#30622
Write Once, Use Many: Why and How We Make Product Information Modular 
Faced with growing demand from customers for specific courses, addressing only their needs, in very short time-frames, we had to re-examine the way we worked. Patching together one-shot customized coursework was labor-intensive for a non-homogeneous and unsatisfactory result. Each new customer request required repetition of the same amount of effort. With reduced turnaround time and dwindling human resources, a solution had to be found.
McClelland, Patricia J. and Alison Bourdel. STC Proceedings (1993). Articles>Documentation>Information Design>User Centered Design
#20363
This study attempts to: (a) to specify a theory that explains the historical character of change or transition in the production of written artifacts, and (b) use that theory to cast light on a particular instance of change or transition in the production of written artifacts, that of the Web, principally, the issue of structured markup and discussions about precisely what a structured Web should look like, the work it should do, and so forth. It attempts to identify, describe, and analyze, are the norms and conventions that govern the production of written discourse.
Wilkes, Gilbert Vanburen IV. Journal of Computer Documentation (2002). Articles>Information Design>User Centered Design>Rhetoric
#32271
Filtering and Withdrawing: Strategies for Coping with Information Overload in Everyday Contexts 
The study investigates the ways in which people experience information overload in the context of monitoring everyday events through media such as newspapers and the internet. The findings are based on interviews with 20 environmental activists in Finland in 2005. The perceptions of the seriousness of problems caused by information overload varied among the participants. On the one hand, information overload was experienced as a real problem particularly in the networked information environments. On the other hand, information overload was perceived as an imagined problem with some mythical features. Two major strategies for coping with information overload were identified. The filtering strategy is based on the determined weeding out of material deemed useless. This strategy is favoured in networked information environments. The withdrawal strategy is more affectively oriented, emphasizing the need to protect oneself from excessive information supply by keeping the number of information sources to a minimum.
Savolainen, Reijo. Journal of Information Science (2007). Articles>Information Design>Audience Analysis>User Centered Design
#32303
The Information User: Past, Present and Future
The emergence of research on various aspects of `information behaviour' is explored and its growth as a subject of academic research is documented. The origin of the field as a potential aid to the development of library and information services is noted, as is the transition from this status to that of a subject for research at PhD level and beyond. The development of the field has thus led to a division between the needs of academia for theoretically grounded work, and the needs of the field of practice for guidance for service development. There is, today, a disconnection between research and practice, to a significant extent: early research was undertaken by practitioners but today academic research dominates the scene. Suggestions are made as to how this disconnection can be repaired.
Wilson, Tom. Journal of Information Science (2008). Articles>User Centered Design>Information Design>Search
#32326
In this article, theories of human judgement and decision making are reviewed and their use by library and information science researchers examined. A different perspective on judgement and decision making is offered by the field of naturalistic decision making (NDM) and the implications of this approach are considered for an expanded understanding of how judgements and decisions are made during information seeking. This discussion is illustrated by a case from a recent empirical investigation into how judgements of enough information are made in the workplace. The article concludes with a critical evaluation of the NDM approach. It is argued that NDM, a recent development in decision theory, offers a new perspective from which to investigate judgements and decisions during information seeking.
Berryman, Jennifer M. Journal of Information Science (2008). Articles>Information Design>Search>User Centered Design
#32926
Brint.com: Why More is Not Better
Information architect Lou Rosenfeld never thought he'd criticize a website for being over-architected. Then he saw Brint.com and its 16 navigational systems.
Rosenfeld, Louis. CIO Magazine (2000). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>User Centered Design
#33110
Why are Intranets Structured Like the Organisational Chart?
Many intranets are structured around the organisational chart. It is well known that this method of grouping content is difficult for staff — they can’t find information if they don’t know who is responsible for it. However, it often seems too difficult to move from an organisational-based structure to a more intuitive topical structure. Before moving to a better structure it is necessary to identify why the intranet is currently designed around the organisational chart, and address these issues first.
Spencer, Donna. Step Two (2005). Articles>Information Design>Intranets>User Centered Design
#33138
This is a simple technique that enables one person or a group of people to create a categorisation of objects so that it is understood which objects belong with which other objects. Objects can be anything: menu items, blocks of content, proposed web pages, URLs. This method can be used by practically anybody after a few minutes practice.
European MultiMedia Usability Services (1999). Articles>Information Design>User Centered Design>Card Sorting
#33139
Card Sorting is a technique for exploring how people group items, so that you can develop structures that maximize the probability of users being able to find items.
Gaffney, Gerry. Information and Design (2006). Articles>Information Design>User Centered Design>Card Sorting
#33140
Card sorting is a user testing method for organising data into structure. There’s a lot of information about on what they are, how to conduct them. Problem is, they’re all over the place and mostly they’re written by scientists so tend to be a little difficult to grasp and bogged down in analysis (which can take over your life if you let it!) I’ve decided to document my understanding of how to plan, conduct and analyse a card sort, from a practitioners point of view.
Boulton, Mark. Mark Boulton (2007). Articles>Information Design>User Centered Design>Card Sorting
#33141
Card Sorting, Part 2: Facilitation
You should now have everything ready to conduct your card sorts - cards, users, observers and most importantly a clear objective of what you want to achieve.
