June 2008 Archives

The latest entry on David Wiley's blog "iterating toward openness" points to the accrediting bodies as a possible culprit behind the stifling of innovation within the university culture. I like the analogy he uses, likening a school that might buck the accrediting behemoths to Martin Luther breaking from the Catholic Church (sacrilege as that might be to my own Catholic upbringing). Though I've never considered the accrediting agencies as stiflers of innovation before, other culprits have come to mind - lawmakers, corporations providing research funding, helicopter parents, etc. Food for thought, read what David has to say if you get the chance:

http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/505

This was a training session offered by Matthew Winkel of The College of New Jersey - this kind of training normally costs about $600!! the training is called Certified Usability Analyst, by Human Factors International.

We looked at the iPhone website - $199 iPhones go on sale July 11th! My calendar is marked.

Question: How can we make Web sites easier and more intuitive to use? Capture the attention and meet the needs of our users? Reduce dependencies on help desk staff?

The presenter is dealing with similar issues of deployability of projects with months-long development times. A familiar theme. Nice to know that even the usability experts run into this! Here are some general tips for planning a usable site (and maybe avoiding the scrapping of lots of hard work):

1. Get to know your users - compile user profiles using different user characteristics and consider design implications for each. Look at usability.gov for ideas for "personas".
2. Interviews - important to come up with 2-3 questions for 3-4 users.
3. Card Sorts - a way to organize the different areas of your site visually
4. Paper prototyping - we did an example for a hypothetical video sharing site. How could you go wrong with video?
5. Fireworks - Can also use Fireworks for prototyping - very useful for drag 'n' drop of box elements on your page.