Re: Eye tracking study of Firefox EV indicators

No offense, and not to be blunt, but this study looks... less than stellar.
:( They're testing Firefox 3 beta 1, which, IIRC, didn't even display the
site name in the URL bar for EV sites. Then they stick in some crap
indicator that looks so god awful and totally out of place with the Firefox
UI it's no wonder that people look at it and say "ah ha! people look at it."
and claim that the base Firefox 3 browser fails. Lovely.
Sure, you can drop in a dork-o-meter that is totally out of line with the
rest of the UI and people will look at it. But is that a good idea? I still
don't know what takeaway points I'm supposed to get out of here :( They made
something look awful, claimed a number of people looked at it... and?

On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 4:32 PM, Rachna Dhamija <rachna.w3c@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi all,
>
>
> Jennifer Sobey and her colleagues at Carleton University published a paper
> that our group should be aware of:
>
>
> http://www.scs.carleton.ca/research/tech_reports/index.php?Abstract=tr-08-10_0010&Year=2008
>
>
> They conducted an eye tracking study of people using Firefox 3 and observed
> whether people noticed EV indicators.  They conclude that the new indicators
> are ineffective because none of the participants noticed them or discovered
> the clickable regions that reveal site identity details.  The study tested
> the Firefox 3 Beta 1 release, but the results are still relevant to the
> interface in the current release.
>
>
> They also experimented with a new interface for an "identity confidence
> meter", which is similar to some of the interfaces that we've discussed in
> the Web Security Score proposal.
>
>
> The authors welcome our comments on the study.
>
>
> Rachna
>
>
>
>
>
>
>