Re: Eye tracking study of Firefox EV indicators

This particularl comment (though not the phrasing :-) reminds me of one of 
the points I made in my "grand challenge" paper/talk - user tests that use 
(and rely on) a UI that I could never, in a million years, get into my 
product, are hard for me to make use of (in a technology transfer sort of 
way). Of course, if the tests are interested in "down stream" impact, then 
that's fine from the point of view of their goals. The example I used was 
the secure email key continuity UI used by Garfinkle and Miller. I loved 
their work, but I could never get that kind of screen real estate for 
representing security state. 

          Mez





From:
"Ian Fette" <ifette@google.com>
To:
"Rachna Dhamija" <rachna.w3c@gmail.com>
Cc:
"public-wsc-wg@w3.org" <public-wsc-wg@w3.org>
Date:
05/22/2008 07:50 PM
Subject:
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