Interface Usability Testing session at ALA Annual

[Lloyd Davidson <Ldavids@northwestern.edu>]

The LITA Electronic Publishing/Electronic Journals IG presents the 
following program at ALA Annual in Chicago:

Searching Digital Resources:  How do people search? How do we know what
they want?  How do we know when they find what they need? Saturday, June
25, 8:30 am - 12:00 pm in the Exchange room of the Intercontinental Hotel.  
During its development, the content of this program has evolved to present
a set of exemplary descriptions of the processes and techniques essential
to designing Web interfaces for optimal clarity and simplicity and to
describe the patron feedback methods used to accurately measure their
usability.

The Speakers and their order will be:

1.  Frank Cervone, Assistant University Librarian for Information
Technology at Northwestern University, will describe the design details of
the processes and methods used to execute the year long Northwestern
Website usability study.

2.  Jeannette Moss and Steven DiDomenico, Reference Librarian and Systems 
Engineer, respectively, were members of the Web Advisory Group that, along 
with their colleagues, actually executed the Web site assessment and 
usability study.  They will report on their and their colleagues' 
experiences and provide details concerning the methods used during this 
study.

3.  Mike Visser is a Product Manager at Endeavor Information Systems,
where he is responsible for coordinating interface design and usability
testing on Endeavor products. This presentation will be a revised version
of a talk he gave last January that I have been privileged to see.  It is
filled with interesting examples and provocative ideas for developing and
testing maximally usable Web interfaces.

4.  Stephen Abram is a well known keynote speaker at library professional
meetings and is the president of the Canadian Library Association.  
Currently he works for Sirsi and will report on the development of a
process he calls "mass narrative collection," the results of which are
clusters of deep user profiles called "personas."  As he has explained it
to me, this allows them to "go beyond usability testing and into
understanding the person behind the glass at a deeper level."  Frankly,
this sounds fascinating.

Moderator: Lloyd Davidson, Life Sciences Librarian and Bibliographer, 
Northwestern University
-------------------------

Libraries are under great duress during this period of rapid change and we 
find ourselves in competition for the first time in our existence, against 
generally well meaning, popular and commercially well funded general 
information providers like Google.  To remain competitive and relevant to 
our patrons' needs in this new century, libraries will have to provide 
services that are easily accessible, simple to use and offer features and 
content superior to those presented by their Internet accessible 
rivals.  For that reason alone, building more usability into our systems is 
vitally important for the future of academic and other libraries.