• Marti Hearst’s new book Search User Interfaces is available for free on the web
• Design with Intent has a very interesting toolkit which boils down to several design patterns in poster format
• The same blog also has a post modeling different types of users: pinball, shortcut, and thoughtful users
• Tyner Blain has some tips for writing complete user stories when building personas
• UXMatters has a post on the Laddering Interview Technique which is claimed to assist in “eliciting goals and underlying values”
• Semantic Foundry talks about an interesting approach using Design Ethnography and Mood Maps
• User Focus has a list of 247 Web Usability Guidelines that can be downloaded to Excel
• New to me: Don Norman has a Ted Talk on 3 ways good design makes you happy

• 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

• Ron Hudson has an entertaining post about social proof including a great YouTube video
• Usability Counts posts a few questions to ask when interviewing a UX specialist
• Researchers questioned on the scope of UX – interesting results
• Aaron Louie has a good write-up on evolving design which touches on user personas
• Craig Tomlin publishes a list of useful books related to design and usability
• UI Patterns talks about low-budget usability, which involves grabbing people and talking to them
• Wonderful list of 50 Free Tutorials in Graphic Design Theory including UX & IA topics

• A discussion on persona skepticism over at IXDA
• Smashing Magazine has a list of 70 Ajax & Javascript techniques
• Jayson Online has a checklist of 10 web app usability guidelines

• A short Harvard Business Review article highlights the importance of ethnographic studies to inform strategy.
• Via Experientia, Christian Lindholm identifies three layers of UX in mobile phone design: Bling, Control, and Utility
• Andy Rutledge analyzes the CNN page design for something he labels “quiet structure”.
• Spoonfed Design identifies six measures of goodness in Apple’s site usability.
• Here’s an interesting collection of UX Quotes
• Very handy resource here: 20 User Experience Deliverables
• Gabriel Svennerberg identifies the rise of Zooming User Interfaces
• Sol Lederman of Federated Search Blog has a two part review of Library Hi Tech’s “One Box to Search Them All” pre-print article.
• Information Architecture for Libraries identifies the purpose of library websites: everything
• Quince is a UX pattern library explorer that’s a lot of fun to use.

• I’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 Experience,” “Usability Study of Digital Institutional Repositories,” and other articles.
• Good editorial article on how Libraries are Becoming Community Living Rooms

• Tito 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 publishes an effective looking model for implementing results-based interaction design with regard to library websites
• uservoice is a new twist on forums where the tech is leveraged as a meritocracy of user feedback
• The information aesthetics blog is doing so many things right
• The SEO blog Conversion Rate Experts outlines a list of 14 online tools to track why visitors abandon a website
• Found via the previous link, and new to me: Google website optimizer which allows you to do some A/B testing with page designs
  
• Lines, or queuing, occurs in every library. Don Norman has a list of recommendations called The Psychology of Waiting Lines [pdf]
  
• Results of a usability study on the iPhone with implications for design on that platform: How People Really Use their iPhone

• The 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 that in the sample of over 200 participants, in excess of one third of the group preferred a white background with black text. In addition to the preferences for the white background, black text, 18% of the total group preferred that combination with blue hyper-links. These findings show that a greater proportion of those surveyed preferred high contrasting page layout with blue hyperlinks. These preferences may reflect or symbolize conventionality in conservative web design, but it may also offer the designer or web content manager with more predictability of interface with website contents and greater usability.”

From what I can tell from the report, below is a representation  of their instrument. They make a point of the following: “Color preferences were derived from the participant’s subjective choices without being coerced or persuaded with color samples through an assortment of prearranged background colors with text color and link color compositions”. This makes me doubt their findings since I’m not sure a participant can get an accurate sense of their choices without seeing examples. I think the below would prejudice participants unless examples were given for all iterations (which would be a lot of work, but not impossible.)


• A Berkeley Professor shares impressions on the Kindle and the joys of rediscovering public domain works.
• The W3C releases the proposed Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0
• New to me: Elements of Typographic Style applied to the Web
• Firefox based prototyping tool Pencil Project

• New 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 a system. Mental models are the users cognitive understanding of how a system works e.g. ask somebody to tell you how the internet actually works, and they might come up with some interesting answers – or a TV set. I find that mental models are a theoretical framework rather than something you can use in actual design. Personas are mainly a tool to investigate and get design ideas from the personas point of view and from the personas needs.”

• The Eyetools corporate blog has a useful “What does it all mean? Understanding eye-tracking results” series of articles from earlier this year.
  
• Darlene Fichter has an interesting post on monitoring what users are saying about an organization through a LinkedIn service called Company Buzz.
• The marketing firm Exact Target has published a 2008 Channel Preference survey that includes personas for college students and teens.
  
• Two interesting heat map and visitor tracking services: Crazy Egg and ClickTale
• Very interesting write-up on Radial Pie Menues
• Useful site that gives you an idea what your library page looks like if you were color blind

• The 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 me: a great resource at Rosenfeld Media
• The WoW Librarian reports on Website Redesign: Perspectives from the Field session from Lita conference
• Andrew Chen talks about generating A/B candidates for testing (which is usually used in advertising, but it’s an interesting process)
• Forrester releases a report on getting the most from design personas (yours for a mere $279)
• WordPress releases a usability study conducted by Ball State. [Their 1st class report is available in both Slides and PDF]
• The E Ink display (currently powering the Kindle) is evolving
• The Ohio State University Library usability team talks about their ongoing work designing navigation terms for their upcoming redesign
• The OLA Quarterly has issued a call for papers; topics include the usability of online catalogs
• The Hamilton Public library releases a usability study conducted on their website