userslib.com

From http://www.usabilitypost.com/2010/03/24/value-of-good-design/

Good design speaks. Good design tells your visitors that you care about your product. Good design at the front-end suggests that everything is in order at the back-end, whether or not that is the case. Good design is what separates the best from the “good-enough”.

I’m happy to announce that the University of Michigan Library is in the process of creating a new User Experience (UX) Department. I will be transitioning from my current position as Interface & User Testing Specialist for the Digital Library Department to the head of this new department. This new department will focus on interface design, mobile design and development, usability testing, user research, web use statistics, and accessibility. I have a million ideas for projects for this new department but right now I’m focused on hiring 2 really awesome people to join our team.

User Experience Specialist
We are looking for someone with a passion for user research, the ability to create engaging designs, and an investment in improving the library users’ web experience. The UX Specialist will help drive interface development through an iterative usability and design process.

User Experience Mobile Developer
(job id= 38884)
We are looking for someone with experience developing mobile interfaces, knowledge of related mobile design principles, techniques, and platforms.

Usability guru Jakob Nielsen released a study this week about mobile usability: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/mobile-usability.html.

The result? “The mobile user experience is miserable.”

Here are some highlights:

• The average success rate for mobile websites was 59% compared to 80% for regular sites.
• Small screens are limiting since they have to show less at a time which results in more clicks and a heavier reliance on short term memory.
• Input is awkward and more error prone due to more scrolling, tiny buttons and links, tiny keyboards, etc.
• Connections are still slow.
• Sites that have a mobile specific interface have a higher success rate (64%) compared to regular sites (53%).
• If a site has a mobile version, make it easy to find. Best technique is to auto-sense users’ devices and auto-forward mobile users to the mobile site. Additionally, make sure to include links to “mobile site” and “full site” to allow users to switch.
• Touch-screen phones perform better.

The new bad usability calendar is out for 2009.

http://www.badusability.com/

Over at the del.icio.us blog, there’s a post about how they’ve noticed that librarians & educators are using delicious in interesting ways.

Over the past year or two, I’ve been delighted to notice educators and librarians embracing Delicious both as a way to share bookmarks with each other and a way to help their students and patrons learn. This makes perfect sense to me as a college student because I bookmark and tag references for all my projects and I’d love to see similar collections from my professors and classmates.

I don’t know who first realized the potential of Delicious for education, but I’ve seen a huge amount of community documentation created by teachers and librarians to help each other understand what this place is, why it’s valuable, and how to use it.

See full post for list of resources about librarians and delicious!