thank you very much for your critique. I really appreciate it. I have added few new categories and I am going to work on “Miscellaneous” category. As you can see, it isn’t a “Trash”-category; mostly, the resources listed there just don’t fit in any other category, although they are valuable for me as a web-developer.

And by the way, UIE Brain Sparks is listed in the Web Developer’s Handbook, too.

With warm greetings from Saarbruecken, Germany,
Vitaly Friedman

(Given my earlier post here about negative feedback from users, this comment may seem a bit ironic… apologies… anyway…)

This whole topic of link order, grouping, info seeking behaviour… isn’t it a bit like “low hanging fruit” to the UX field?

Do people who make websites NOT know about this?!?

I’d be a rich man if I had a pound for every occasion I have explained your labelling example about “Miscellaneous” = “Random Crap”! (Interestingly though, people still do it…)

At what point do we stop treading these fundamental yet well worn avenues and get on to the more challenging and perhaps more forward thinking questions, e.g. domain or sector specific user experience, usability of podcasts, RSS feeds, multi-channel e-commerce and so on?

Regards
DJ

And I know you try to use natural tasks – I remember reading a long time ago your e-commerce testing where you gave people money to spend. I taught usability testing for a couple of years and *always* told people about this as I thought it was such a great way to get natural behaviour.

But just because you do it, doesn’t mean everyone else does That sounds like a great article to get out there…

On the contrary, my thinking is the user is better served if *more* information was brought to this page. In addtition to just saying “Access Matters”, what if a brief synopsis or relevant tags were also presented for the user.

The goal would be to prevent needless pogosticking, even if the user is just exploring.

In our testing, we try to use more natural tasks, often gleaned from interviewing the test participant. That way the tasks are actually activities that particular user would do in the language they’d use. Using this type of task formulation, more exploratory tasks can (and do) emerge.

I’ve had it on my list to write an article on our interview-based task techniques for a while. Maybe I’ll bump that up a few notches on the priority list.

But there are different tasks. Someone (like me) may be poking around to see what tools other people are using just to see what’s around. Or they may be looking for stuff on usability but don’t know enough about it to know what they need to find (exploratory). They also may be there looking for something they know they need to know and spot something they didn’t know about (serendipity). Now if everything was hidden beneath the headings, the site wouldn’t work at all for these type of tasks, but because the content is exposed, I think it would work fine.

One of the problems with usability testing is that it almost always focuses on known-item tasks – “find out how to check your HTML is valid”. It much less frequently focuses on the more exploratory tasks. So a usability test might see pogo-sticking, but real life may not….

Anyway, I have a half-written boxes and arrows article on this, so have been thinking about it a lot