digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

Today is the "Interactions" day: all sessions are workshops of one form or another, and the ones I attended were not specific to museums but all of them did use museum web sites as examples/case studies. The first session I attended was on website usability testing. I have done some usability testing but enjoyed seeing someone else doing it in front of an audience. The presenters began by describing the purpose and methods of observational usability testing and then asked for volunteers from the audience to test some sites. The volunteer(s) then left the room while a representative of the website being tested demonstrated the site and defined some tasks that typical users might do. The volunteer returned and was asked to perform some of the tasks, narrating his/her thoughts while the presenters observed. At the end of the test, the presenters offered an analysis of the test results. They did this for three websites. One interesting tip from the presenters was that having married couples perform the tasks together is often useful because they tend to argue a lot over how things should be done. Ha.

The next session, "Paper Prototyping," was hardcore hands-on: the presenters broke us up into teams and gave us blank paper "screens," pens, scissors, glue, and paper widgets to mock up a page. They supplied the site's subject matter (rail, canals, and aircraft), intended audiences, and themes and gave us half and hour to create a secondary-level page. The presenters explained the basics of paper prototyping, and did a good job of leading the audience at this very tactile task. As in the usability session described above, it was good for me to see someone else's implementation of techniques I have used (and am increasingly making part of my approach to software development), and seeing it done successfully in this setting makes me think that similar sessions would be useful at other conferences.

The third session, "Measurement", was split between two different sets of presenters, both of whom talked about collecting data from within rich media (specifically, Macromedia Director/Shockwave and Flash) on websites. Both referred to the "informational black hole" that occurs with interactive media that not tracked by standard web server access logs. Their solution to this problem was to embed some sort of logging mechanism within the media, independent of the web server's access log, that allows them to track user behavior at a very granular level within the interactive media. News to me was that server-log based analysis applications such as WebTrends are able to use standard web server logs to track more information than they could in the past; for example, WebTrends can apparently log a user's screen resolution.