Robert Denton - web strategist and designer

Page Source Order & Accessibility

Study on some current usability practices and how they actually work in the field.

Week in review: Sony’s sour note | CNET News.com

In the right column they’ve put a “perspective” box to show you a tree of how this story fits in with other news… Not extremely useful but curious.

Ning is a free online service (yeah but if it’s a service how’ll it remain free?) allowing one to easily build and use social applications.

What is social software?

It tends to be a web application enabling one to post content, e.g., photos, bookmarks, reviews, and easily match, transact, or communicate with other people. The matching/transacting/communicating [...]

mambofrog

This guy thinks too much like me.

Bloug: Updated Enterprise IA Roadmap

This is fantastic. Much like we are doing at Bowdoin on the web site… at least that’s the goal set in last summer’s redesign. The top tier is particularly useful and our home page is the “politicized page”; perhaps after we launch the new “academics” section that will be the so [...]

A first look at Google Scholar: What’s included and what’s not

Tina sent the link to this nice summary of Google Scholar.

A Simplified Model for Facet Analysis
The purpose of this study is to propose a simplified model for facet analysis that incorporates the principles of facet analysis proposed by both Ranganathan and the CRG. The purpose of this simplified model is to act primarily as a teaching tool to introduce LIS students to a consolidated, and [...]

Been thinking about the home page, and the site with regard to a search field on every page instead of a link to a search page. What comes first? Giving people the easy way to search or attempting to get them into your content?

Some studies show that people look in the middle of the page [...]

Search Engine Optimisation and Accessibility

plasticbag.org | weblog | Using Wikis for content management…
Now one of the problems with using Wikis generally is that they don’t lend themselves to the creation of clear sectionalised navigation. Nor do they do naturally find it easy to use graphic design, colour or layout differently on separate pages to communicate either your context or [...]

Navigation Study on Current University Websites

Ken Kelleher prepared a useful overview of IA challenges on University web sites.

Our main points he describes: – varied audiences – site architecture (taxonomy) vs. faceted view (audience gateways)

He also lists a lot of the references I have in my bookmarks. This is a paper I have written but [...]

Brown has an interesting entry point into their course web site pages.

Essentially turns browsing course web pages into an application for viewing the data in different ways. You can filter based on department and semester. Very easy to do (given the right background architecture and likely increases the usability a lot.

Just wanted to note this. We vetted the reasons why we can’t use a horizontal menu bar at the secondary, or departmental level navigation.

Anyway, I was looking at this essay seven resolutions for 2004 and noticed how nice their navigation is… wishing we could somehow build and/or enforce a stricter sense of IA on dept [...]

Is Navigation Useful?

First bullet point: “users comment on the content first; if the content is not relevant, then they don’t care about any other aspect of the design”

Link this to the discussion of the “page paradigm” and the recent mention of a survey (user testing?) done with location of search input fields vs. links to [...]

Summary: Recent studies have shown that while the use of breadcrumb trails to navigate a website can be helpful, few users choose to utilize this method of navigation. This study investigates the effects of “mere exposure” and training on breadcrumb usage. Findings indicate that brief training on the benefits of breadcrumb usage resulted in more [...]