Ithaka has released an interesting study it has been working with since 2000 on academic libraries and faculty perceptions. What I like most from this is a useful model of academic library services that they’ve broken into three aspects: purchaser, archive, and gateway. They describe these as:
The purchaser role was described in the survey by [...]
Very good persona analysis [pdf] coming out of Macquarie University in Sydney Australia. The thing I like best, aside from the nice personas they’ve developed, is the way they’ve mapped them against experience/seriousness vs. frequency of use/need for the library:
This fits in nicely with several assumptions I’ve had regarding the audience we serve at our [...]
For the past year I’ve been working on a project using Archive.org to categorize a sub-set of academic library home pages according to their browse and search structures. Next week I’ll present this data at ALA during the Monday 6/26 poster session at 1pm. But for now, here’s a quick overview of some of [...]
It’s been one of those months where several ideas seem to congeal all at once. Last year I conducted usability interviews with students where I asked them if they were worried about the authority of the documents they were finding. 100% of that sample said they were not. That made little sense to me until [...]
I’m currently enjoying this book:
Mulder, S., & Yaar, Z. (2007). The user is always right: A practical guide to creating and using personas for the web. Berkeley, CA: New Riders.
Mostly because of the way the authors break down the persona creation process. This landscape of user research chart is a good example of their technique: [...]
I found a link to MindCanvas today by browsing the site for this week’s Information Architecture Summit in Vegas. Their business is built around a meme called Game-like Elicitation Methods (or GEM) and their manifesto makes the following claim:
The overuse of Likert scales must stop. We understand that Likert scales have their uses, but every [...]
Lisa Halabi has a very good article at usabilitynews.com on the common question of whether or not to implement usability guidelines (aka an expert usability review) in place of conducting usability testing. An expert review is tempting because a reasonable person would expect to be able to codify what is and what is not good [...]
There’s an interesting article out in Information Systems Journal about the difficulties encountered while trying to get a list of requirements from users. It’s not a problem that affects users only, but it also affects investigators and designers of user centered design:
Pitts, M. G., & Browne, G. J. (2007). Improving requirements elicitation: An empirical investigation [...]
I’m presenting at Internet Librarian today, speaking on an analysis of library home pages. Here’s a link to the ppt as well as to the list of libraries I used for the analysis (large file: 1.7MB).
Update: I’ve re-analyzed that data and provided the results here in a more recent post. [6/19/07]
Trendwatching.com has an interesting article up on what they call “Status Skills“, which they define as:
“In economies that increasingly depend on (and thus value) creative thinking and acting, well-known status symbols tied to owning and consuming goods and services will find worthy competition from ‘STATUS SKILLS’: those skills that consumers are mastering to make the [...]