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

• Dawn Bastian Paschal is co-author of an interesting usability study on Colorado State’s digital collections in JAL 35 No. 3
• Design Mind has an article on how designers can influence behavior
• ColoRotate has a fascinating take on the color picker
• A compelling account of Kristina Halvorson’s talk regarding Content Strategy
• Karen McGrane talks Content Strategy: “It’s about action, not awareness”
• A Google Knol of Content Strategy
• Pew Internet has published a study on mobile adopters called The Mobile Difference with some interesting personas
• UserTesting.com offers inexpensive usability, but I’m not sure how relevant it would be for libraries
• Classic bookmark: Usability with 5 Users
• An eye-opening (ahem) comparison of results from Feng-Gui and a genuine eye tracking machine

• The IMLS Digital Collections and Content research group is designing a collections dashboard
• UsabilityPost has a list of 8 Characteristics of Successful User Interfaces
• UX Booth has a post on using color theory
• Simon Day shows the effects a small color change can have by analyzing heatmaps of the page
• Austin Govella describes six strategies for combining UX and agile computing
• Johanna Brewer talks about the relationship between ethnology and design
• The blog InfoMatters has a post on the poverty of the term “user centered“
• Frontier Strategy has an excellent white paper on the topic of the five principles of  “co-creation”
  

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:

Magic Wand edge detection

Human eye edge detection

That’s a good comparison to heatmap accuracy. At some point, expense of additional accuracy isn’t worth the added costs.