Web-Based Experienced Planning
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:
- Strategy:
- This is the information gathering phase, find out what people want and expect and need etc.
- 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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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]
