Team Ether

BTH740 | Weekly Schedule | Research Projects | Research Essay | Student Resources

Team Ether

• Kyle Barnhart
• Qian Xu
• Sharon Kats

eMail All

Research Notes

Potential Topics

Ubiquitous computing

• Computers are getting faster, smaller, more effecient, and cheaper which will result in computers in everything (ubiquitous). This is already happening, and as it grows computers will become invisible, embedded in everything, and connected together. They will also become intellegent to changes in their surroundings (ambient intellegence).
• The key to the success in ubiquitous computing will be the human factors. The will not be invisble unless human-computer interactions become more natural so that people are not aware that they are using a computer at all.
• Example: Amongst mobile phones, digital music players, and many other computers that we don't think of as computers, tablets have become popular. Tablets have been around a long time, the idea has been around for decades, and there have been many effective tablets in this decade. However it didn't gain popularity until people started looking at them in a new way (a new class of device) different from newbooks or laptops. That is what the iPad and the Apple iOS accomplished. It was a shift in perception accomplished through a new user interface that was much more natural to users that had previously existed.
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablet_computer

• Video that got me interested in the subject: THE INTELLIGENCE REVOLUTION - Visions Of The Future - BBC
  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-14mZgPfxM
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubiquitous_computing
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambient_intelligence

Banner Blindness

Banner blindness is a phenomenon in web usability where visitors to a website consciously or subconsciously ignore banner-like information, which can also be called ad blindness.

• An eye-tracking study conducted by the Nielsen/Norman Group finds Internet users avoid viewing banner ads. Text advertising is read more often than display ads, according to the research.
• There's still hope for online ads. Pernice Coyne said graphical ads with text and contrasting colors, like white text on red, is less likely to be disregarded. "They're looking at them if they're text," she said. "I hate to sound boring, but [it is best] if you can make sure your ad is something simple, text or a recognized logo, and it needs to be relevant to the page."
• The researchers also found that people read Web pages in an F-pattern, narrowing their focus as they scroll down a page of content. Pernice Coyne said readers fixate or focus on the content at the top of a page, read a little bit further down, then give up and go back to the beginning of the same or subsequent page.
• Images that appear in the middle of the page, a spot for advertisements, are considered "obstacles" and annoying.

[1]

• The industry is taking different approaches to the problem. Many are starting to have Rich Internet Application advertisements (RIA) – with ads that sometimes takeover the entire screen without the users consent – classic interruption marketing. I haven’t really looked at the stats as to the efficacy of these campaigns but it’s a clear response to banner blindness.

[2]

Reference

Banner Blindness research with some tests