This is a blog entry that never made the leap to XIST’s (no longer) new site. It is still worth a read. Here’s a posting entitled Usability testing for findability on the difference between testing in informational and interactive environments…

It’s nice, for a change, to hear Jakob Nielsen sounding positive. In an interview with CNN today, the man who…

A posting on the difference between testing in informational and interactive environments. From DonnaM a new (for me) IA/usability blog….

Thomas - I’ve been following your Model of attraction and personal infocloud thoughts. You’re way ahead of me thinking about this

This is an area I have been working on for a couple years with the Model of Attraction and Personal InfoCloud frameworks. Much of the HCI work in this area is lacking as it focusses on one device and acquiring, using, and resuing information across devices. A person finds infomation they believe is valuable and want to keep that information close to themselves, in a Personal InfoCloud.

One example is information in PDF, which is not a format that works well with out modification on mobile devices. The best practice when linking to a PDF is to let the user know the information is not an HTML file (mobile devices do not have status bars). Being careless with this linking practice can cause a mobile device to not access the page, or as I have seen many times in meetings the devices just lock-up. The framework for many UCD and IAs has been the desktop or laptop environment. But the rest of the world is moving beyond that, some parts of the world have most of the internet uses accessing information by something other than desktops and laptops.

There are also information standard formats for some information types. Take address information, many sites still have this information in a graphic. This requires the person interrested in this information to write or type the information again rather than copy and paste (which will decrease error rates). Even better is using a stand such as a vCard to offer the information as well as offering the info in text/HTML. The vCard can be used on many devices and provides a consistant and accurate format for sharing and storing contact information. IA has failed to recognize this easy approach as IA has focussed on just getting the info infront of the user, but not how they user will use and reuse the information. There has not been a framework to work from that helps designers and developers think about this informaiton use and reuse properly.

Findability is extremely important as it the rest of the IA framework, but where it stops helping is where many users need the help to use the information more easily and accurately.

Having 50-100 years worth of research in a library doesn’t do me any good if I can’t find it easy. I can’t go to the library in the middle of my work-day, and I need some questions/answers for a presentation.

The fact that there is all this information already developed is great. The fact that this stuff has been studied before is fantastic. I’m not knocking that at all. We just need to pull/relate that information/studies/theories to what we’re doing here. And make it easy to find and use.

Okay. Whew. Sorry for the long post. I’m done now.

doesn’t at work, winxp sp1

I didn’t want to make this negative note public, but when I went to look for your contact details on this page….

I couldn’t find them.

‘usability testing for findability’
It’s unusable, you obviously didn’t test your site… and I can’t find what I need!

Ironic don’t you think?

「Usability」の前提になるのでしょうか。米国でこの手の情報を探していると「User Experience」と「Findability」という表現がしきりによく出てきます。 DonnaM: Usability testing for findability というこ…

It may be true that people “new to site creation” may not have access these materials, or be able to fully understand them, but I thought we were talking about user experience professionals. A professional who chooses to ignore decades of research because it doesn’t apply directly to the web or is more difficult to find then jumping on Google doesn’t speak to a problem about lack of research. Rather, that is a problem with user experience designers failing to capitalize on a wealth of information that already exists.

Donna has blogged an item on usability testing for findability. To quote: A very, very large proportion of our body of knowledge about how people approach sites, and about how we should design sites, is based on a very narrow…

Anyway, I assume that as we find stuff more and more, the shift in focus for usability folks should indeed be “is it useful’, and Google keeps pushing that point for us. Usability folks need to re-focus to keep up with technology.

whether or not there is tons of stuff in the LIS literature is irrelevant. When someone is new to site creation and wants to know about how to make it good, they turn to the public web and find the usability gurus. They don’t turn to the LIS literature. All of that good stuff is completely hidden from the people who could benefit from it most, and the stuff that is easily available may have this enormous, known-item flaw.

If you’ve done that work up front, you’ve already made certain decisions about what information is necessary to people to make their decisions. These questions aren’t ones of usability - which is about how usable the solution is. The questions you bring up are ones of strategy and user needs, and you shouldn’t start building without thinking about these things. They should inform every decision you make when building the system. If your usability testing has to test those basic assumptions, you’ve gone too far in the process.

The way I’ve come to define it user testing/research is what you do at the beginning of the process to determine what the system should look like. Usability is simply testing whether the system you put together is the best way to facilitate the solution you’ve put together based on the initital user research.

I think they are two very different things, but I definitely agree the web hasn’t really caught on to the best way of figuring out what users really want. While their doesn’t seem to be much research of this type for the web (what a surprise) I definitely feel like I’ve seen some. Plus, having just finished my Master’s degree, I can tell you there is tons of more generic information seeking behavior research in the LIS and HCI literature.