|
If I recall correctly, a large area of eye focusing
was along the lower part of the screen where the crawling bar tells you where
you are in watching the video.
Talking heads are less visually interesting so I
suspect people would just watch the bar crawl while listening to what was being
said for a few seconds at a time.
However, if you had the screen filled with fast
paced action, that part of the screen might get very little
attention.
Randolfe (Randy) Wicker
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, December 07, 2005 5:19
PM
Subject: Re: [videoblogging] Jakob
Nielson On Talking-Head Videos
Gena ... thanks for the interesting post, I do a lot of work in
usability and human-computer interaction research and am quite familiar with
Jakob Nielson, so thanks for the opportuntity to allow me to pontificate in a
boring academic manner :) ...
First of all, although Jakob Nielson has
done a lot to promote usability, his claims have always been suspect with me.
In fact, when I saw this Alert Box referred to in this thread I thought about
posting it to the list too, but then figured that, based on what I know about
Jakob Nielson's work, I figured that people may take it too seriously.
So what I would emphasize in interpreting anything Jakob Nielson says
is to take it with a grain of salt ... he states things as hard and fast
facts, based on research, when, in fact I would call them more like educated
opionions ... for example, let's take this one
1) Rarely does any eye
tracking research indicate that anyone stares at anything for a long period of
time ... are eyes are not really "designed" that way
2) The data he shows
you in his example is a sample size of 1 ... this is not the summation of a
lot of eye tracking data, nor does it give any indication of the degree of
error associated with all of the different participants
3) Most
importantly, his criterion (operational definition) for "boring" was eyes
moving throughout the page, but I think there's a pretty big distance between
this operation and this construct ... seems like the better thing would have
been time-on-task or self-report of "boringness"
4) Maybe even more
important, he makes this giant claim about comparing TV to the web, and how
these data indicate that talking head video on the web is boring as compared
to TV, but I don't see any data about eye tracking data associated with
watching TV ... do people who watch TV just stare at the face and not let
their eyes wander? even if they do, would the wondering be associated with the
fact that a TV just has a face, but no other stuff on the screen?
...
the other intersting thing to me is that the "active - web" and "passive - TV"
thing is going to blur more and more as the two devices television and
computer monitor/keyboard start to merge and the web becomes a part of all
these devices
... Perhaps what he concludes is true, but it is
certainly my view that he does not provide us with any reasonably emperical
test to support it and, in fact, if a real experiment was conducted to try and
examine the relationship between video characteristics and "boredom", I would
imagine you would find that there are some other major variables that would
mediate this to a larger extent, for example, nature of the content,
expressiviness of the talking head (there's a lot that a face can add to a
voice, as we all know from watching someone speaking) ... and of course,
there's a whole host of issues having to do with the context in which someone
is watching the video (I would put rocketboom with a talking head up against
most "action videos", including my own, and I'm thinking the action would tend
to be more boring - but that's an opinion, not based on any
research)
... well, that whole discussion demonstrates that
a) I
must be a college professor, who teaches stuff like research design, or
how could I possibly write stuff so boring
b) As Sam Rayburn said "any damn
mule can kick down a barn, but it takes something to build one" (it's a lot
easier to criticize research than do it)
c) I'm obviously jealous that I
don't have a web news letter on usability that attracts a zillion readers per
news letter
... Richard
--
Richard
http://www.richardshow.com
YAHOO! GROUPS LINKS
|
