Business Logs – Page 23

Attentional Spotlighting in User Interfaces

In visuospatial terms, a saccade is an eye movement from one area in the visual field to another, and usability testing using eye-tracking equipment tracks the timing and progression of saccades across a user interface in response to certain stimuli. These stimuli may include 1) the first presentation of the interface to the user, 2) the modification of the visual field due to animation (Flash, banners, animated GIFs, etc.), 3) the slow download of information to be presented, or any number of other things that can attract your gaze.

Sony Paying $25k Per Month for Lifehacker Blog Sponsorship

Kris Oser from AdAge.com drops the inside scoop (free registration required, or BugMeNot with clarus84[at]hotmail.com/fpdcB2B) about Sony’s sponsorship deal with Nick Denton’s Gawker Media and their new Lifehacker blog:

The deal, which also includes placements on Gizmodo, Gawker’s earlier gadget title, will cost Sony in the range of $25,000 a month, according to a source close to the deal. The sponsorship runs for about three months.
—Kris Oser

LiveJournal Does Reputation Management Right

What do you do if you are a large company whose sole business is to host weblogs for thousands of people only to find out that everything has been shutdown? Well first you tell your customers what happened and apologize. Then you could do what LiveJournal did and go into great detail about exactly what happened and how they plan on preventing it in the future.

EPO, by the way, stands for Emergency Power Off and it’s a national fire/electrical requirement for firefighters to be able to press these big red buttons near all exits that turn off all power in the entire data center. This is the second time this has happened to us in the years I’ve been there. The first time the button was unlabeled and unprotected and some dude thought it opened the door. This time we have no clue why it was pressed… maybe that dude tripped and fell onto it… mystery.

Although a large percentage of their customers will have no idea what Brad is talking about it’s refreshing to see such honesty coming from him. What makes it even better he does not take a “I am mightier than thou” approach by simply telling everyone that the power went out. Educating your customers while also keeping the communication lines open is what helps to develop trust. Trust builds relationships and relationships builds revenue.

Movable Type Accessibility In Question

Joe Clark, one of the loudest voices in the world in regards to accessibility, has a boombastic writeup on his weblog that discusses how Movable Type is an application that generates content, and should therefore adhere to the Authoring Tools Accessibility Guidelines or ATAG:

A detail of note here: Many browsers comply with most of UAAG, and we have a few thousand sites more or less accurately claiming to comply with WCAG, but nothing whatsoever complies with ATAG, including demo projects created by the W3C itself, like Amaya.

We could sit around and wait for inconsequential and minor products like Amaya to comply, or we could go big right away. Movable Type is pretty big, isn’t it? And aren’t they committed to standards compliance and accessibility, at least on paper?

Joe is referring to the A List Apart interview where Anil discussed TypePad’s concerns for accessibility and web standards. Joe’s point being that content generating tools like Movable Type and TypePad should adhere to the ATAG guidelines because they’d be an amazing example of highly-accessible products. I’d have to agree.

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