William Albert

• PhD
• SVP at Mach49

Objective The present study examines the cognitive effects of placing icons in unexpected spatial locations within websites. Background Prior research has revealed evidence for cognitive conflict when web icons occur in unexpected locations (e.g., cart, top left), generally consistent with a dynamical systems models. Here, we compare the relative...

An online survey ( N = 810) examined the impact of design best practices on the perceived usability of End-User License Agreements (EULAs). Redesigning a EULA according to best-practices (without changing the EULA’s terms and conditions) led to higher perceived usability while responses to attitudinal (perceived reasonableness of conditions) and be...

We examined the relationship between political affiliation, perceptual (percentage, slope) estimates, and subjective judgements of disease prevalence and mortality across three chart types. An online survey (N = 787) exposed separate groups of participants to charts displaying (a) COVID-19 data or (b) COVID-19 data labeled ‘Influenza (Flu)’. Block...

The present study used mouse-tracking to investigate the impacts of web object characteristics on cognitive conflict during a naturalistic website use task. An online survey (N = 191) gathered baseline location typicality ratings for common web objects. An in-person laboratory study (N = 101) presented images of popular websites with target objects...

Banner ads remain a core component of the marketing mix for companies in both the analog and digital domains. Consumers spend much of their time on websites, whether through mobile or desktop devices, and marketers need to target them where they are. Unfortunately, inattention blindness is a serious impediment to the effectiveness of banner adverti...

Two eye tracking studies were conducted to investigate the impact of information relevance and visual design treatments on inattention blindness to banner advertising on web pages. It is an important question to determine how ads should be designed to maximize their value. Participants completed information-seeking tasks while viewing pages that co...

This study compares results obtained using the SMI infrared and Sticky webcam eye tracking technologies. Participants viewed a series of images twice, once using each technology. A comparison of the results shows that the infrared equipment is more accurate for smaller images, particularly those farther from the center of the screen. Infrared techn...

The purpose of this study is to explore the emergence of ad banner blindness in the viewing of e-commerce home pages. Building on the literature on inattention blindness and banner blindness, this article assessed the gaze path of users in goal-directed and free-viewing tasks when viewing pages with advertising banners on the right side of the page...

Participants in a usability evaluation are often asked whether they noticed certain elements after some level of interaction with a design. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the reliability of self-reported awareness measures using eye tracking data. Participants were shown 20 popular homepages for 7 seconds each and then asked afterwards i...

Usability testing and user experience research typically take place in a controlled lab with small groups. While this type of testing is essential to user experience design, more companies are also looking to test large sample sizes to be able compare data according to specific user populations and see how their experiences differ across user group...

The goal of this study was to determine the reliability of pre-conscious trust assessments of web sites. Participants in Experiment 1 (n=72) viewed 50 screenshots of popular financial and health care home pages in a random order in two separate trials. Each screenshot was presented for 50ms, followed by a mask for 150ms, followed by an assessment o...

Measuring the User Experience was the first book that focused on how to quantify the user experience. Now in the second edition, the authors include new material on how recent technologies have made it easier and more effective to collect a broader range of data about the user experience. As more UX and web professionals need to justify their desig...

Effectively measuring the usability of any product requires choosing the right metric, applying it, and effectively using the information it reveals. Measuring the User Experience provides the first single source of practical information to enable usability professionals and product developers to do just that. Authors Tullis and Albert organize doz...

This study assesses how changes in speed affect the formation of cognitive maps while an observer is learning a route through a desktop virtual environment. Results showed low error rates overall, and essentially no differences in landmark positioning errors between observers in variable speed conditions and a constant speed condition, utilizing bo...

Previous research has demonstrated the importance of attention in the development of survey (or configural) knowledge of the environment. However, it is unclear if attention is also necessary for the development of route knowledge. Our aim in this paper is to evaluate the specific role of attention in the acquisition of both route and survey knowle...

This study presents two experiments that examine how individuals learn relative directions between landmarks in a desktop virtual environment. Subjects were presented snapshot images of different virtual environments containing distinguishing landmarks and a road network. Following the presentation of each virtual environment, subjects were given a...

Spatial cognitive abilities play an important role in the use of GIS, although they have yet to be examined in a controlled experimental setting. This study aimed to develop an experimental design which measures spatial cognitive abilities in the use of GIS, specifically the map overlay operation. Subjects (n = 134) received three map overlay tests...

This study examines the effects of spatio-temporal disorder in learning the relative locations of buildings in a simulated environment. In two experiments, subjects were asked to learn the layout of an environment consisting of four buildings and a road network from a series of snapshots. The snapshots were presented in two conditions: a sequential...

For thematic maps rnade from remote sensing at the resolu-tion of polygons, there are frequently more data available than the single class assigned to the polygon. One way of us-ing these additional data is to provide secondary labels in maps. A key question concerns the reliability of these data. The optimistic view is that the distribution of cla...