What I Learned Today…

David King (who I got to have lunch with today – pictures to come later) presented this session.

He started with a graphic from Creating Passionate Users about the “I Rule” theory – and by “I” it means the user.

He started with the The Elements of User Experience by Jesse James Garrett, a book written for the corporate web world, with ideas that can be applied to our library world. The five elements are:

1. Strategy:
• This is the information gathering phase, find out what people want and expect and need etc.
2. Scope
• Write out what you want on each page – turn the data you gathered into a detailed description of what you want on your site – page by page
3. Structure
• Graph the interactions between tasks related to the page – So in order to buy a book you have to find the book – which you can either do by searching or browsing and once you find it you have to view the information and then you have to actually buy it – Dave’s graph was easier to follow than that – but you get the idea.
4. Skeleton
• Create the website – minus the design – so great your tables so that there is a menu on the side you want it on and create a box for the New & Noteworthy section – but just type N&N will go here in the box – create a skeleton of your site
• Start usability testing now – it’s not pretty, but it gives the user the idea of how things will function – which is what you want to make sure works before you go any further.
5. Surface
• Visual Design – last thing is the look & feel

On paper this all makes perfect sense – but how many of us are actually doing this? I know that when we redid our Intranet we started with Scope and jumped to Surface – it turned out well for us, but then again we have a limited audience – a captive audience

I think I’ll go look up this book and give it a read.

[update] Dave has posted his slides [/update]

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