Blogs

I’ve moved my blog over to http://ambiguiti.es from now on. Over there I’ll be talking about web and mobile development, and maintain a more general blog relating to events, conferences, job postings, and other such news in the industry.

I’m doing some casual research right now on website usability metrics for RobotReplay. I stumbled onto an old but still interesting blog post about the old ‘Three Click Rule’. Don’t worry, I hadn’t heard of it either. Essentially this is a rule of thumb that says that every piece of content on your site should take no more than 3 clicks to get to.

So what does this have to do with pogosticking? Pogosticking is the act of jumping up and down through the hierarchy of a web site, repeatedly hitting the back button to move to the next item in a list. The general concensus is this is a behavior you want to avoid in your users. The two concepts are related but are they both valid?

Turns out, probably not. The UIE blog people did some research that showed that number of clicks was not related to goal success.

The next thing they looked at was user satisfaction. What they wanted to know was did more clicking result in consistently lower satisfaction? Turns out not really.

This flies in the face of conventional wisdom (at least my limited wisdom anyway). Turns out dissatisfied ran the gamut in terms of the number of clicks they made. Satisfaction seems to be intrinsically linked to other factors.

However.. what they did find that the specific behavior of pogosticking could reliably predict low goal completion. In other words.. clicking ok, pogosticking bad.

I wonder if anyone has done research on pogosticking within a particular page. (ie: scrolling up and down, mousing all over the place, etc).

We upgraded our Google Analytics code today to use the new ga.js instead of the old urchin.js… We immediately had problems with the Script include they ask you to use.. Here is an example:

What’s with the embedded script tags? This violates what of the cardinal rules of embedded script tags with document.write. You’re supposed to properly escape the word ’script’. This is so that people with Norton installed on their systems, and also people running an IIS ASP.NET/ASP server environment don’t find their pages broken. Once we fixed this, it all started working again.