Jenny Levine: Usability & Information Architecture

That's What I Want

"No single service has a catalog of music from all of the major record labels. Until there is DRM standardization and a sea change in industry attitudes, users will have to patronize more than one service to get an unabridged selection of artists. That means consumers are asked to pay for a service that might carry only half of their favorite artists, or to pay several monthly bills just to have access to the musicians they like. Not surprisingly, many users are unwilling." [at New Architect, via Tomalak's Realm]

This article is an excellent primer explaining why the online music services are failing, covering everything from Digital Rights Management (DRM) to usability issues.

"According to Pew, in the last year, of the users who were asked to pay for something that used to be free online, 50 percent found free online alternatives. Thirty six percent stopped getting the service online, and only 12 percent paid for it. Subscription service providers need more. They must offer a unique value proposition to keep their audiences from walking out."

What amazes me is how many people take advantage of free online services but then forget about libraries. Granted we're not loaning out digital music yet, but I don't think we do a good enough job of marketing our computers, our video & DVD collections, our audiobooks, our CDs, and everything else you can get for free at your local library. Not to mention the free expertise.

Of course, that's nothing new and we say that every year, but now we have to figure out that digital service and delivery part, otherwise known as "shifting." Similar to the concerns raised in this article, we need to work closely with our vendors to make sure our services based on their products don't have that usability barrier that so many of our online catalogs currently have.

Inside joke: if only the sombreros were animated, they'd be dancing! Actually, the Flamenco Project sounds interesting, so you should check it out even if you're not spitting Coke through your nose right now. It "investigates how to effectively incorporate large category hierarchies into information access user interfaces" using categorical metadata. [via Peter on SIGIA-L]

Information Design using Card Sorting "The difficulty in organising the content stems from a lack of knowledge about how real users make use of this information. Without this, any exercise in information design is a purely theoretical one. A card sorting session can go a long way towards resolving this problem." [at Intranet Journal, via ia/]

Filing away for future reference because I want to try this technique when we start re-designing the SLS Web site to turn it into a portal.

And speaking of usability, I want to change the way my posts look and read. I want to put a small icon next to each new post so that it's easier to distinguish between them. Then I want to do something besides italicize quoted material, because I think it makes it more difficult to read. I don't want to put it in a different color because I'll eventually be designing my own templates. Do you have any ideas? Maybe just indent and quote the material? Thoughts welcome.

I also want to add titles at the top of each post, even though Radio won't pick them up as honest-to-god titles. I'd like to make the background color on these different, again to better delineate them. Suggestion for Dave and the Radio crew: add an option in the WYSIWYG editor for background color of a span done in CSS. I could do it manually, but that would defeat the point of using the editor.

Information Specialists at the Intersection of IA and Usability [via ia/]
This is an interesting article in its own right, but I just had to share this section:

"In a speech last year, GraceAnne DeCandido described the lure of librarianship by saying:

For most of us, what brought us to librarianship was the power of the word, the power of stories. Whether we called it reading, or scholarship, or research or study, what brought us to libriarianship was the power inherent in bringing together people and ideas.

She went on to say:

If librarianship is the connecting of people to ideas, it doesn’t matter where the ideas reside. That means, if the ideas are on video, or on audiotape, or on CD- ROM, we adapted our collection policies to handle these materials. Format is no longer the controversial issue it once was. Or is it?"

Olympics Site Not Medal-Worthy "Interface design guru Jakob Nielsen says the official Salt Lake website has a chilling effect on users. Like many 'capitulating' sites in need of revenue, it places ad dollars ahead of sound design." [Wired News]

Just one of the many problems with the Olympics Web site.

Over on Evolt.org, Marlene Bruce gives some numbers to help you Design to Realistic Window Sizes. "It is my opinion that with the increasing number of surfers now surfing at 800x600 one can possibly design safely at 741x404. However, to really be on the safe side (15% at 640x480 can add up to a lot of visitors), design to 581x284." [via ia/]

This sounds great in theory, but I'm still having problems balancing 1) one-window designs that 2) contain meaningful navigation links that have a modicum of breadth and depth 3)with text that is legible. And I'm still working out how to best implement liquid designs. It will be hard to get what I want using Oracle Portal for SLS because I can't control table widths, but yet I can't put the whole thing in CSS for layout. As Mr. Dylan says, "stuck in the middle with you again."

Layout and Content of Popular Sites. "This study by Steve Kangas, CTO of NetConversions compares common attributes in 87 sites including use of JavaScript, fixed layout versus liquid, file size, number of images used, and more. For further comparison of attributes of popular sites, you might also be interested in WDVL's Ten Top Sites Compared, which looks at elements such as fonts used, page width, background color, link location, and more." [ia/ - news for information architects]

"The “average” home page has 80 links, 11 (about 1/8) of these are through images." Can you guess that almost all of these sites are big .coms? I'd like to see this type of study done for small- to medium-sized public library Web sites. It would be interesting to compare what works well and what doesn't for this type of site.

IA in LIS Schools. "Though defining IA as "the design of user experience for Web-based environments" (broad enough? ;) this article is a good example of traditional organizations trying to adapt to the changing market. Interesting ideas on mapping existing LIS classes to IA skills, and a list of links to some IA course offerings." [ia/ - news for information architects]

I wish I could have taken a class like this in library school. Has anyone taken a class like this?