photo: taipei fountain
The Usability Professionals’ Association says “a cell phone should be as easy to access as a doorknob.” And since 2005 they’ve been organizing World Usability Day to help make that happen. Locally the UPA Boston chapter is holding events at the Boston Museum of Science (in Cambridge, actually) that explore the clues we use to [...]
This an old one, but it just caught my atention. In A List Apart tells us Usability experts are from Mars, graphic designers are from Venus. Is this still true? Haven’t the last several years been about the triumph of good design in both the usability and graphic senses? Or are rounded corners not actually [...]
Free from Nielsen Norman Group: Beyond ALT Text, Making the Web Easy to Use for Users With Disabilities, a report on web design for users with disabilities. “Seventy-five best practices for design of websites and intranets, based on usability studies with people who use assistive technology” According to the blog post, usability is three times [...]
A bibliographic instruction quiz we used to use asked students how many of Dan Brown’s books could be found in our catalog. The idea was that attentive students would dutifully search by author for “brown, dan,” get redirected to “Brown, Dan 1964-,” and find three books. Indeed, the expected answer was “three.”
As it turns out, [...]
“Bagged products” is little better than “cookery.” I’m gonna bet that no customer has ever asked the sales people for “bagged products,” that nobody’s ever checked the yellow pages for “bagged products,” and without context, nobody would come close to answering a question on what the heck “bagged products” are all about.
But we do have [...]
I was especially young and impressionable when I discovered Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things, but I still claim it’s required reading for anybody who’s read more than one post here at MaisonBisson. That’s self selection at work, but let me put it this way: unless you’re the only consumer of the things you [...]
Following Edward Tufte’s advice, I’ve been wanting to offer a presentation without slides for a long time now; I finally got my chance in Portland. The downside is that now I don’t have anything to offer as a takeaway memory aid for my talk. My speaking notes are too abstract to offer for public consumption, [...]
Brian’s comment at RemainingRelevant should resonate with many of us:
Something to consider about why libraries end up with bad interfaces (at least as far as catalogs go) is that it might be that the people who use the interface (and help the public use it) are not the people who decide which interface to use.
When [...]
I was this close to posting soldierant’s Gobbledy Gook map, but, well… I guess I wanted to make a point with his user experience map, done in collaboration with the smart folks at Experience Dynamics.
Take a careful look at the role of your competitors and a user’s expectations and goals. Yeah, we’ve all got some [...]
Ryan Eby speaks with tongue firmly in cheek in this blog post, but his point is well taken. Privacy is serious to us, but we nonetheless make decisions that trade bits of our patrons’ privacy as an operational cost. While we argue about the appropriate time keep backups of our circulation records, we largely accept [...]
