RussellStoll.net

Pop quiz: how many of you know what a favicon is? 

No, it isn’t a type of Star Trek convention.  Actually, as a websurfer, you’ve probably seen hundreds of favicons.  They’re the little icons that pop up next to urls in your browser’s address bar.  The MediaFatigue favicon (or “favicon.ico file” if we want to please the sticklers) is a small blue square containing the letter M in white. 

Jennifer Apple at PhotoshopSupport.com has written a concise article on how to create favicons using Photoshop.  Find it here. 

The new LEGO Mindstorms NXT robot building system has been out for a few weeks now and the first returns are in: it’s a hit!  One Amazon reviewer wrote, “I am thrilled with NXT.  It is all I expected and more.” Another writer said, “All in all, this thing is very impressive, has lots of staying power, and since it supports MacOS X, I’ll actually use it, and will most likely pull out my old Mindstorms and combine parts.  Thanks, Lego—keep up the great work!”

Warning: shameless plug approaching at high speed.  One reviewer wrote, “The help system is well done and actually helpful.” Thanks for the compliment.  I had a great time writing the help system and secretly feared that it would be the one thing that users hated.  I can rest easy now.

Update: Ars Technica gives Mindstorms NXT a 10!  Here’s their review.

Lee Brimelow should get a medal (or a brown bag of cash) for his Flash tutorial site at www.gotoandlearn.com.  It’s a treasure trove of advanced techniques for Flash developers and it’s all free—a welcome respite from the rude crowd of pay tutorial sites popping up on the web. 

The material is fairly high-end so expect to be confused if you’re a newbie to Flash.  But if you’re over the beginner’s hump and have dabbled with Actionscript, you’ll find his 5-10 minute video tutorials simply engrossing.  Kudos to Lee. 

Task-oriented users don’t pay attention to images on web pages.  This was one of findings reported by Jakob Nielsen and Kara Pernice Coyne at Nielsen’s Usability Week conference in San Francisco on June 22nd where they presented the results of their first eyetracking study on website usability. 

Eyetracking is a technique used to determine where a person is looking.  By using a lightweight headset fitted with small cameras, it’s possible to track the movements of a user’s eyes and note what the pupils are doing while the user is looking at a particular feature.

Laura Ruel, a contributor to the E-Media weblog from Poynter Institute and an attendee at the conference, reported that: “According to [Nielsen and Coyne], images that do NOT attract attention share these traits:

• Generic/stock art
• Off-putting, cold, fake, too polished or “set up"
• Not related to content
• Look like advertisements
• Low contrast in terms of color—crisp

“Meanwhile, images that DO get attention share these traits:

• Related to page content
• Clearly composed and appropriately cropped
• Contain “approachable” people who are smiling, looking at the camera, not models
• Show areas of personal/private anatomy (Men tended to fixate on these areas more than women—really!)
• Items a user may want to buy

Although Jakob Nielsen can be a bit heavy-handed in what works and doesn’t on the web, these look like common-sense results.  And no big surprise concerning men and private anatomy— some things in life are constant. 

Other links about eyetracking and web usability:
Digital Storytelling Effects Lab
Results of Poynter’s Eyetrack III