"One of the most suprising things in eye tracking is how fast the blue ball moves"

There's a nice podcast from UXPod with Jakob Nielsen. About minute 7:30, Nielsen segues from talking about voice recognition and audio interfaces to the speed of large screens in terms of human input bandwidth. Vision is to hearing as cable modems are to dialup modems. In Nielsen's terms, vision is a "fast, fast input channel".

The best quote of this section, especially for Scrutinizer fans, is Nielsen's claim that "One of the most surprising things in eye tracking is how fast the blue ball moves." Check out our eye tracking video & blog archive for some examples if you've never seen eye-tracking.

Mostly, folks know Jakob Nielsen as the web design usability guru, and he's particularly known for arguing against mainstream trends and fancy web systems. But most folks don't realize that his experience in the field extends to way before the web existed. Most interestingly, he worked extensively on hypertext systems prior to the web, providing a very unique perspective on where the web is today.

A couple other highlights:

• 13:30: "If everybody does things in a certain way, you should probably do so as well... because that's what users expect." So what he's saying is that even if it's not the best solution in principle, your customer's prior experience may make it a superior way to accomplish your mission as a web or software designer.
• 19:30: Nielsen argues against the iPhone web browser model saying that the phone should not be a peephole into a page, but mobile devices should be integrated across a user's gadgets with custom interfaces for the form factor of the device.