Caroline Jarrett
Personal Homepage:
http://www.formsthatwork.comCurrent place of employment:
Effortmark Ltd
Caroline is a usability consultant who specialises in forms and in tuning up the content of large web sites.
Publications by Caroline Jarrett (bibliography)
Jarrett, Caroline, Petrie, Helen and Summers, Kathryn (2010): Design to read: designing for people who do not read easily. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2010 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2010. pp. 4481-4484.
“Many people do not read easily. They may have an impairment such as a visual problem. They may be reading in stressful conditions or poor light, or perhaps they are reading in a second language. Is it possible to provide one consistent set of guidelines or approaches that will allow designers of electronic materials to meet all the apparently diverse needs of these people? Or are there compromises to be made? If so, what are those compromises?”
© All rights reserved Jarrett et al. and/or their publisher
Jarrett, Caroline and Gaffney, Gerry (2009): Forms that work: Designing web forms for usability. Boston, Morgan Kaufmann
Jarrett, Caroline, Grant, Katie, Wong, William, Kodagoda, Neesha and Summers, Kathryn (2008): Designing for People who do not Read Easily. In: Proceedings of the HCI08 Conference on People and Computers XXII 2008. pp. 201-202.
“Many people do not read easily for all sorts of reasons: social and cultural, because of impairments, or because of their context. Even in the area of impairments, design for people with learning disabilities might be very different from design for people with visual impairments. But many sets of guidelines, such as WCAG 2.0, are promulgated that attempt to provide one unified approach to design. This workshop will attempt to explore issues in design for people who do not read easily: what do we know, what commonalities can we exploit, and what we need to find out.”
© All rights reserved Jarrett et al. and/or their publisher
Jarrett, Caroline (2008): Label Placement in Forms -- What's Best?. In: Proceedings of the HCI08 Conference on People and Computers XXII 2008. pp. 229-230.
“The details of forms design often absorb unreasonable amounts of designers' time. For example, where should labels be placed? The recent fashion has been to right-justify the labels and place them to the left of the fields -- is that really always the right answer? This talk draws on the author's 15 years' experience of forms design and on recent eye-tracking data.”
© All rights reserved Jarrett and/or his/her publisher
Jarrett, Caroline (2007): Problems and Joys of Reading Research Papers for Practitioner Purposes. In Journal of Usability Studies, 3 (1) pp. 1-6.
“In her editorial, Jarrett discusses reasons that practitioners read research papers and the obstacles that they face when reading research papers. Jarrett provides several examples and suggestions for improving the accessibility of research papers for practitioners. Her suggestions include writing clear titles, ensuring that the abstract states the study population and limitations of the study, and ensuring that the conclusions are written clearly. She also discusses her criteria for determining whether or not a research paper is relevant to her work.”
© All rights reserved Jarrett and/or Usability Professionals Association
Stone, Debbie, Jarrett, Caroline, Woodroffe, Mark and Minocha, Shailey (2005): User Interface Design and Evaluation. Morgan Kaufmann
Jarrett, Caroline (2005): Proposal outline for a case study session at OZCHI 2005. In: Proceedings of OZCHI05, the CHISIG Annual Conference on Human-Computer Interaction 2005. pp. 1-2.
“What do you do if you're forced to give quick feedback on a product? You know that the best answer would be to run a usability test -- but time or other constraints make it impossible. This session will give you ideas about what to do if you have thirty minutes, and what else to do if you have two days. It is based on actual reviews conducted by the presenter and will be illustrated with 'war stories' about what went right -- and the risks you might run by giving quick feedback.”
© All rights reserved Jarrett and/or his/her publisher
Moyes, Jackie, Buur, Jacob, Jarrett, Caroline, Ehn, Pelle, Howard, Steve and Brereton, Margot (2005): Book smarts meet street smarts: the best of both worlds. In: Proceedings of OZCHI05, the CHISIG Annual Conference on Human-Computer Interaction 2005. p. 1.
“This panel will discuss how academia can contribute to industry practice and how industry practitioners can contribute to academia. We will focus in particular on how theories and practices are formed and shaped in different settings. We will discuss when academic theories and practices help industry, when and why they are discarded, and how they are transformed in industry settings.”
