Reminder re: Jakob Nielsen alerts

I forget to look often enough at the studies done by or reviewed by Jakob Nielsen. I was reminded today when we discussed where to place links on the library website to our Research Guides (libguides).

From one of the more recent alerts:
How Little Do Users Read?
"On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.

We've known since our first studies of how users read on the Web that they typically don't read very much. Scanning text is an extremely common behavior for higher-literacy users; our recent eyetracking studies further validate this finding....

Among other things, the authors found that the Back button is now only the 3rd most-used feature on the Web. Clicking hypertext links remains the most-used feature, but clicking buttons (on the page) has now overtaken Back to become the second-most used feature. The reason for this change is the increased prevalence of applications and feature-rich Web pages that require users to click page buttons to access their functionality. "

Oh, and the original reason for looking at Nielsen's site was to find the information about usability tester numbers. See
Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users

Choose your own homepage look

Ellie sent this out and I really like this idea. Don't know if it is practical for us but something to think about.

http://www.librarybytes.com/2008/07/homepage-preferences.html

Quick jump to page she talks about. See Full and Simple tabs on the right.

Queens Public Libary

Encore for Libraries

Just documenting this iii site:

http://www.encoreforlibraries.com/main.html

Has the information re: encore libraries, et.

How people read web screens

Lazy Bastards How we read online.

By Michael Agger
Posted Friday, June 13, 2008, at 1:00 PM ET

http://www.slate.com/id/2193552/

Interesting information about how people scan web pages for points that draw their attention, like:

• bolding
• bullets
• links within paragraphs

Gives links to other resouces such as Jakob Neilsen's stuff. Might be a handy reference.

Workflow and library services

Another thought-provoking blog entry by Lorcan Dempsey:

Workflow is an intermediate consumer
May 31, 2008

I have been using the following contrast in presentations for a while. This is to make a distinction between library services - or any other service for that matter - in a pre-network age, and such services now. Then: people were prepared to build their workflows around library services. Now: the library must be prepared to build its services around people's workflows. This is to try to capture succinctly a recurrent theme in these pages. This shift is because people are increasingly building their workflows - or learnflows, or researchflows. ... - on the network. In some cases through a bricolage of desktop and network tools (e.g. toolbars, rss feeds, social networking sites, search engines, etc); in some cases through prefabricated workflow environments (e.g. course management systems, ...). Where resources are not easily available to those workflows, they may not be used. Of course, putting library services in those flows is not straightforward .... It does mean that the library needs to think about 'intermediate consumers' - those workflows and applications that may sit between the library and its users (search engines, RSS aggregators, course management systems, search engines, social networking sites, cell phones, etc).