Mashable, using services from EyeTrackShop, writes a great article on how users view social media profiles.

As an interface designer, it’s important to know where users look most frequently and in what order. Although this data is acquired from testing users on desktops, the findings do give direction for mobile interface design as well.

It’s interesting to see that most of the findings show an F-Pattern, similar to what was found by Jakob Neilson’s study.

Gmail has good date formatting practices. Here’s a suggestion to make them even better.

Currently within Gmail, on the day an email is sent or received, only the timestamp of the message is shown (ex. “11:36pm”). On the calendar year an email is sent or received, the short name of the month is shown followed by the day (ex. “Jan 12″). If an email is sent or received in another calendar year, then the ugly Middle Endian hypeniated format is shown of the full date (ex. “01/12/2011″).

As we’ve just started a new year, the ugly Middle Endian full date format is all over my inbox for messages from 2011. As shown in the picture above, this view is unpleasant and makes sorting through emails difficult. Gmail should instead show the short name of the month followed by the day (ex. Jan 12) for emails sent or received within the last 365 days rather than just the current calendar year. This would make the interface cleaner and more consistent early in the year.

A very well written article by Brett Victor on the Future of Interaction Design. I couldn’t agree with him more.