Subject: Notes of 12/11/01 Meeting of UWired Usability Committee


Attending:
  Jennifer Ward, Carol Robinson, Dominick Dellino,
  Laura Baldwin, Stacy Waters, Tracy Wagner, Melody Winkle,
  Dan Comden, Rick Ells

News:
  o The Accessible Web design site
    (http://www.washington.edu/computing/accessible)
    was visited over 600 times during November
  o Rick Ells, along with Sheryl Burgstahler and Terry Thompson
    (the new director of AccessIT) will be giving a talk on
    accessibility at the UW Support meeting on Thursday, 12/20,
    1pm-4pm in the South Campus Center. The talk will be given at
    about 2:30pm. The AccessIT site is at
    http://www.washington.edu/accessit/
  o Stacy Waters is now working for the new Center for Digital
    Arts & Experimental Media (http://www.washington.edu/digitalarts/)
  o Domenick Dellino is the new assistant director of
    the Department of Technical Communication's Lab for Usability
    Testing and Evaluation, and is involved in research assessing
    the accessibility of Windows XP. Welcome Domenick!

Featured Speaker - Jennifer Ward, UW Libraries

  o Currently evaluating the organization of the main Libraries page
    http://www.lib.washington.edu
    + Using Catalyst's WebQ to create an online survey, which was
      linked to from the Libraries page during the summer and fall.
       - Got 120 useful responses
       - Many suggestions related to the Catalog interface, which
         is actually third party software and is not easily changed.
       - Overwhelming response is that the Libraries site is
         "not broken" - it works for most people
       - Some people wanted an Amazon.com-style search, which seemed
         to be a desire for a simple search that did not require
         them to think about keywords, titles, author, or other explicit
         information types.
       - Respondents included a good variety of faculty, staff, and
         students
    + Doing card sorting to more clearly understand user mental models
       - All topics on the page are written onto cards
         1. User reads each topic and says what they think it is
         2. User then rates it on how critical it is
         3. User sorts topics into groups
         4. User names each group
       - 2 faculty, 2 staff, 2 grad students, and 2 undergrad students
         are being tested.
       - Using cluster analysis to analyze the results. Two useful
         programs are IBM's EZSort and USort programs, available at...
           http://www-3.ibm.com/ibm/easy/eou_ext.nsf/Publish/410
  o Next Step
     + Results will be taken to the Library's Web steering committee

Discussion
  o Cluster analysis would be a good topic for a presentation at
    a future meeting
  o Statistics on visits to the Libraries Web site are now available
    at http://staffweb.lib.washington.edu/webserver/logs/w3svc9/
    + The stats were summarized using the Wusage package from
      Boutell http://www.boutell.com/wusage/
  o Domenick is doing usability testing with disabled subjects,
    which might also be a good topic for a future presentation.
  o Statistics on Internet access and use by the disabled are
    available at
      http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/fttn00/chartscontents.html
    The stats were compiled by the National Telecommunications and
    Information Administration.

 |- Rick Ells - 543-2875 - rells@cac.washington.edu - Rm 011S MGH Bldg -|
 |-                http://staff.washington.edu/rells/                  -|