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 [...]
Category Archives: Usability
Library Usability Links 1/8/09
09-Jan-09Accuracy of Eye-Tracking Algorithms
06-Jan-09The 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, [...]
Usability Over Time
01-Jan-09Found 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” [...]
Library Usability Links 12/20/08
20-Dec-08An article published in Code4Lib Journal called “User-Centered Design and Agile Development: Rebuilding the Swedish National Union Catalog“. “Finally, we would like to conclude that working with user-centred design in combination with iterative development is a better, faster and cheaper way of software development, compared to traditional models. Better – the product being released at [...]
Library Usability Links 12/11/08
12-Dec-08I’m a fan of user personas, but building personas for applications is an interesting idea. SocialStartup.com identifies five fundamental social patterns: Public Timeline Asymetrical Follow News Feed Re-blogging Social Proof Via the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog: The Electronic Library 26, no. 6 (2008): Includes “A Metadata Manager’s Role in Collaborative Projects: The Rutgers University Libraries [...]
Library Usability Links 12/3/08
03-Dec-08James Robertson writes about Practical Ways to Assess CMS Usability including the following: 1. Vendor demo 2. Involve end-users 3. End-user training 4. Demo sites 5. Reference sites 6. Proof of concept 7. Usability testing Gizmoto review of Sony’s PRS-700 ebook reader: Unfortunately, the “improvements” have taken away the very essence of the Reader—the easy-on-the-eyes [...]
Library Usability Links 11/20/08
20-Nov-08Tito Sierra, Jason Casden, and Kim Duckett at NCSU have a DLF presentation via slideshare that effectively collapses the work subject librarians have to do to push a large number of course pages out to the library site. An innovative method for monitoring twitter to both build personas and track the library’s brand Meredith Weiss [...]
Library Usability Links 11/16/08
16-Nov-08The University of Minnesota Walter Library hosts World Usability Day talks in conjunction with Campus IT. New to me: Interactions which is available from the ACM Digital Library A description of user personas, this one with a useful persona template [doc] EDSF report on Color Preference in Web Design [pdf] “Results from this research found [...]
Library Usability Links 11/7/08
07-Nov-08New to me: 10 Steps to User Persona Personas expert Lene Nielson has a question and answer session on personas with the Journal of HC Vistas earlier this year. She is also the author of the above 10 Steps to User Personas. “You have to distinguish between the process of creating a system and testing [...]
Library Usability Links 10/31/08
31-Oct-08The Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) has a call out for papers for next June’s conference. Suggested topics include user studies. The webmaster library claims that flash websites kill business. Business sites, sure, but what about education sites? NASA is looking for a digital librarian to conduct usability testing, among other things. New to [...]