Boulton, Mark. Mark Boulton (2007). Articles>Information Design>User Centered Design>Card Sorting
#33142
Card Sorting, Part 3: Analysis and Reporting
In the final part of the article I talk about perhaps the most important part of the procedure - Analysis. This is the part in which you can get the most bogged down. You must be thorough, ruthless and accurate. Card sorting won’t always give you the answer - it may just give you more questions. This is where the analysis comes in.
Boulton, Mark. Mark Boulton (2007). Articles>Information Design>User Centered Design>Card Sorting
#33436
Persuasive navigation is navigation that persuades a user to do something. That something can be anything that you want the user to do—buy a product, sign up for a newsletter, or download a game. By understanding user needs and matching them up with business goals, you can persuade users to go where you want them to go, making them happy at the same time.
Lash, Jeff. Digital Web Magazine (2002). Articles>Information Design>User Centered Design>Persuasive Design
#33463
Contingency Design: Maximizing Online Profitability By Helping People When Things Go Wrong
Contingency design is design for when things go wrong. It's the error messaging, graphic design, instructive text, information architecture, backend system, and customer service that helps visitors get back on track after a problem occurs.
37Signals (2007). Articles>Information Design>User Centered Design
#33793
XML and SOA (Service-Oriented Applications)
The realization of SOA through Web services is intrinsically driven by core XML technologies. The emergence of service-oriented design principles, however, is affecting how XML technologies are utilized and positioned within contemporary solutions.
Erl, Thomas. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Information Design>XML>User Centered Design
#34179
Learning Information Intent via Observation
Workers in organizations frequently request help from assistants by sending request messages that express information intent: an intention to update data in an information system. Human assistants spend a significant amount of time and effort processing these requests. For example, human-resource assistants process requests to update personnel records, and executive assistants process requests to schedule conference rooms or to make travel reservations. To process the intent of a request, an assistant reads the request and then locates, completes, and submits a form that corresponds to the expressed intent. Automatically or semi-automatically processing the intent expressed in a request on behalf of an assistant would ease the mundane and repetitive nature of this kind of work.
Tomasic, Anthony, Isaac Simmons and John Zimmerman. WWW 2007 (2007). Articles>Information Design>User Centered Design
#34334
Almost 2 million book titles were published in the US alone, compared to more than the 1.3 million books published in the preceding 100 years. This change in the amount of information available for consumption is starting to change the way people read. How do we address the problem of information overload? Through good writing, and good information architecture.
Self, Tony. HyperWrite (2001). Articles>Information Design>User Centered Design>Publishing
#34961
What is Enough? Satisficing Information Needs
This paper seeks to understand how users know when to stop searching for more information when the information space is so saturated that there is no certainty that the relevant information has been identified.
Prabha, Chandra, Lynn SilipigniConnaway, LawrenceOlszewski and Lillie R. Jenkins. Journal of Documentation (2007). Articles>Information Design>Search>User Centered Design
#34962
Affordance Theory: A Framework for Graduate Students' Information Behavior
This study seeks to apply ecological psychology's concept of "affordance" to graduate students' information behavior in the academic library, and to explore the extent to which the affordances experienced by graduate students differed from the affordances librarians were attempting to provide.
Sadler, Elizabeth 'Bess' and Lisa M. Given. Journal of Documentation (2007). Articles>Information Design>User Centered Design
#34963
Information Creation and the Notion of Membership
This article aims to examine a particular sub-set of human information behavior that has been largely overlooked in the library and information science (LIS) literature; how people are socialized to create and use information.
Trace, Ciaran B. Journal of Documentation (2007). Articles>Information Design>User Centered Design
#36031
How Much Information? 2009 Report on American Consumers
In 2008, Americans consumed information for about 1.3 trillion hours, an average of almost 12 hours per day. Consumption totaled 3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words, corresponding to 100,500 words and 34 gigabytes for an average person on an average day. A zettabyte is 10 to the 21st power bytes, a million million gigabytes. These estimates are from an analysis of more than 20 different sources of information, from very old (newspapers and books) to very new (portable computer games, satellite radio, and Internet video). Information at work is not included.
Bohn, Roger E. and James E. Short. University of California San Diego (2009). Articles>Information Design>User Centered Design
#36318
To test aspects of a theoretical framework on goal detection in social interaction, an experiment examined dyadic initial interactions wherein one participant pursued a goal unbeknownst to another participant. The level of specificity and efficiency at which a pursuer sought a goal interacted to affect the accuracy of the detector's inference as well as the time of onset for that inference. Consistent with hypotheses, efficiency was unrelated to accuracy and negatively correlated with onset latency when pursuers had an abstract information-seeking goal, whereas efficiency was positively correlated with accuracy and onset latency when detecting a concrete (i.e., specific) information-seeking goal. Unexpectedly, efficiency was unrelated to accuracy and onset latency for a midlevel information-seeking goal. Other results focused on the role of individual differences (i.e., perspective-taking and suspicion in others' motives) and perceived communication competence in the goal detection process. A more controlled, second experiment that employed confederates generally replicated results.
Palomares, Nicholas A. Communication Research (2009). Articles>User Centered Design>Information Design>Audience Analysis
