| |
 |
Friday, February 15, 2002 |
Design Criteria for Children's Web Portals: The Users Speak Out
Andrew Large; Jamshid Beheshti; Tarjin Rahman. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology V53, 2, JAN 15, 2002, p79-94.
"Four focus groups were held with young Web users (10 to 13 years of age) to explore design criteria for Web portals. The focus group participants commented upon four existing portals designed with young users in mind: Ask Jeeves for Kids, KidsClick, Lycos Zone, and Yahooligans! This article reports their first impressions on using these portals, their likes and dislikes, and their suggestions for improvements". [ia/]
Unfortunately, this article isn't available online, but it's a perfect example of why interlibrary loan was invented. Oh, Ka-a-a-te....
8:18:52 PM 
|
|
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]
8:55:36 AM
|
|
Book Review: Hot Text: Web Writing That Works
"Every place you use text on the Web is thoroughly explored. From headlines to links to menu design you'll learn how to make your text stand out from the crowd. In addition to conventional writing wisdom like using the active voice and one idea per paragraph the authors urge readers to adopt an object-based approach to writing for the Web." [WebReference News]
Andy King gives it a thumbs up and it sounds interesting, so I'll be ordering this one today.
8:10:29 AM
|
|
|
Thursday, February 14, 2002 |
Joel speaks the truth in an essay about The Iceberg Secret, Revealed. Although the first half isn't as applicable to libraries, the second half is music to my ears, and I'm going to pass it around at SLS. Choice quotes:
"If you show a nonprogrammer a screen which has a user interface that is 90% worse, they will think that the program is 90% worse."
"If you show a nonprogrammer a screen which has a user interface which is 100% beautiful, they will think the program is almost done.... And then when you spend the next year working 'under the covers,' so to speak, nobody will really see what you're doing and they'll think it's nothing." This is a big problem for me in the type of work I do at the System level.
"Don't, for a minute, think that you can get away with asking anybody to imagine how cool this would be. Don't think that they're looking at the functionality. They're not. They want to see pretty pixels." I'm still trying to learn this one, because I always think I can convince based on the potential outcome.
8:12:55 PM
|
|
Comments by: YACCS
© Copyright 2002 Jenny Levine.
|
|
|
|
|
