A Recycled Experiment

Do you like my theme? Feel free to download it and use it on your own WordPress site. By doing so you agree to participate in Recycled Research. Curious yet? I chose this theme for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I like the way you can customize it as it comes with different layouts and skins built in. Secondly, I love the idea behind this research.

By navigating on this site you are sending back data on how you use it via your mouse coordinates. From an anthropological stand point I’m interested in the fact that it shows how users use the tools provided to them. I think it would be fascinating to take different demographics of people, sit them all in front of a site using this software and see how each group differs. By adding participant observation to this utility, we will not only get a real readout of what is happening on the site, but also quantitative data on what else is grabbing the users attention, what their thoughts are, and how they use the physical tools provided to them as they interact with the virtual tools on the screen. All of this put together can assist interaction designers in making a highly valuable user experience.

This information can not only be used to make a well designed site, but also allows designers to design sites to meet the needs for all levels of users. In the future, sites could change over time to better suit your user level and habits allowing you a more customized user experience. The benefit here is especially evident when it comes to accessibility. For example, if someone has a hard time seeing things and thus misses a button each time they go to click on it because it is too small, then the code behind the site can make the button larger or move it a little to one side or the other based on that particular habit.

Imagine a site that allows you to teach it instead of it expecting to have to teach you!

The best part of this research experiment you can participate via a learning license and the data is freely available to the public!