29Aug / 2008

A Cure For Real Estate Amnesia

Mr. Unger of The Unger Report has outdone himself this time.

“…Real Estate Amnesia (REA) is the leading cause of real estate anxiety, next to homelessness and foreclosure…” – A Cure For Real Estate Amnesia

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21Aug / 2008

What are Attachments?

Should links inside emails be considered attachments? In the technical sense of an email (like rfc 2183) links wouldn’t be considered a different content type. The question isn’t whether they are technically attachments as much as if they should be attachment-like in the user interface.

Facebook

Facebook handles links in a message almost like an attachment-object and will do some additional meta work on the link to provide a default photo and short description for it.

In the message list view Facebook offers an icon to note that a link attachment was included in a messages.

In the composition view Facebook also grabs links from inside the message and shows them separately as an attachment like thing. In the screenshot below the composition window grabbed the link inside my message and pulled down a description and number of photos from the site.

link detected in the composition area

This kind of meta data around a link can be really beneficial. The presentation of the link is better than a person naturally would and since it’s the information is retrieved automatically it only takes extra seconds to make sure a good image and description appear.

Beyond just the benefits of better presentation is another hot topic in the Thunderbird world of offline support. When reading mails offline it’s far better to have a more context about the link than none at all. Even if I can’t bring up the link in an offline state the image, description and comment can help me to recall what the link is about.

Gmail

When you’re using the rich editor for composing a message in Gmail and create a link it has some nice features for recognizing a link and helping you edit it. Here are some screen shots of what Gmail is doing right now.

Popup indicates the link has been recognized in compose window

Editing a Link

Alternatively Editing an Email link

Pretty straightforward and simple stuff when compared to the extra things Facebook is doing. Gmail doesn’t add meta-data about the links or make their inclusion visible in the message list.

Links as Attachments

If in Thunderbird we wanted to start treating links more like we treat attachments…

How do we present that to the user?
- Both in terms of composing messages and when receiving links in messages.
Do we grab meta data for links sent to us?
- assuming some kind of policy about what links we can do that with
And should we be making links available somehow in Firefox?

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21Aug / 2008

Visual Field of Dreams

Not more baseball…

I’m wondering what is the optimum visual field or display size for reading on a computer screen?

I haven’t been able to find an easy answer to this question for a number of reasons and what I’ve found for research indicates many conflicting studies. One difficulty is that you have to really define what optimum means. Are you optimizing for speed, comprehension, or satisfaction? Also the size of the documents you are reading can change the optimizing factors for presenting it.

So here’s a compilation of research papers that I’ve found related to the Visual Field, Optimum Display Size, whatever you want to call it problem.

The Effects of Line Length on Children and Adults’ Online Reading Performance [ pdf ]

Adults were measured against children in 3 sets of line length for reading time and effective reading score yet no real differences were found. What is interesting is the perceived results, only in adults found the narrow to medium line length (45 – 76 CPL – characters per line) to be preferred when compared to the full length (132 CPL).

The Effects of Line Length on Reading Online News [ pdf ]

Twenty college-age students were given news articles to read displaying in 35, 55, 75, or 95 characters per line from a computer monitor. The results showed that passages formatted with 95 cpl resulted in faster reading speed with no effects for comprehension or satisfaction other than strong preferences for sizes.

The Effect of display size on reading and manipulating electronic text [ pdf ]

An attempt at more meaningful analysis of the effect of window size on reader comprehension and manipulation of “real-world” texts. Participants were given journal articles for comprehension and a software manual for specific information. Indications that screen size does not play a major factor in performance on either task and readers prefer larger screens. (no kidding!)

Reading and skimming from computer screens and books: the paperless office revisited?

Previous research made conclusions from the screens of the 1980s vs. paper, however when comparing against high quality CRTs speed and comprehension are equivalent. However skimming on a CRT is still 41% slower than from a book, reasons for this finding are discussed.

Interface Design and Optimization of Reading of Continuous Text

A fantastic overview of a lot of different research that has taken place with breakdowns of key variable components of each experiment. If you only read one paper this is likely the best one to get a handle on the situation.

Visual performance on CRT screens and hard-copy displays, Human Factors (1989) { missing }