Fri, September 10, 2004

Promises, promises. I have all these great ideas for how to make onebee better as a source of entertainment and as a workplace time-waster for our 9-to-5 friends, but they never end up coming to fruition. It's not that I don't have time (I'm mostly watching old Reno 911! reruns), but sometimes it's a matter of energy (all that couch potato time saps the strength) or inspiration. Or it's just a matter of it being 98 fucking degrees and the air conditioner not reaching the bedroom where the G5 is.

Anyway, if I ever want to get this site to the point where it's completely effortless to administer – which is essential if I want to get back to the frequency of updates that I used to have – I have some work to do, both on my end and on yours. Since I've seen most of the movies I care about seeing right now (except maybe Resident Evil and maybe Criminal), it seems like a good weekend to try to get some work done in this area. Here's hoping!

Anyway, as far as the kick in the pants that I needed in order to get cracking on some of the smaller adjustments, there's Eyetrack III. It doesn't apply 1000% to what I do, but it has some interesting suggestions about how to maximize the effectiveness of design and layout elements, which is something that's important to me because I feel like onebee would be more read if it were more readable. (Not that it's so hard now, but better is always better.)

One of the main things Eyetrack does is tell you where people look when they're looking at a web page. Certainly this is aggregated data from looking at a few sites with specific designs, and the values would change if you had people looking at, say, onebee. But it's still data, and it reveals some trends which transcend the particular layout of any individual site. For example, Eyetrack generated the following graph, which splits the screen into zones and identifies where people spend most of their time looking.

So, I decided to overlay this general graph onto my homepage and see how I'm doing.

Not great. The really important stuff is only in one half of one of the four red squares, and only one and a half red squares out of four contain any information that changes frequently. So, immediately, I dropped the RSS links to the bottom of the left column, because those are rarely used and shouldn't occupy such prime real estate. Whether to do something drastic which moves the writing further into the red, I haven't decided. Probably not; after all, this graph would be different if it were generated by people looking at onebee instead of other (primarily news) sites.

Eyetrack also generated this graph, which indicates where people's focus generally starts on a page, and where it moves over time.

This one makes for much better news when overlaid with onebee.

In fact, it looks like a perfect match! This is my dream route for eyeballs on the onebee homepage. Check out the recent columns, check out the newest post, take a gander at the recent comments to see if anything is new, return to the content, and finally appreciate our adorable mascot, Beeie. Again, this is aggregate data and by no means specific to this site, but if people's general instinct is to move their eyes across the page in roughly this pattern, I'll take it!

Anyway, it's just a start. I have to dig deeper into Eyetrack to evaluate its recommendations about the use of typography and whitespace (two elements that are key – key! – to onebee), and also it's important to remember that one report like this doesn't mean everything. I'm really pleased with a lot of the careful design work that went into onebee, so I'm not going to go ripping it out because Eyetrack says my link colors are bad or anything. But if a few minor tweaks can make it more scannable, more engaging, and more readable, I'm for it. I'll go to the ends of the earth for you, my adoring public.

Tune in on Monday and see if anything happened, or if I just watched a lot of TiVo like always.

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