Usability it is not about computers: it is about people. This is the reason why, when talking about usability in the Era of eHealth, we begin our discussion with from human behaviors.

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Home > Resources & eZINEs : Geeks of Health > Usability check for the Health 2.0 Era
Usability check for the Health 2.0 Era
In Geeks of Health, posted on 12/1/2011 by Leandro Agrò
The Author
Leandro Agrò
aka leeander: 15 years experience IxD
Designer & Manager
His leadership and innovative work have
been recognized by numerous
organizations, such as: Venice Biennale of
Architecture: “Visionary”, ADI: Included in
ADI INDEX (Compasso D’Oro finalist), New
York Times: Included in Top10 Internet of
Things Products, WIRED: Nominated as
“ItAliens”, etc.
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Usability starts from our Vision
Usability it is not about computers: it is
about people. This is the reason why, when
talking about usability in the Era of eHealth,
we begin our discussion with from human
behaviors.

2. We all live in a complex multi­sensorial environment surrounded by large amounts of
information. Our brain comes into contact with this environment through sensory
organs. Of all these, sight is without question the sense which helps us interact the
most with our surrounding environment.
Through our eyes (and eye movements) we can obtain information about the spatial
and material nature of the visible world; we can make out the exact shape and identity
of the elements within our view, and register their relative positions. If we keep our
head still we can't see a full 360° angle but only 120°.
The sensitivity of the eye's retina, is
not even, since its resolution is
higher in a very limited area called
the fovea. As humans, we need to
quickly and continuously move our
eyes, to compose the unfinished
puzzle that we the perceive as
reality. The magic of our vision
happens through Rapid Eye
movement, which through rapid
periods of technical blindness and
quick snapshots, lets the eye build
the reality of our visible world from
the tiny puzzle pieces it grabbed.
In technical terms
saccades: are movements that allow our brain to align the area of the eye with the
highest resolution ­ the fovea ­ with the target we want to see.
fixations: are "pauses" that allow the eye to grab the images that our brain will
compose and understand.
Why eye tracking is relevant for Health 2.0?
According Wikipedia: The term Web 2.0 is
associated with web applications that
facilitate participatory information sharing,
interoperability, user­centered design, and
collaboration on the World Wide Web.
People behaviour is its driving essence.
From the web's Client­side, everything has
changed! Web browser technologies based on
"Ajax programming" allow the upload/download of
new data from a server without requiring a full
page reload. This is today's secret behind the
beautiful dynamic of web user interfaces for
online services like google maps, facebook,
twitter, etc. The intrinsic dynamic of the web2.0
raises the level of fragmentation of user
interactions ­and­ hides many relevant actions to
the traditional methods employed to conduct
usability tests (which just focuse on the record of
the pages viewed by people and on the time they
spend on a single page). As humans, we continuously drive our gaze throughout a
web page in order to catch the information we need. Even if we are not aware of this
process, this is how we transmit the visual stimuli to our brain in order to process it as
information.
It's clear that knowing exactly where users tend to focus their attention is an
extraordinary way to check the effectiveness of an interface or to make strategic
choices. This is the reason why Eye tracking has become one of the best methods of

3. extraordinary way to check the effectiveness of an interface or to make strategic
choices. This is the reason why Eye tracking has become one of the best methods of
measuring the usability of an interface.
The point of Eye tracking testing is neither about what you click nor how long you stay
on a page, but WHY you click and HOW your gaze wanders across the webpage. To
discover this we need to strongly track the users "gaze journey" throughout the
webpage.
So how is the the usability level of the health websites?
We know that good Web 2.0 calls for e a rich
user experience, user participation, dynamic
content, metadata, web standards and
scalability. and now comes the question:
Does Health 2.0 have these characteristics?
Amongs the top 15 health websites we find a low level of user participation or
engagement. The interactivity is lower than any other type of site (news, foods,
sports...) while at the same time people tend to get lost trying to find the information
that they need and deciding where to click for the right spot.
Conclusion
The user's journey through health­related websites may turn into a really unfortunate
navigation exercise: before being able to grasp the meaning of the content, users
often need to go through the trouble of accessing it via the page interface.
This is when eye tracking technology can be very handy and helps us. Eye tracking
has shown us how users' glaze is continuously jumping from side to side in a
webpage until the users find the information they need and click on the right spot to
get more of it. We have noticed that a lot of the websites we have evaluated with eye
tracking fail in driving users throughout the navigating and users keep on exploring
the webpage in search for a clickable landing spot.
The methodologies that are usually applied to measure the usability of websites are
blind to the "gaze wandering" by users because that kind of analysis just focuses on
the click stream (such as the record of the viewed pages by users) and does not tell
us anything about the quality of the users' stay on the page. Was the user reading?
Was he/she lost in navigation? That's something that only eye tracking can tell us.
Usability check for the Health 2.0 Era
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