Bring the lnternet into Your Documents on Budget and on Time  

Technical communicators can mine the Internet for fresh approaches and information to prepare documents with efficiency and minimal expense.

Murphy, Avon J. STC Proceedings (1996). Articles>Information Design>Research

Data Mining and Predictive Analytics, Part 1

The cluster analysis process looks for groups of visitors in the data, where the people within the groups have something in common but the commonality is different from group to group.

Mason, Neil. ClickZ (2007). Articles>Web Design>Research>Log Analysis

Data Mining and Predictive Analytics, Part 2

In part one of this series, I examined visitor segmentation, a data-mining technique. Now, let's look at how data mining can be used to understand important visitor behavior over time.

Mason, Neil. ClickZ (2007). Articles>Web Design>Research>Log Analysis

Extreme User Research

What is the biggest problem I face almost every time a client hires me to do something about a web project going awry? They don't know a thing about their users. They don't have a clue, whatsoever. Unbelievable but true!

Lafreniere, Daniel. Boxes and Arrows (2008). Articles>User Centered Design>Research>Usability

Literature Review: What is Visual Literacy?  

This paper takes a look at what is being said in various disciplines (technical writing, journalism, education, psychology, user interface design, and visual arts) in an attempt to answer the question 'What is visual literacy?' A corollory is 'How will I know when I have achieved it?' A working definition of visual literacy has many implications for how we train technical writers in order to meet the professional challenges of the future.

Couse, Mary M. STC Proceedings (1993). Articles>Graphic Design>Research>Visual Rhetoric

Making Research Actionable: An Introduction to Design Criteria

What happens when people want a company’s product, but are frustrated by the process of trying to get it? Obviously it should be reworked — but doing so can be easier said than done. When we’re asked to redesign a process, we often start by exploring the problem space with in-context research, which generates a large amount of data. That data tends to point teams in the direction of a number of possible solutions. But how should the team decide which direction is the right one? In such cases, I’ve found that Design Criteria — a set of rules a design team can follow — can be a key tool so when a design team creates or reworks a service or product, everything it does supports the user.

Nelson, Sarah B. Adaptive Path (2008). Articles>Research>Design>Business Communication

Scholarly Information Architecture, 1989-2015  

If we were to start from scratch today to design a quality-controlled archive and distribution system for scientific and technical information, it could take a very different form from what has evolved in the past decade from pre-existing print infrastructure. Ultimately, we might expect some form of global knowledge network for research communications. Over the next decade, there are many technical and non-technical issues to address along the way, everything from identifying optimal formats and protocols for rendering, indexing, linking, querying, accessing, mining, and transmitting the information, to identifying sociological, legal, financial, and political obstacles to realization of ideal systems. What near-term advances can we expect in automated classification systems, authoring tools, and next-generation document formats to facilitate efficient data mining and long-term archival stability? How will the information be authenticated and quality controlled? What differences should be expected in the realization of these systems for different scientific research fields? Can recent technological advances provide not only more efficient means of accessing and navigating the information, but also more cost-effective means of authentication and quality control? Relevant experiences from open electronic distribution of research materials in physics and related disciplines during the past decade are used to illuminate these questions, and some of their implications for proposals to improve the implementation of peer review are then discussed.

Ginsparg, P. Data Science Journal (2004). Articles>Information Design>Research

Web Measurement Strategies for Small Businesses

Tools to build an effective Web measurement strategy on a tight budget.

Mason, Neil. ClickZ (2007). Articles>Web Design>Research>Log Analysis

Site Navigation and Its Impact on the Content Viewed by the Virtual Scholar: A Deep Log Analysis    

is paper presents early findings of a unique analysis that related questionnaire data to site usage as recorded in the transaction log reports of ScienceDirect, for the same people. Its focus is the differences in the online behaviour of three types of navigational users: those accessing the site via a gateway (either via a reference hyperlink or subject search facility), those using the on site search facility and those employing menus. Towards this end 16,865 sessions were analysed and grouped by navigational entry and compared over three types of online behaviour: the viewing of articles in press (AIP), the number of different journals viewed in a session and the viewing of old material. A strong association was found between form of navigation and behavioural trait. Those using menus were more likely to view AIPs, while those using the search facility were more likely to view a greater number of different journals and were more likely to view older material. This supports a hypothesis proposed by Nicholas et al. (2006) that use of the online searching facility increases the visibility of material irrespective of journal and age and results in a greater use of older material and a more diverse journal use compared to other online and off-line information retrieval methods. Although research has been undertaken on the different strategies that users employ to navigate and find their way around a collection of content (e.g. a digital library), this we believe is the first time the effect of different navigational strategies on outcomes (for example, what is viewed) has been investigated.

