Bookmarks 12/15/2009
I’ve had personas and navigation on my mind lately…I’ve been particularly interested in libraries that use personas (and according to the literature, there aren’t a lot!)
Jesse James Garrett: Visual Vocabulary for Information Architecture
Navigation models for web sites – Web Designers London
Information Architecture models: Guide to web site navigation patterns – Web Designers London
Using Personas to Understand the Needs and Goals of Institutional Repository Users
UW Libraries | Personas Development
Audience personas for the Macquarie University Library website » Step Two Designs, Patrick Kennedy
Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose. – Charles Eames
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UX/IA Tools
I’ve been accumulating links to cool (often free) UX/IA tools over the past couple of days. Let me know if you have others that you really like!
Creately – Online collaborative diagramming tool. Offers templates for UML diagrams, wireframes, and more. Free for 1 project. Small monthly cost for larger projects
EightShapes Unify – Suite of IA deliverables templates
Mockingbird – Free online wireframing tool
IxEdit – Tool to build Jquery interactions without coding
Protoscript – New scripting language for building interactive prototypes for the web
Naview – Navigation prototyping tool
FluidIA – Agile IA collaborative prototyping
iPlotz – Online wireframing tool that is free for 1 project. Small monthly charge for unlimited projects
A journalist and an information architect face exactly the same problem – how to give shape to the pile of information in front of you in a way that will make it easy and natural for people to comprehend. – Jesse James Garrett
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Bookmarks 11/23/09
UX Treasure Map
User Experience Deliverables
Search Patterns
Ubiquity – The New Computing
The Book Cover Archive
[Users] make their credibility-based decisions about the people or organization behind the site based upon the site’s overall visual appeal. Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, 2002
The old computing is about what computers can do; the new computing is about what people can do. Ben Shneiderman, 2003
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Text Analysis
I am currently working on a project with a colleague to look at the frequency of user-generated subject terms in electronic theses and dissertations at the university. We’re just at the beginning stages, but it looks to be a fascinating project/paper. We’re seeking to answer a number of questions about the terms themselves, such as: how often are subject terms assigned by users on self-submission? how do those terms relate to the abstract of the thesis or dissertation? Since I’ve always had a limited understanding the inner workings of text analysis software, I’ve been doing my homework. Many of my bookmarks for today deal with text analysis, word clouds, and visualizing data. If anyone has experience in this area or knows about cool (and simple to use for this novice) text visualization tools, I’d be eager to hear from you.
Using Text Analysis Tools for Comparison: Mole & Chocolate Cake « Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
HyperPo :: Digital Text Reading Environment
Tag Cloud . Lots of Code . php, css and javascript
Wordle – etd_subject_terms (our subject terms for etds)
digitalresearchtools / Perform Qualitative Data Analysis
Heard this quote from a friend today – so appropriate!
If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?
Albert Einstein
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Agile and Bookmarks
As you can tell from my bookmarks today, I’ve been thinking a lot about Agile development. Being at a university, we don’t necessarily embrace a formal methodology. I do try, however, to incorporate some type of hybrid waterfall/agile methodology into our Web redesigns – my intentions are to make the project agile and to involve users from the beginning, however politics and time seem to always get in the way of this goal. If anyone has specific examples of how to run agile Web redesign projects, I’d be interested in hearing them.
Agile Product Design, holistic product design and agile software development
Manifesto for Agile Software Development
Top Ten Mistakes of Web Management (Alertbox June 1997)
Social Annotations in Digital Library Collections
Beneath the Metadata: Some Philosophical Problems with Folksonomy
We are uncovering better ways of developing
software by doing it and helping others do it.
Through this work we have come to value:Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a planThe Agile Manifesto
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Bookmarks 11/16/2009
Author-generated Dublin Core Metadata for Web Resources: A Baseline Study in an Organization
I tube, you tube, everybody tubes
CSHE – Digital Resource Study
Toward an Effective Understanding of Website Users: Advantages and Pitfalls of Linking Transaction Log Analyses and Online Surveys
Rosenfeld Media – Prototyping Book Site
7 Visualization Groups On Flickr to Find Inspiration | FlowingData
Calvin Mooers reminds us that design of a useful information system requires deep understanding of users and their social context. We cannot assume people will want our information, even if we know they need our information. Behind most failed web sites, intranets, and interactive products lie misguided models of users and their information-seeking behaviors. Users are complex. Users are social. And so is information.
Peter Morville, Ambient Findability (Sebastopol, California: O’Reilly Media, Inc., 2005), pg. 45
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Happy World Usability Day!
Today is World Usability Day, so my bookmarks for today are usability related. Have a great day and go forth and design usable products and make the world more user-friendly!
Interaction Design.org
Great Designs Should Be Experienced and Not Seen
Take the Challenge Now! | World Usability Day
Optimizing the User Experience (pdf)
Don’t make me think.
Steve Krug
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Bookmarks 11/9/2009
Five Techniques for Getting Buy-In for Usability Testing
Mark Baskinger on Drawing Ideas and Communicating Interaction on Vimeo
adaptive path » task-based audience segmentation
Trigger words are content-related and navigational–words that help lead you along the path to what you seek. Care words are task-related not content-related; they are the words that visitors need to see to complete the task they are on your site for. These words are not always found in your search logs or in keywords that have led people from Google to your site. But, through polling, testing and observation, care words can be discovered.” Jarod Spool summarizing Gerry McGovern’s talk on Managing Sites for Top Tasks.
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Bookmarks 11/6/2009
Following in the footsteps of Nicole Engard, social networking guru, I am going to start posting my bookmarks for the day, along with a favorite quote. I hope these are of interest!
People Search Once, Maybe Twice
Users Don’t Learn To Search Better
Why Amazon Succeeds — And Why It Won’t Help You
Digital Collections Blog » Website Redesign
Library Services | Rowan University
The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2009 [pdf]
Dan Rubin: “When you design something right, no one will pat you on the back, because now it works like it’s supposed to.”
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apache mod rewrite
I have dabbled in the past with Apache rewrite rules but never in a really extensive manner. For the past day, I’ve been trying to get our Dspace application (which is currently now running under https://) to run under http:// with only the login under https://. Easy, huh? Well, thanks to the Dspace list, I did get some good syntax for mod rewrite rules.
ssl.conf
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/(ldap-login|image|.*css|.*js)
RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [L,R]
httpd.conf
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/ldap-login.*
RewriteRule ^/(.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R,L]
What does this do? It looks for any url on the site that doesn’t match /ldap-login and forwards those requests to http://. If the request matches /ldap-login, then Apache forwards to https://. All of this was pretty easy to get up and running. I started testing however, and in IE I was receiving a warning that part of the page was not secure. Hmmm. After scratching my head for a bit, I opened up Firebug and discovered the images, css and js were being rerouted back to http://. After reacquainting myself with regex (yes, I don’t do this stuff on a daily basis), I came up with this condition: RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/(ldap-login|image|.*css|.*js) which remedies the non secure/secure error. Pretty cool, huh?
I’m now feeling more confident that this is going to work in production (it’s in test now) despite the fact that I continually scratch my head as I look at the mod_jk connector code that’s also in my Apache config on the Dspace server…How in the world did I get this up and running last year!
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