Posted in Usability on Sep 15th, 2005 3 Comments »
Today I had an interesting conversation on the bus to work. For a while I’ve seeing the same UH faculty member on my morning bus ride. We’ve exchanged pleasantries but I hadn’t really talked to him for very long. This morning I had a chance to talk to him at length on the ride in. [...]
Posted in OpenURL, Usability on Jun 16th, 2005 1 Comment »
Today was an interesting day dealing with an issue we have been having with the Gale Group OneFile database. Apparently, OpenURL linking via SFX will only work properly if you are using Internet Explorer for a web browser. It took me two days to discover that this was the issue because (silly me) I assumed [...]
Posted in Library Systems, Usability on Jan 28th, 2005 No Comments »
The Evergreen project blog has an interesting list of
functionalities that web being included in the OPAC portion of that
open source library system.
There are some specific OPAC functionalities that I’d like to point
out. Note that we designed this OPAC using the focus group notes as
guidelines, and the vast majority of this functionality comes directly
from those notes:
Ability [...]
Posted in CSS, Usability on Jul 24th, 2004 No Comments »
Print Stylesheets and User Expectations
There is a great post over at Man in Blue about how the behavior created by print stylesheets confound users. The basic idea is that user expect when they print to get the what they are seeing on the screen and when they don't they are puzzled. So there are suggestions [...]
Posted in Usability on Jun 22nd, 2004 No Comments »
Cross Browser Testing
In the course of conducting accessibility testing on our library's WebOPAC, I used a variety of web browsers. Some of these included Firefox, Opera, Mozilla, Netscape, Internet Explorer, and Lynx. Perhaps the most difficult one of these to find a copy of (on the PC platform) was Lynx. In the past I was [...]
Posted in Usability on Jun 11th, 2004 No Comments »
Web Accessibility
Well, I've been working my butt off to finish my presentation on web accessibility and OPACs for NAAUG (North American Aleph User's Group). I had my testing and preliminary stuff done a while ago but hadn't put everything together. As a result, I had forgotten what really good resources are available on the web [...]
Posted in Library Systems, Usability on May 30th, 2004 No Comments »
DOCTYPE Dilemmas
Haven't got a clue what a DOCTYPE is or not sure is yours is right? Then you need to check out, Fix Your Site With the Right DOCTYPE! by Jeffrey Zeldman. This article discusses what a DOCTYPE is and why if your (X)HTML page has an incorrect or missing DOCTYPE your pages might not [...]
Posted in RSS, Usability on May 22nd, 2004 No Comments »
Sometime last week I discovered this interesting post over at mezzoblue from November of 2003, entitled “Plugging the RSS Usability Hole“. This post discusses just how useful the little orange XML button is to our users and if we need to think about what our users do when they see it. Particularly the non-techie users. [...]
Posted in Usability on May 7th, 2004 No Comments »
Morae: Usability testing recording suite. -Record the screen -Video the participant -Audio of the participant Add “mark” to return to key places [Furl - The Darlene Fichter Archive]
Its interesting that Darlene Fichter should put a link to Morae in her Furl archive this week. Right now we are in the midst of conducting a very [...]
Posted in General Thoughts, Usability on Apr 28th, 2004 No Comments »
This week's lecture for my E-commerce class is on web server log files, which made me decide that wanted to post a little about web server log analysis. All web servers have log files and they are a terrific starting point for figuring out what users are doing on your site. However, in order to successfully make use of [...]
