Usability Matters will be presenting the following poster at the IA Summit 2010 in Phoenix, April 9 – 11.
POSTER TITLE
Iterative Remote Design Collaboration
AUTHORS
Terry Costantino, Principal and Information Architect, Usability Matters
Meredith Noble, Information Architect, Usability Matters
OVERVIEW
On behalf of the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL), Usability Matters recently worked with Scholars Portal to design new user interfaces for their e-Journal and e-Book applications.
Usability Matters’ key responsibility was to carry out consultations with a set of representative users every few weeks. To enable consultations with users across Ontario, these usability/design sessions were conducted remotely. Our participants were not designers; rather, they were undergrads, grad students, post-grad researchers and faculty members in a broad range of disciplines.
Our poster focuses on two specific challenges we encountered:
1) engaging participants in the context of a remote, iterative study
2) engaging a busy design / development team over the course of a multi-week study
In the poster, we identify things that worked well, particular challenges and our thoughts on what we would do to address those challenges in the future.
The high-level findings from the research, plus other documentation, can be found on the Scholars Portal blog: http://spotdocs.scholarsportal.info/display/client
A paper co-authored by Terry Costantino about the preliminary study that led to the current research was published in the peer-reviewed, open access journal Evidence Based Library and Information Practice and can be found at: http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/EBLIP/article/view/5622