Nielsen Doesn’t Get 2.0

At least, as far as i can tell. His latest Alertbox article is a good example. The article discusses why one should “write articles, not blog postings.” His summary states: “To demonstrate world-class expertise, avoid quickly written, shallow postings. Instead, invest your time in thorough, value-added content that attracts paying customers.”
Then he goes into his [...]

ALA2007: Ambient Findability: Librarians, Libraries, and the Internet of Things

Peter Morville - very fun to hear! Good stuff, too.
Lead-off quote: Information that’s hard to find will remain information that’s hardly found.
organize websites so people can find what they’re looking for - that’s how he explains his job to his mom
provide multiple paths to the same information
What does usable mean? His honeycomb… :
useful, desirable, [...]

Library Catalog Usability and a Test of CamStudio

I am playing with CamStudio, and needed to create a short screencast, so…
At the same time, I was looking at Sirsi/Dynix Horizon sites, and found something slightly amusing (to me, anyway) and thought I’d share.
Click the image to the right to watch the video (here’s the .mov version too, if the m4v version doesn’t work [...]

Find the Title of this Page

What’s the title of this page? Here are your options, by just taking a quick glance at the page:

Teens News (title tag, small type under large "start pages" text in orange box)
Start Pages (highlighted text in both orange areas, highlighted text in blue menu)
Teens’ News (highlighted text in left-hand menu and in larger orange box [...]

Steve Krug’s New Book

From the Boxes and Arrows blog:
They did an interview with Steve Krug, who wrote a most eye-opening book on web usability, Don’t Make Me Think…
“But in the meantime I’ve had a change of heart, and decided to do an updated edition of Don’t Make Me Think first, then write the how-to testing book. The second [...]

Help in Question Writing for Usability Tests

I just read this - DonnaM’s Writing memorable scenarios for usability testing. Good stuff!
To sum it up… when you do a usability test, you usually ask a bunch of scenario-type questions. Your test participant then tries to answer the question by finding an answer on your website. Easy enough, right?
The hard part is writing those [...]

Jakob Neilsen isn’t a web designer

From someone’s comments on a previous post -
From Anonymous:
I have found Nielsen to be the most overrated web site design “guru” out there. I read his book “Designing Web Usability” and found it to be pretty far from what I would consider good advice for a web designer, at least in the library world. Maybe [...]

The biggest web design mistakes in 2004

This is a great post: Web Pages That Suck presents the biggest web design mistakes in 2004. It’s funny, but it also mentions some good stuff in the process. here’s the list:
1. Believing people care about you and your web site: A website is about customer’s needs… not staff’s needs.
2. A man from Mars can’t [...]

Usability of Websites for Teenagers from Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox

Update: here’s an article from CNN about the new study…
This is a must read: Usability of Websites for Teenagers (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox).
From the article: “Many people think teens are technowizards who surf the Web with abandon. It’s also commonly assumed that the best way to appeal to teens is to load up on heavy, glitzy, [...]

Usability testing with 5 users challenged

Laura Faulkner wrote an interesting article “Beyond the five-user assumption: Benefits of increased sample sizes in usability testing.” I just heard about it at the UIDesigner blog, but the article has been around for awhile (published in Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers in August 2003).
In the article, Faulkner argues that “the risk of relying [...]

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