the Microsoft TV product: A lot of time is spent learning from both the attributes and shortcomings of competing products…The research has shown that TV watchers want to spend most of their time looking at their TV, not at their remote. So Sloo and his team have been working with several different ways of putting more navigation features on the screen, and fewer on the remote control.

“We see TV today as akin to the PC in the 1980s — it’s useful but its utility is limited until it becomes a two-way system,” says Microsoft TV spokesman Jim Brady. Microsoft’s approach to the problem is something called “search and discovery.” During Light Reading’s visit to Microsoft’s Mountain View, Calif. campus, marketing general manager Christine Heckart demonstrated the system’s simple search function. She entered some keywords into the system with the remote control, and the system searched all of the recorded, broadcast and VOD programming available and returned a list of titles.

In future iterations of its software, the “discovery” part of the equation will become more emphasized, Microsoft says, with the experience become more like browsing at Amazon. Once a viewer locates something (a movie, clip or TV show) that’s in their general area of interest, the system begins suggesting related titles the viewer might like

“We get asked about broadband video a lot, and there’s so much confusion about it,” Brady says. “Over time the lines between IPTV and internet video will blur, but today people access and watch them for different reasons,” he adds, though “we do see a crossover in the future.”

via Light Reading by Mark Sullivan, Reporter

Real Wireframes Get Real Results

Stephen Turbek over at boxes and arrows has an interesting article about usability testing with low fidelity vs. high fidelity prototypes. I’ve personally usability tested both ways and gotten good results from both. Also, I generally prefer to conduct formal usability tests with higher fidelity prototypes. If you’re going to go through the effort of recruiting a number of users, spending a couple of days on testing and even more on analyzing the results then the time required to make a low-fidelity, greyscale wireframe prototype into a higher fidelity version is neglible. I agree with Stephen, when it comes to the results from higher fidelity prototypes; users give better feedback because they have more to react to.

“Just because project teams understand the purpose of wireframes, that doesn’t mean everyone will. Similar to listening to someone sing out loud to his iPod: we only hear the singing, while the person hears the whole orchestra. Likewise, the test subject knows only that ‘the page isn’t going to look like what they see,’ but what they see is all they have to react to.”

(Via Boxes and Arrows.)