I’m working on a usability test report right now, and I’ve just coined the phrase “link-color”, as in, “the amount of link-color on this page is overwhelming”, or “the distribution of link-color on this page emphasizes the navigation options while clearly indicating content areas” or “the location of link-color in these blurb chunks sets up a readily identifiable pattern”.

The presumption here (and what I’ve seen in testing) is that the location/presence of links strongly influences eye movement on the page; therefore, the density and distribution of link placement is something we need to consider when designing pages.

The term is an update of the “sea of blue effect”, while not showing any color prejudice (ooh, heresy! Please – it has as much to do with color contrast with the site’s palette as with the expectation of a particular color. Yeah, I’ll burn for that one, so says the usability elders). It also gives you more flexibility in talking about grouping of links to show patterns, indicate navigation options, and so on – “sea of blue effect” doesn’t allow for such usage.

The density and distribution stuff draws from all the “Scent of Information” theories from Xerox PARC and put into practice by J. Spool, but I still feel like there isn’t a vocabularly adequately built up to support those kinds of discussions. Try to use it when discussing a page today, see what you think…

I had a few drinks with a friend the other day. She’s an artist, and these days she’s doing a lot of conceptual art. Her projects focus on experience, mostly trying to absorb, understand, and share others’ experiences. In addition to her most recent project, she’s done another project where she approached people in a supermarket, asked them what dish they really liked and how they made it, and then bought all the food and made it herself. She did this a dozen times, all while documenting the process and her thoughts about the experience and about the concept of experience. I know, not your traditional idea of art, but she’s got an MFA and knew what she was talking about, so who was I to argue?

The conversation was interesting because we were both trying to understand the same concept, but for two different reasons and using two different means. We were using such similar language about relating to and understanding people, but for me it was to understand users better to know how to design for them, while for her it was to question how we have and share experiences. It brought up some interesting questions about empathy and the different qualities by which we each understood someone else’s experience as a result of our methods: obervation vs. emulating/recreating/re-experiencing. I wonder what design traditions, if any, seek out information in a similar manner.

And you thought user experience design had nothing to do with conceptual art…

I’d invite some meaningful conversation now, but I don’t have comments enabled. Soon, soon – I want to do the redesign in moveable type so that I can categorize my posts.