Folksonomies: A User-Driven Approach to Organizing Content

From User Interface Engineering:

“Many of the design teams we talk to face the same major issue: how to organize the information on their sites. From creating navigation schemes to developing site hierarchies to refining checkout sequences, it’s highly important for design teams to organize information effectively for their users.

Information architects frequently must deal with the problem of managing more and more information. Rarely can they remove information from a site; in most cases, it’s add, add, add. Design teams must make room for this new content in some way, either by incorporating it into the current organizational scheme or by altering the information architecture to allow for it.”

-Miguel

Google Accessible Search for the Visually Impaired

Google Labs have launched an Accessible Search interface.

From the FAQ:

“Accessible Search is an early Google Labs product designed to identify and prioritize search results that are more easily usable by blind and visually impaired users. Regular Google search helps you find a set of documents that is most relevant to your tasks. Accessible Search goes one step further by helping you find the most accessible pages in that result set.”

-Miguel

Search 2.0

Nice article from Read/WriteWeb:

Search 2.0 vs Traditional Search

-Miguel

Guild of Accessible Web Designers

From the site:

The Guild of Accessible Web Designers (GAWDS) is a worldwide association of professional organisations, web designers and developers working together to promote the use and preservation of accessible design standards. “Promoting a vision of the future that assumes accessible web design to be relevant, obtainable, and not at odds with successful business practice or good visual and usable design.”

-Miguel

Building and Managing a Successful User Experience Team

This interview by UIE’s Christine Perfetti with Sarah Bloomer and Susan Wolfe, two User Experience experts, is chock full of good ideas and advice.

From the interview:

“Producing a usable design takes time, money, and resources. It also requires the User Experience team’s dedication to focus on customer needs throughout the entire design process.

Knowing how to identify and communicate the value of a User Experience (UX) project will substantially help it get approved and supported by an organization. Most organizations we work with understand the need for UX efforts, yet they still struggle with how to best incorporate the team into the development process.”

-Miguel

re: Web07

Nice post Jon – I’m looking forward to this next iteration of UDT too, especially getting into the creation of a design pattern library and exploiting our style-guide wiki, as well as more user testing, including the creation of personas and more ethnographic type research, and rapid paper prototyping of designs.

User Centered Design is tough! Web 07 begins…

I’m Jon Dillon, co-chair of the Western Libraries Usability/Design Group. Miguel and I love to talk usability so what better way to do it than this blog format? I’m psyched about Usabiliblog and I hope you like what you find. I’m gonna jump right in and talk about what’s going on in our library.

After too many months experiencing UCD from the outside looking in, it seems we are finally getting real. Our web team is officially working on Project Web 07! For a long time I have been saying how great it would be if we could start our entire web site from scratch. Well, Web 07 is the answer.

A “Next generation” library catalog

This article addresses some interesting issues regarding the possible future of the library catalog.From the article:

“This text outlines an idea for a “next generation” library catalog. In two sentences, this catalog is not really an catalog at all but more like a tool designed to make it easier for students to learn, teachers to instruct, and scholars to do research. It provides its intended audience with a more effective means for finding and using data and information.”

-Miguel