Monday, January 18, 2010

Top Tech Trend = User Experience Design

Doing my usual - following conferences from afar (thx to Twitter & the interwebs, at least I don't miss everything).
LITA held a discussion on Top Tech Trends this morning... for more, see http://litablog.org/. I felt validated by the discussion since one of the topics that dominated the discussion was user experience design. (& yes, I both saw & agreed with the tweet "@gluejar: Depressing that usability is a trend in 2010. 10 years late"... true, but this just supports my oft-pronounced theory that library technology is 10 years behind... )
Amanda Etches-Johnson referred to automated usability testing sites - Usabilia (http://usabilla.com/) & Crazy Egg (http://crazyegg.com/). I'd heard of Crazy Egg, but not Usabilia. That one's new on me. It has a free, five-page trial. If one of you uses it first, please give me some feedback. I'd love to hear about it.
Another thing I saw from afar was @libraryfuture's Prezi-based presentation (mobile libraries). It inspired me. I'd written a long, boring bulleted "what to post where" listing to give our public services librarians a feel for when they should put things on our news blog vs. our Facebook page vs. our Twitter stream (& how those updates automatically cascade from one level to another). I sent it out to my Web2.0 group for feedback & didn't get much. So I made a Prezi to make the same information appear more compelling. (http://bit.ly/6ushBe) Imagine if we all did our memoes & policies using a tool like this! (BTW, it was a real pain to get used to Prezi at first, from my perspective. Then again, I'm not a gamer & it may be somewhat more intuitive for folks who are. Still, I think that it was all worth it.)

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