The Long Tail of Usability
The Stormont Papers resources makes available the debates from the parliament of Northern Ireland (Stormont) from creation in 1921 until the end of Home Rule in 1971.
It’s been available since 2006 and some statistics from the website are available. Of most interest is graph showing the spread of search terms entered by users
There are two interesting points from this
1) The bulk of your users may not be looking for the things you expect them to be looking for.
2) Pre-arranged hyperlinks on your home page can provide a user-friendly way of letting users get to know a resource’s contents.
Web usability tested
In the development of a Web resource, ideally usability testing is an iterative process that is carried out throughout the development of a resource and can be conducted both internally (expert review) and with outside users (user testing).
The second meeting of the JISC Digitisation programme partly focused on Web usability issues and user interaction with digital resources.
Gemma Richardson, from the Cabinet Papers digitisation project, gave an enlightening presentation on the First steps to usability and user centred design. Subsequently, in a hands-on session delegates tested two different methodologies for carrying out an expert review, the Cognitive Walkthrough and the Heuristic Evaluation. Although different, perhaps unsurprisingly the two methodologies unearthed similar problems with the web site being tested.
Claire Warwick’s presentation also provided projects with insightful and practical tips on key features that the ideal digital humanities resource ought to include, based on the findings of the LAIRAH study (Log Analysis of Internet Resources in the Arts and Humanities), which she conducted as part of a team at University College London.
Librarians on the way out?
The JISC and BL-commissioned Google Generation report highlights a number of key points that will have an effect on current and future digitisation projects.
- That librarians need to radically re-think their position and tasks to avoid becoming outdated in the face of tools like Google.
- It is not just the ‘kids of today’ that dumb down in front of a computer terminal - we all skim over the surface of the web’s voluminous content
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The now-ingrained hyperactive approach to skimming Internet content means that any kind of barrier to access (payment or passwords for instance) means sacrificing the attention of many potential users
It’s worth reading.
