Business Insider has an interesting argument indicating that Craiglist is being slowly, but surely, disrupted.

Generally speaking, Craigslist has been “good enough” to not be disrupted head-on. Nevertheless, the world moves on, and the gaps in their product (due to a stubborn obstinate refusal to invest in technology) grow wider and wider. As tablets, smartphones, etc disrupt, and craigslist doesn’t invest in those platforms, the feature gap grows wider.

The disruption that has happened has occurred on a category-by-category bases, as this graphic by Andrew Parker (http://thegongshow.tumblr.com/po…) shows:

That graphical analysis of sources for disruption is really interesting. What would the same type of analysis look like for academic libraries? Here’s a lightning quick example using the library I work at as an guinea pig. This image is not meant to be comprehensive, just a proof of concept. This doesn’t prove that libraries are imminently doomed to be disrupted, only that many services external to the academy would like a slice of the action. Let me know in the comments what I’m missing.

Active Sources of Library Disruption:

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

• Lesson from American Airlines: “good design is necessarily the product of a heavily centralized structure”
• Bookmark: Interesting blog called Wireframes
• Lateral Action lines out the 9 ways users respond
• Smashing Magazine has some Useful Glossaries for Web Design
• Very funny: Dilbert on User Experience
• Smashing Magazine has an article on Modal Windows in Web Design
• New to me: 23 Actionable Items from Eye Tracking Studies
• Online Card Sorting with OptimalSort
• Frank Long makes that case that photos work better than illustrations when building personas
• Laurie the Librarian argues that instruction librarians should be managing the website

• 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

Christian Rohrer has a good article up earlier this month on the three dimensions of user studies:

• Attitudinal vs. Behavioral
• Qualitative vs. Quantitative
• Context of Website or Product Use

He’s also mapped them out in this chart:

There are some very interesting lessons for libraries in this slideshare on user experience design: