All posts from
September 2004

The Cost of Frustration

Added on 21 September 2004 Peter Bogaards
“It’s difficult to find someone who doesn’t believe it’s beneficial to make a more usable design. However, in today’s design environment, it’s often difficult to justify the expense of usability work against other business priorities.” (Jared Spool – webpronews.com) – courtesy of john rhodes

CM Pros

Added on 20 September 2004 Peter Bogaards
“(…) content management is essential to organizations of every type. It harvests and promotes both financial and human value for the companies and organizations that can tap its potential. CM Pros is a membership organization that fosters the sharing of content management information, practices, and strategies.” (About CM Pros)

Extending a Technique: Group Personas

Added on 15 September 2004 Peter Bogaards
“So we decided to see if we could make group personas. At first, there was some apprehension – what if the groups are so varied as to be impossible to characterize? But as soon as we started making them, only several different kinds of personas made sense and it became a straightforward extension of Alan Cooper’s original persona technique. Here’s how we did it.” (Mike Kuniavsky – Boxes and Arrows)

Internet time and the reliability of search engines

Added on 14 September 2004 Peter Bogaards
“Search engines are unreliable tools for data collection for research that aims to reconstruct the historical record. This unreliability is not caused by sudden instabilities of search engines. On the contrary, their operational stability in systematically updating the Internet is the cause. We show how both Google and Altavista systematically relocate the time stamp of Web documents in their databases from the more distant past into the present and the very recent past. They also delete documents. We show how this erodes the quality of information. The search engines continuously reconstruct competing presents that also extend to their perspectives on the past. This has major consequences for the use of search engine results in scholarly research, but gives us a view on the various presents and pasts living side by side in the Internet.” (Paul Wouters et al. – First Monday 9.10)

Lost in gallery space: A conceptual framework for analyzing the usability flaws of museum Web sites

Added on 14 September 2004 Peter Bogaards
“This article reports on a study which used results from 119 scenario-based evaluations of 36 museum Web sites to develop a conceptual framework for analyzing the usability flaws of museum Web sites. It identifies 15 unique dimensions, grouped into five categories, that exemplify usability problems common to many museum Web sites. Each dimension is discussed in detail, and typical examples are provided, based on actual usability flaws observed during the evaluations. The availability of this conceptual framework will help the designers of museum Web sites improve the overall usability of museum Web sites in general.” (Paul F. Marty and Michael B. Twidale – First Monday 9.9)

Experiences of Educators Using a Portal of Aggregated Metadata

Added on 14 September 2004 Peter Bogaards
“The paper documents a pilot user test with a small group of K-12 teachers-in-training. The users were asked to use the portal to locate primary source materials for use in the classroom. The results highlight the challenges posed by aggregations of heterogeneous metadata for both users and service providers. Areas for further investigation and approaches for more in-depth studies are suggested.” (Sarah L. Shreeves and Christine M. Kirkham – Journal of Digital Information 5.3)