Michael Magoolaghan writes about working with library design as an information architect. He includes a very interesting chart that maps out patron behavior: Six Revisions has an excellent post of links to 20 sites for mastering web design Wayne College Library addresses quiet study in their library weblog Edward Lee from Ohio State has an [...]
Tag Archives: Users
Library Usability Links 10/16/08
16-Oct-08A user rants against librarians commenting on her books Lots of interesting data points in this CDWG survey of students and faculty: 39% of students want to be able to chat online with their professors while 23% of campuses offer it. 63% of students use technology every day to prepare for class. A Colorado State [...]
Library Usability Links 10/10/08
10-Oct-08iPhone users frustrated with mobile news website design The UKSG completed a 3-year study finding that link resolvers are driving article use among academic library patrons [doc] Southwester College student newspaper reports that single students hogging study rooms is impolite Michael Lascarides, the new usability analyst at NYPL, writes about the work of Willliam “Holly” [...]
Library Usability links: 10/2/08
02-Oct-08Activity in the library increases at Wake Forest U. after Starbucks is added. Increased social opportunities cited. The Bibliocommons team describe some of the findings they’ve run across by talking to users. Lots of very interesting points are made. New to me: Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI) which is released under a BSD license and [...]
Library Usability Roundup 9/26/08
26-Sep-08Here’s a quick roundup of what’s happening with usability and libraries: University of Minnesota Library holds a Usability Lab Open House Springer releases a new study on eBook behavior at Universities which was conducted in conjunction with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,United States; University of Florida, United States; University Library of Turku, Finland; Centre [...]
Persona Analysis of IR Users
15-Sep-08There’s a very good persona analysis in the latest edition of D-Lib called “Using Personas to Understand the Needs and Goals of Institutional Repository Users” out of the U. Colorado Boulder. A couple things caught my eye. Firstly, the persona study came across findings they didn’t expect, which is a classic result for user-centered research: [...]
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 [...]
Clay Shirky Web 2.0 speech – updated
28-Apr-08A quick bookmark post on Clay Shirky’s Web 2.0 speech from last week. It’s a great read in its entirety. Here are my favorite sections: So I tell [a television producer] all this stuff, and I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. [...]
Authority lies in Social Proof
12-Jun-07It’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 [...]
On Google and Privacy and Library Search
10-Jun-07A quick comment on the latest privacy analysis conducted by Privacy International. Their methodology is a very interesting read because it appears to be directly counter to what Google is doing with search and data aggregation. Two points in particular: Data collection and processing What type of information does the site collect, with and without [...]