Huntington, Paul, David Nicholas and Hamid R. Jamali. Journal of Information Science (2007). Articles>Web Design>Research>Log Analysis

Web Robot Detection in the Scholarly Information Environment    

An increasing number of robots harvest information on the world wide web for a wide variety of purposes. Protocols developed at the inception of the web laid out voluntary procedures in order to identify robot behaviour, and exclude it if necessary. Few robots now follow this protocol and it is now increasingly difficult to filter for this activity in reports of on-site activity. This paper seeks to demonstrate the issues involved in identifying robots and assessing their impact on usage in regard to a project which sought to establish the relative usage patterns of open access and non-open access articles in the Oxford University Press published journal Glycobiology, which offers in a single issue articles in both forms. A number of methods for identifying robots are compared and together these methods found that 40% of the raw logs of this journal could be attributed to robots.

Huntington, Paul, David Nicholas and Hamid R. Jamali. Journal of Information Science (2008). Articles>Web Design>Research>Online

Making Decisions About User Research

We know that we should do user research for projects. All the user-centred design material says so, we talk about it at conferences, we put it in proposals. We just know that it is a good thing to do. But when I talk to people about their actual projects, I find that very few people actually do user research. There are many many reasons (no time, no money, already know what users need etc etc etc). I think that part of the reason it doesn’t happen is also that we don’t have good tools to tell us just how much research to do, and even when it isn’t necessary at all to do research.

Spencer, Donna. DonnaM (2008). Articles>Research>Usability>User Centered Design

Jared Spool on User Research Methods

Adaptive Path’s Peter Merholz recently talked to the founder of User Interface Engineering Jared Spool about user research.

Merholtz, Peter. Adaptive Path (2005). Articles>Research>Usability>User Centered Design

Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship  

Social network sites (SNSs) are increasingly attracting the attention of academic and industry researchers intrigued by their affordances and reach. This special theme section of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication brings together scholarship on these emergent phenomena. In this introductory article, we describe features of SNSs and propose a comprehensive definition. We then present one perspective on the history of such sites, discussing key changes and developments. After briefly summarizing existing scholarship concerning SNSs, we discuss the articles in this special section and conclude with considerations for future research.

Boyd, Danah and Nicole B. Ellison. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (2007). Articles>Web Design>Research>Social Networking

Why We Search: Visualizing and Predicting User Behavior  

The aggregation and comparison of behavioral patterns on the WWW represent a tremendous opportunity for understanding past behaviors and predicting future behaviors. In this paper, we take a first step at achieving this goal. We present a large scale study correlating the behaviors of Internet users on multiple systems ranging in size from 27 million queries to 14 million blog posts to 20,000 news articles. We formalize a model for events in these time-varying datasets and study their correlation. We have created an interface for analyzing the datasets, which includes a novel visual artifact, the DTWRadar, for summarizing differences between time series. Using our tool we identify a number of behavioral properties that allow us to understand the predictive power of patterns of use.

Adar, Eytan, Daniel S. Weld, Brian N. Bershad and Steven D. Gribble. WWW 2007 (2007). Articles>Web Design>Search>Research

Analysis, Plus Synthesis: Turning Data into Insights

In this article, I will outline an approach to gleaning insights from primary qualitative research data. This article is not a how-to for creating the design tools that are often the outputs of primary qualitative user research—such as personas, mental models, or user scenarios. Instead, it identifies an approach to generating overarching insights, regardless of the design tool you want to create.

Ellerby, Lindsay. UXmatters (2009). Articles>User Centered Design>Interviewing>Research

Guesses vs. Data as Basis for Design Recommendations

Even the tiniest amount of empirical facts (say, observing 2 users) vastly improves the probability of making correct UI design decisions.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2009). Articles>Web Design>Usability>Research

デザインアドバイスの根拠としての、推測　vs.　データ

ごくごく小規模な経験的な事実（例えば、観察対象のユーザが2人）からでも、そこから得られる事実はUIデザインに対して、正しい判断ができる確率を大きく高めてくれる。

Nielsen, Jakob. Usability.gr.jp (2009). (Japanese) Articles>Web Design>Usability>Research

Manipulating Data: Analysis Techniques, Part 3

One of the key characteristics of a manipulation technique versus related techniques like transformation is that the underlying data remains unchanged. The main thing we’re doing is changing the relationship - logical or physical - that one piece of data has with another. Reorganizing the data helps us to identify patterns that may otherwise not be apparent. In fact, it is almost certain that most patterns won’t be visible at first glance. Let’s start by taking a more detailed look at some of the processes that contribute to the manipulation of data.

Baty, Steve. Johnny Holland (2009). Articles>Research>Methods>User Centered Design

Deconstructing Analysis Techniques

On a recent project I needed to collect and analyze the content management templates in use across a large enterprise Intranet. We were looking to inventory the diversity of templates in use; whether they existed outside or within the enterprise content management system; what changes might be made to the ‘official’ template set to reduce the overall number of templates, and to prepare for the migration of all content to a new design a few months down the track. I looked around at the literature for information architecture and Web design generally and found quite a few references to content inventories and content analysis, but nothing on analyzing templates.

Baty, Steve. Johnny Holland (2009). Articles>Research>Methods>Web Design