Screen Real Estate Evaluation Tools
31 Mar 2006 - 4:07pm
4 replies
750 reads
Travis Chillemi
2006
Does anyone know of any tools available for identifying and analyzing screen
real estate for web sites? I'm looking for something similar to the screen
real estate bareak downs found in Jakob Nielsens book "Homepage Usability:
50 Websites Deconstructed". We are working toward a redesign of our
university website and would like to see what percentage of space our peers
are devoting to navigation, search, recent news, etc.
I am currently using screen caputres and Illustrator (doing the percentages
in my head). Ouch.
--
Travis Chillemi
Web Developer
1080media CITT/ATEL
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Comments
If you are on a Mac, xScope could make your life easier. You'll still
have to do the math yourself, but xScope has transparent rulers to
take your measurements onscreen instead of the screen captures/
Illustrator route.
http://www.iconfactory.com/xs_home.asp
Dan
Travis Chillemi wrote:
>
> Does anyone know of any tools available for identifying and analyzing screen
> real estate for web sites?
Hi Travis,
The MeasureIT extension for Firefox allows to measure screen areas within the view area:
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=539&application=firefox
Chris
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Chris Jackson
Information Architect
Networked Information Services
Boston University
617-358-0547
http://www.bu.edu/webcentral/
I know this is just slightly off topic, but can one really use website real
estate allocation as a heuristic basis for website usability evaluation?
I've read the article, but not the book. Was there any usability study
conducted to corroborate this claim? Just curious...
Cheers
Navneet
I remember to have read a study (in Spanish) which did exactly that,
measuring the building blocks of homepages of several Spanish
universities. The study (codename USABAIPO,
http://griho.udl.es/usabilidad/4NovaUsabPagWeb/paginas/heuristicas.jsp
) used the Nielsen's book as a reference.
The real estate allocation of the blocks is not used as a direct
measure of usability, but as a weighting of the absolute quality of
the parts. Each part (identity, navigation, content, advertising,
decoration and whitespace) is individually measured for compliance
with Nielsen's web guidelines, and the whole page is valued for
compliance with W3C web standards. Then those individual results are
weighted and aggregated to compute a final usability measure.
You can question whether the used heuristics and relative
significances given to real state blocks were meaningful. But the
relative comparison between the details of several universities
webpages was valuable on its own.
On 01/04/06, Navneet Nair <navneet.nair en gmail.com> wrote:
> [Please voluntarily trim replies to include only relevant quoted material.]
>
> I know this is just slightly off topic, but can one really use website real
> estate allocation as a heuristic basis for website usability evaluation?
> I've read the article, but not the book. Was there any usability study
> conducted to corroborate this claim? Just curious...
>
> Cheers
> Navneet
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