Usable Forms

One of the projects that I’ve “parachuted” into has been a redesign of a tool that produces forms.  Forms are used for many things, and at PH they are used mostly for data input from nurses, doctors, patients, and more.  Today I ran across a book in progress by Luke Wroblewski called Web Form Design Best Practices. 

The book has its own site http://www.rosenfeldmedia.com/books/webforms/, and while checking that out I ran across this slideshow from Aaron Gustafson’s Learning to Love Forms talk at WebVisions 2007: 

Personas

The User Research Subgroup is finishing up our first round of personas, getting them ready for next week’s UDT meeting.  We have one primary persona (undergraduates) and three secondary personas (upper-level transfer students, faculty, and community users).  I’m working on the transfer student persona.

 It’s pretty satisfying to be able to apply all the data and analysis to an artifact like this, and doubly so as the persona really does help bring the data to life.  I’m excited for the next step, when we begin using the personas to inform the design decisions.

-Miguel

User Research & the Library Tour Podcast

I’m on the User Research subgroup of the UDT and we’re just finishing up some surveys we sent out via email to freshmen and transfer students, as well as posting the survey on the library homepage.

 The email survey has returned 489 responses so far, vs 16 for the website, so we’ll have some pretty good data with which to fill out our personas for the design work.

 Next up is to finish writing the in-depth interview questions and start recruiting our subjects from the list of those respondents who said they’d be interested.  We’re shooting for 4 interviews, 2 freshmen & 2 transfer students, of 30-50 minutes each.

 The library tour podcast is all edited and ready to post.  We’re meeting next week to do that!

-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.