© All rights reserved Moyes et al. and/or their publisher
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Knowledge wants to be free !
We have decided to give away world-class educational materials
because we believe that universal access to high quality education is key to the building
of peace, sustainable social and economic development, and intercultural dialogue.
To calculate just have much we have saved you, our wonderful readers, we compare our free encyclopedia to two
books we love:
$110: Human-Computer Interaction by Dix et al (a great textbook but without video interviews)
$116: Shneiderman's Designing the User Interface
(a great textbook but without video interviews).
As you are reading our encyclopedia on your iPad/tablet (and saving a few trees), we estimate that the price would be $90 if sold as an eBook.
With that number, we can calculate how much money we have saved our readers, based on calculating the number of readers.
How we calculate readership
Because of our online and tablet/iPad approach to publishing, we are able to precisely measure reading behaviour across hundreds of parameters in realtime: Anything from reading
speed, drop-off points in the text, reader demographics, and much more.
Based on our server logs and the Google Analytics API,
we calculate the number of readers as described in the calculation method below.
A reader is not the same as a simple pageview and a reader is not the same as a
website visitor (as described in our calculation method below).
We calculate readership for two types of readers:
- Readers that have read our whole encyclopedia, much the same way you read a printed book
- Readers that have reader an individual chapter
Calcalution method: How we define a reader
- First we use the Google Analytics API to get a report of the number of unique human visitors to a chapter/page. Google runs its business on ads and thus completely relies on the ability to distinguish between a human visitor and an automated request. If not, you could earn millions on automating clicks on Google Ads.
- We then compare that number to our Apache webserver logs, which report the much higher number of actual visits to a chapter/page (both human and automated). We calculate the difference in percent, which we call an "exaggeration factor", which we use in step 6 below.
- With a large part of the visitors excluded, we further exclude any visitor who:
- has not remained on the page for at least 3 minutes (this factor is calculated by recording visit durations of 1000 randomly selected visitors) or has not printed the page (i.e. has not visited the printerfriendly version of the chapter/page)
- has not scrolled the page (this factor is calculated by recording scroll movements on 1000 randomly selected visitors)
- We then further exclude "double readers", i.e. readers who read a portion of a chapter and then returns in,
say, a week or a month to read the rest.
Although this person's reading activity spans multiple server sessions, the person is only counted as a single reader.
We categorize a "double reader" as a visitor who:
- visits a page, or multiple pages, across multiple server sessions
- qualifies to be defined as a reader, cf step 1-3 above, in all server sessions
- uses the same originating IP address
- We then subtract 5% from the final number to counter-balance a last remaining factor, namely the situation where one reader reads a chapter on his/her tablet
using a WiFi connection (and counted as one reader) but then picks up his other tablet using a 3G dongle
(with another IP address) and re-reads some of the chapter. That will equal two readers, not one. We have no way
of calculating how many times this situation arises, but to be on the safe side we subtract 5%
from the final number.
- We then take half of the "exaggeration factor" from step 2 and substract from the final number. We do this for no rational reason. We do it only as a further measure to be certain that our number of readers is not inflated.
- To qualify as a reader who has read our whole encyclopedia - much the same way you read a printed book - that person must have qualified as a reader (cf. 1-6 above) of at least 80% of the encyclopedia chapters.
As a result, we have eliminated everything from automated requests to the more casual visitors. That leaves us with what we can safely call readers.
Changes to this page (author)
18 Nov 2010: Author was edited 02 Nov 2010: Author was edited 22 Feb 2010: Enabled abstracts to be shown on Caroline Jarrett's author page.
12 Jul 2009: Author was edited
12 Jul 2009: Author was edited
02 Feb 2009: Page was edited
10 Oct 2008: Book was added to the page (approved by an editor)
10 Oct 2008: Author was added to the bibliography (approved by an editor)
09 Oct 2008: Added a picture of Caroline Jarrett
24 Jul 2007: Author was edited
24 Jul 2007: Author was edited
27 Jun 2007: Author was added to the bibliography
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