Ever had one of those things that you “just know” is better? Ever turn out you were wrong. I hate that! Yet it happens to be periodically.
This is why I like to test things. I’ll come up with a good design for a website, show some people, and sometimes walk away with changes based upon some thoughtful insights (and sometimes I walk away knowing everything was just right). Over the last couple of years, I’ve made a habit of checking out ideas with tools like Google’s Web Optimizer which lets you test small changes, or changes to a whole page even. Usually I’ve improved the results by only 10 or 15% (just shows how good the initial implementation was), other times closer to 75% improvements.
One thing that I’ve been wondering recently is what is the best way to view tabular data on a web page. This is increasing with importance now that many documents are accessed on-line instead of being printed out. People always say that alternating the background is the best method, but tests have shown only a small improvement in use. With more recent faster computers, it got me to thinking, maybe it is better to use a row highlighting, which highlights the entire row you are on.
I would think it would be better, but you can’t tell for sure without a test. So I’ve developed a simple page to test out this hypothesis. Go to: http://access2learn.com/survey1/, and see how you do. Once it is done, send others so they can take the survey. With more people, we will get better results.
Once I get all of the data gathered, I will release my results.
About Walter Wimberly