A Digital Outrigger

Eye Tracking:

• Oneupweb has an intriguing eyetracking presentation up that discovers “areas of interest” in a few social web sites
• Think Eyetracking has an interesting write up of ca. 1967 “gaze plots”
• Virtual Hosting offers 23 lessons from eye tracking studies which could marked “citations needed”

Library Usability:

• Usability Post has an article on improving your observation skills and breaks the discipline into these non-verbal elements:
  • Physical Characteristics
  • Personal Style
  • Body Language
  • Facial Expression
  • Vocal Rate and Tone
  • Eye Movement
• A copy of the UM Mansfield Library usability study poster presented at ALA 2009
• Holger Maassen gives an overview of Card Sorting practice

User Behavior:

• Search Engine Land discusses how search engine results can cause a shift in search behavior (interesting because she’s citing an LIS article to make her point)
• Leslie McNeil Weber publishes Design Ethnography: Strategy for Visual Communications

Design:

• Judith Siess talks about designing web pages for “mature” users
• Linda Coss has a few tips for improving readability
• UI Patterns wonders if links should always be blue
• Information Architects says that web design is 95% typography

Content Strategy:

• UX Matters has a practical guide to conducting a content analysis which should result in a clear description of what’s available, gaps & opportunities, prioritization, and themes.
• (new to me) Fred Leise published a set of 11 heuristics for content analysis

Intranets:

• Jakob Nielsen advocates both avoiding intranet design based on org charts and allowing role-based personalization

Library 2.0

• Christian Crumlish writes about the Information Architecture of Social Experience Design