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Monthly Archives: January 2009

Library Usability Links: 1/29/09

29-Jan-09

Here is one blog’s take on the top 10 eye tracking blogs.
Print Create talks about a few usability design myths
Stupendous Amazing Library discusses the user tracking tool Userfly
Tutorialism has a video froom Google on enhancing user accessibility with AxsJAX
Interesting article on Open Source Text Analytics Software
Very interesting conversation on pattern languages over at Boxes & [...]

Learning Object: The Role of Social Proof in Academic Publishing

28-Jan-09

A recent article by Chung & Duckett over at In the Library with the Lead Pipe has inspired me to try and expand on some thoughts on the importance of social proof. I especially like their third category of learning objects:
CATEGORY 3. Provide students with MORE CONTEXT to understand a process or concept — the [...]

Library Usability Links 1/16/09

17-Jan-09

Smashing Magazine has a comprehensive article on Mobile Web Design with discussion, pointers, and screen shots of good design. This chart on screen sizes caught my eye:

Jared Spool has an interesting case study on a usability project that discovered the existence of a $300 million button.
Here’s another mouse tracker, which  makes use of javascript on [...]

Library Usability Links 1/8/09

09-Jan-09

Semantic Foundry has a good list of interview questions to ask a usability specialist. Pretty tough list.
New to me: Changes from 2005 – 2008 in Google search results reading among users.
Interesting testimonial of the Crazyegg eye tracking service.
Here’s another click tracking tool, similar to Crazyegg and ClickTale, called ClickHeat
A good product design comparison between the [...]

Accuracy of Eye-Tracking Algorithms

06-Jan-09

The Feng-GUI blog has a good analogy for imagining the accuracy of their attention tracking software. They compare it to the Photoshop “magic wand” tool’s ability to find an edge as opposed to a human eye’s ability, and provide these examples from a Berkely study:
That’s a good comparison to heatmap accuracy. At some point, expense [...]

Effects of Open Source on Preservation

05-Jan-09

David Rosenthal has a detailed and useful analysis of the value of open format specifications for preservation:
If we plot the quality achieved by a newly created renderer for a format against the cost of creating it we will get an S curve. A certain amount of money is needed to get to a barely functional [...]

Usability Over Time

01-Jan-09

Found this useful idea by Chris Rusbridge from a year-end review by Jill Hurst-Wahl:
It’s not just the language that makes digital preservation unconvincing to the decision maker. Part of the problem is that digital preservation describes a process, and not an outcome. … So I would argue that outcome-related phrases like “long term accessibility” or [...]