Fidelity gets 75% of it’s customer interactions from Fidelity.com. Wow!
An article in Business 2.0 talking about Tom Tullis and the usability facilities at Fidelity. Tom Tullis did some seminal work on predicting the usability of alphanumeric screens back in the early 1980s. His work looked at 4 characteristics of visual information including:
1. Overall density – the number of characters displayed
2. Local density – the number of characters near each character
3. Grouping – the extent to which characters on the display form well defined perceptual groups
4. Layout complexity – the extent to which the arrangement of items on the display follows a predictable visual scheme
His work was fundamental in providing a tool to quantify the information and layout of screen elements. His research subjective opinion of screen layout could be quantified and measured using informaiton theory. Many of the guidelines and principles about whitespace, chunking, and alignment are based directly in the research conducted by Dr. Tullis.