March 2nd, 2010 |
Published in
Ecommerce, Information Architecture, Usability
Beautiful article from @lukewdesign on The Apple Store’s Checkout Form Redesign: http://bit.ly/57S2sL (RT @marlaerwin: RT @jmspool)
November 12th, 2009 |
Published in
Usability
Web Manager University recently commissioned these new Howcast videos on Usability and Plain Language.
November 9th, 2009 |
Published in
Usability
Worldwide Activities Planned
Resources
October 24th, 2009 |
Published in
Usability
Check out Usability.gov for great content related to usability.
For example:
May 29th, 2009 |
Published in
Design, Information Architecture, Usability
As usual, Peter Morville delivers great content in his January 27, 2009 post about User Experience Deliverables.
Included is this Treasure Map of deliverables, to remind of us the great variety of tools we can use to develop durable information architectures:
May 8th, 2009 |
Published in
Design, Information Architecture, Usability
Jana Tate and I completed our review of the iSchool website.
Our report and presentation are included below.
This was our first usability study using tools and techniques learned from Dr. Randolph Bias in his Spring 2009 Introduction to Usability class. We learned several lessons along the way about study design, survey design, testing tools, presentation techniques and more.
The study is by no means perfect or complete, and we hope that we have the opportunity to further refine the review of the site as we continue in our degree and certificate programs.
Executive Overview: Usability Review of the iSchool website (pdf format)
Usability Test Results - the iSchool website (pdf format)
April 27th, 2009 |
Published in
Design, Information Architecture, Usability
Primary Readings
- Morville, Peter – Ambient Findability Chapter 1
- What a delightful read. Clear, informative, insightful.
- I particularly enjoyed the success story about the National Cancer Institute site and the importance of optimizing sub pages for search engines. People don’t navigate the way you might like them to — best to ask the questions: What do people need? How are people getting to that information on my site? And how can I support findability given actual search strategies? Brilliant to re-work both the IA of the site and to tackle search optimization.
- Morville’s attention to credibility and authority is a key point. With massive information overload – how important is it to project authority on a site? How do people determine authority? He notes that the 97% literacy rate in the US is not enough to navigate today’s information-rich world. Information literacy is a related and core competency.
- The stats on the long tail were compelling: size of a then average Barnes & Noble store (130k titles) dwarfed by the sales on Amazon of titles not in their top 130k list.
- Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility
- Make it easy to verify the accuracy of the information on your site.
- Show that there’s a real organization behind your site.
- Highlight the expertise in your organization and in the content and services you provide.
- Show that honest and trustworthy people stand behind your site
- Make it easy to contact you.
- Design your site so it looks professional
- Make your site easy to use — and useful.
- Update your site’s content often
- Use restraint with any promotional content
- Avoid errors of all types, no matter how small they seem.
- Fogg, B.J., Marshall, J., Othman, L., et. al. (2001) What Makes A Web Site Credible? A Report on a Large Quantitative Study. Proceedings of ACM CHI 2001 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, v. 1, 61-68. New York: ACM Press.
- Convey the real world aspect of the organization
- Make websites easy to use
- Include markers of expertise
- Include markers of trustworthiness
- Tailor the user experience
- Avoid overly commercial elements
- Avoid amateurism
- McCray, A. and Gallagher, M. Principles for Digital Library Development. Communications of the ACM. Vol. 44, No. 5. 2001. pp 49-56.
- Expect change: plan/design for it
- Know your content: spend time on planning the metadata; remember to plan for document types and the units they will be stored as on the site: implications for metadata and retrieval
- Involve the right people: multiple perspectives & executive support yield more effective results
- Design usable systems:follow established accessibility & usability standards
- Ensure open access: a public policy issue; avoid proprietary systems
- Be(a)ware of data rights: be aware of and plan for intellectual property protection
- Automate whenever possible: be efficient
- Adopt and adhere to standards: for scalability, interoperability, portability
- Ensure quality: define and implement QA methods
- Be concerned about persistence: plan for preservation of the record
- Balasubramanian , V., & Bashian, A. (1998). Document Management and Web Technologies: Alice Marries the Mad Hatter. Communications of the ACM, 41(7), 107-115.
- The move to make content providers the content publishers is fraught with difficulty, as was pointed out a number of ways in this article.. The learning curve for the publishing tools, accessibility and coding standards, writing style standards is steeper than most realize. There is no shortcut to quality. Content management can only get you so far. Technical expertise in web development, writing, editing, design is still necessary.
Secondary Readings