A couple of web design links

Cool Tools for Webmasters from the Internet Librarian Conference - covered by Library Web Chic and Librarian In Black.

Web Design on a Dime (pdf) by Librarian In Black.

The Designing Librarian

The people behind Web Site Design with the Patron in Mind have a blog that they seem to have just started taking a greater interest in. The Designing Librarian has been up since November 2006, but the posting just got regular this past month. Has anyone taken a look at the book? Is it any good?

Designing a better library experience

From the Blended Librarian webcast on 27 Sep 2007. Some thoughts:

• Design for outcomes not features.
• User-centered not technology driven.

These ideas among others stood out for me because I think that they are particularly relevant and something librarians -- who know all the possibilities and want others to have the best chance to find stuff -- forget.

All the possibilities overwhelm most of our users. We need to provide for them and also create alternatives for those who want more options, more possibilities.

Integrating into the Network Environment

http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/001379.html (Lorcan Dempsey)

Some interesting thoughts here that have been tickling at the edge of my brain for awhile.

The entire post is worth reading.

Glanceability

Glanceability   [excerpt from Lorcan Dempsey's weblog]
May 08, 2007
http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/001347.html

Glanceability is about enabling "users to understand information with low cognitive effort". And further: Glanceability refers to how quickly and easily the visual design conveys information after the user is paying attention to the display.

These quotes are from a paper Designing glanceable peripheral displays by Matthews, Forlizzi and Rohrbach at Berkeley. [abstract html] [full text pdf].

I went looking for further information about glanceability after I came across a mention of it in Tony Hirst's blog:

However, whilst the visual component to radio is not just using limited to scrolling liveText displays, nor does it mean moving wholesale into television: the key is to support glanceability, a beautifully evocative word referring to the ability to look at a screen and capture the information you require at a glance. [OUseful Info: Learnin' from Virgin] 

Broadly speaking, it seems to me that effective ranking, for example, supports glanceability, as folks will focus in on top results and may forego individually inspecting each member of a result set. And of course, one of the issues with library websites is that they have low glanceability: they require quite a bit of cognitive effort to figure out what is available where as they present a...