Gathering usage data
Jonathan Watt
I'm at Libre Graphics Meeting and saw a talk [1] yesterday on how ingimp gathers
usage data for user interface refinement. It's worth watching the whole thing,
but the part of the video from 18:10 to 28:30 seems especially valuable for us.
E.g. in getting our "know your rights" message across. (It's pure gold around
21:50 :-) .)
Besides that, are we doing anything like this for gathering usage data for user
interface refinement?
Cheers,
Jonathan
Chris Hofmann
It would be interesting to study the "arms race" part of this.
It seems pretty clear there might be an initial advantage to using the
techniques described to catch attention. The anacdotal two guys
looking at the amazing things published in Star for the first time, and
data gather from someone seeing a totally new presentation of a software
terms of service seems pretty convincing that users would pay more
attention to what is in the agreement.
If all software agreements started looking like Star and GQ would they
start to get ignored?
One way to get at this would be to study long time readers of Star, GQ,
and Glamour to figure out which of the information layering Vignettes,
Sensationalism, and Visual Variety techiques work over the longer haul
and to see if the pattern change.
I guess solving the arms race part of this might be a secondary
question. Just getting people to read the agreements once might be a
great enough victory ;-)
-chofmann
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Justin Dolske
> It's worth watching the whole thing,
> but the part of the video from 18:10 to 28:30 seems especially valuable for us.
> E.g. in getting our "know your rights" message across.
Interesting work. I'd love to see the slow gears of the legal world
start to move based on this kind of data -- throwing a wall of legalese
at someone and expecting an "I Agree" click to be some kind of iron-clad
contractual agreement is full of all sorts of fail. Companies that bury
sleazy things in these kinds of terms&conditions should have to meet a
higher standard than just making the text bold.
I think we should aim in a different direction, though, by striving to
remove or mitigate the kinds of things that require interrupting a user
to grab their attention in the first place. For example, an
informataive, attention-grabbing EULA is better than a wall-of-text, but
no EULA is even better.
But this would be directly applicable to something like Test Pilot
(where we want to make sure we have informed consent from a user who
installs it, so users are not surprised later on). And it might be
interesting to think about things like malware/certificate warnings in
the context of this work.
Justin
Jonathan Watt
> It would be interesting to study the "arms race" part of this.
>
> It seems pretty clear there might be an initial advantage to using the
> techniques described to catch attention. The anacdotal two guys
> looking at the amazing things published in Star for the first time, and
> data gather from someone seeing a totally new presentation of a software
> terms of service seems pretty convincing that users would pay more
> attention to what is in the agreement.
>
> If all software agreements started looking like Star and GQ would they
> start to get ignored?
Heh. Well hopefully we won't ship things with semi-naked women plastered all
over it, but I'd hope they could start to use some of their tricks for grabbing
and maintaining attention to get important information across.
Anyway, I'm not so interested in EULAs. Didn't we replace our EULA with a "know
your rights" message? I'm much more interested in using these tricks there to
more effectively communicate the "Mozilla message" to a mass audience. It seems
like the vast majority of our users don't know that Firefox is open source (and
many that do don't really understand what that means) and that they know nothing
about our mission to keep the Web open.
Jonathan