What does an information experience design toolkit look like? Posts in this category describe, analyze, critique, and/or discuss emerging or established tools, techniques, methods, and approaches that inform or facilitate the design of great experiences.
Usability and the US Government go hand in hand. ADA laws require the government to make all of their outputs accessible, so usability is something that goes right along with that. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs are the ones that manage the content of …
The US Government & Usability: tools for everyone! Read More »
What is “5-Second Test”? “5 Second Test” is a usability testing tool that tells you whether the webpage effectively engage users. As the name suggests, you display a webpage to users for 5 second, then remove it, and ask them questions based on purpose of the page. It is a convenient and cost-efficient tool …
Remote user testing has a reputation for being a quick and dirty evaluation method, but like other methods it has strengths, weaknesses, and best use cases. Remote user testing can be divided into two types: moderated and unmoderated. In unmoderated remote user testing, the evaluator and user are not in the same place, and the …
Data-driven design sounds pretty self-explanatory on the surface: collecting data about activities of users on a website and making key design decisions based on the insights garnered from these numbers. Using this data from web analytics to make design decisions can be a cheaper, automated, and potentially quicker way to know what users want. Or …
When it comes to online experiences, the technology for creating information experiences is often more advanced than the technology designed to document and capture them. But art collective (kind of?) Rhizome has a new tool for capturing online experiences—particularly social media interactions. The goal here is to create a contextual archive that is more like the …
How could the methods, values, and attitudes of UX and usability research be applied in thinking about library public services—experiences which may or may not involve interacting with a digital interface? Many point out that librarians already test user experience. Assessment of library use, and even experience in particular, is an established feature of reference …
UX and Usability for Reference & Public Services Read More »
Kanban refers a display board for embodying and controlling repetitive workflow. It was invented in the 1950s in Toyota by Taichi Ohno to support the methodology of delivering the product to customers just in time (JIT), neither sooner nor later. Due to its many benefits, including the flexible plant system as well as the notion …
Repo? Forking? Pushing? Pull request? Merged? We’ve all heard about Github, but unless you are a programmer, you probably don’t understand exactly what it is nor how it works. In simple terms, Github is a code sharing and publishing service that allows versioning, collaboration, access control, task management, wikis, bug reporting, and feature requests. The …
After several weeks of presentations and learning about usability this semester, I decided I wanted to know more about eye tracking. Obviously, the name indicates what eye tracking is, studying questions like: Where does the eye go first? What does it look at the longest? What does it ignore? etc. But I wanted to learn …
Framer is a Javascript-based prototyping tool that is becoming one of the most popular tools in design communities. It is a code based platform that allows for the rapid prototyping of interactions, which is increasingly important as the majority of designers are creating for mobile. Though it comes with a steep learning curve (especially for …