"Do you see what I see?"

Every good designer knows the rules about page layout. Your eye goes first to the headline, then to the caption of the picture, then to the picture… whatever. But if you’re really serious about page layout and GUI design, you have to use eyetracking.

The problem is, eyetracking is really expensive and time-consuming. You need special equipment and a testing environment and, probably most difficult to come by, test participants. Maybe…

Now, a group of artificial vision scientists who call themselves Feng-GUI Lab have created a piece of software that simulates the human vision process. You can upload a still image or a movie and in seconds approximate the results of a weeks worth of human testing. Their website allows you to try out a free image analysis every three hours. I tried an analysis of my home page. The result is displayed above (click on it for a larger view).

Feng-GUI also has a lot of interesting applications of AI vision analysis listed on their home page including “smart thumbnails,” the technique of only including the visually interesting part of a picture. Make your own AI eyetracking simulations here.

Links:

• Good info on consumer Web visual behavior
• 5-step formula for creating a David Ogilvy-style ad layout

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QR code in the Wild

That funny looking symbol on my new business card is a QR code. Lately these little beasties have been cropping up on everything from T-shirts to magazine ads.

The QR (Quick Response) code is a two-dimensional bar code that can store contact info, URLs, even paragraphs of text. Although they were invented clear back in 1994, they were relegated to industrial applications until a new generation of consumer electronics made them practical for just about everything.

Now that phones like the Android and iPhone have easy to use software for decoding them, QR codes are spawning a new generation of applications called “hardlinking” or “physical world hyperlinking” that make it easy for consumers to capture data from products, magazines, billboards and even each other’s phones.

You can get your own QR codes to start pasting on stuff at the link below.

Related:

• Make your own QR Code courtesy of ZXing project

• Google image search of social QR code applications

• Silicon Alley Insider, “Mobile Barcodes: Big In France!”

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1. Sprint Rolls out Flawed Android Strategy at Developer Conference

We accomplished the goal, but the result has been less than perfect. We are drowning in a flood of meaningless drivel, with no professionals to place it into context for us. This same flood has washed away most of our great media and news-gathering institutions, bankrupting nearly all of the major newspapers and dismantling the great network news organizations, leaving those who would gladly pay for a little “intermediation” with few choices. (Funny video: “Twouble with Twitters“)

Cheer up, for the pendulum is swinging back. It turns out that we are NOT staring the future in the face, we are just suffering a little market adjustment. The role of the editor is on the rise again, but we don’t call them “editors” anymore, they’re “curators.”

Curation is the new role of media professional; aggregating, sorting and classifying. The pieces aren’t really big enough to edit anymore. They are just sorted, classified and rearranged. This is what bloggers do, and it’s what I’m doing right now.

Links:

• Silicon Alley Insider, “Can ‘Curation’ Save Media?”

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