SIGIA-L Mail Archives: Re: SIGIA-L: ZUI hatred
Re: SIGIA-L: ZUI hatred
From: Jared M. Spool (jspool_at_uie.com)
Date: Sun Mar 24 2002 - 01:07:02 EST
Christine wrote:
> Jef Raskin usually shows the USA as a zoomable interface, allowing
> you to
> zoom into a place going all the way to someone's house in a city in
> a state; and it mostly works because we've learned the shape of the
> USA in school. However, I doubt most folks could easily zoom into
> Waukee, the small town I grew up in. Even if you know it's Iowa,
> it's still unlike you could find it without a number of zoom, zoom
> out, zoom in, zoom out. Believe me, this looses its charm rapidly.
The zoom-in, zoom-out behavior matches the behavior we call
'pogosticking' when dealing with content.
Pogosticking is an affect of the Scent of Information. When users get
to a point in a content space (such as a web site) where the scent
isn't clear, a common behavior is to click on the most likely
candidate, inspect that candidate, then hit the back button when it
isn't the right thing. Users then repeat the process with the second
likely candidate. The up-and-down motion through the content space is
reminiscent of a pogo stick, thus the name.
We've documented and studied pogosticking in our research. The
research tells us several things:
1) Pogosticking is a primary indicator of lost scent.
2) Users pogostick when there isn't the "right" information at the
upper level to properly discriminate through the candidates.
3) The more users pogostick, the less likely they will find their
content.
4) When you study information systems that produce lists, most
users (usually about 66%) who find their target content do it
without any pogosticking.
5) Pogosticking can be dramatically eliminated through proper
design.
My guess is that we don't really know how to create ZUI's that
contain the 'right' information at the upper level to prevent
pogosticking, but further research could easily reveal how to do
that, just has it has with web-based content.
It's nice to know that we have research results that would predict
the behavior Christina saw. Maybe research is useful after all? :)
Jared
p.s. More can be found about pogosticking in our white paper "Are the
Product Lists on Your Site Reducing Sales?", which describes
pogosticking from an e-commerce perspective. This is available free
at http://world.std.com/~uieweb/whitepaper.htm.
- o - o - o -
Jared M. Spool
User Interface Engineering
242 Neck Road
Bradford, MA 01835 USA
(978) 374-8300 fax: (978) 374-9175
jspool_at_uie.com http://www.uie.com
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