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.
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.
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
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.
