I’m just back from Berlin, where it was my privileged to speak at the Web 2.0 Expo Europe earlier this week. The presentation was developed by Peter Stahl (eBay’s lead designer on our project) and myself, and it was largely based on a methodology we concocted together that allowed us to audit interactions on the eBay site. Versions of this deck are already on SlideShare from previous presentations, but to make life easier for those who are looking for it on the heels of this most recent Expo, here’s the most recent deck.
I was talking to a developer after the presentation who was particularly interested in the ideas around “Feel” metrics — metrics that we envisioned might help better quantify or describe the various aspects of an interactive experience, and how those metrics might shift or remain consistent as users operate a site. It’s one of the cooler ideas Peter and I kicked around during our work on the interaction audit, so perhaps we’ll find time to do further investigation into how those various objective and subjective metrics could become some sort of tool. Obviously there’s going to be a wide variety of factors that will determine whether a site or service has a good experience, but it would be interesting to see how “Jack-in-the-boxiness” (the degree which layers and other elements jump out at you as your run your mouse over a page) might come into play.
