Re: some references on user need assessment

Scott,

My response to you was, "great!  create it and we'll use it!"  I agree, if 
participants on this list were more familiar with user centered design, 
that would be great.  It would also be great if all participants in the 
working group had a general understanding of business practices, the latest 
Web technologies, professional Web design, professional Web development, 
assistive technology tool development, etc.

This is why we try to invite participants with a variety of expertise so 
that not everyone has to learn everything about everything.  Perhaps we 
ought to have "suggested reading lists" for each of the topics that we need 
expertise in.  We also need to invite experts in each of these topics.

Since we have just rechartered and released a call for participation, in a 
sense we can "begin anew."  If people have suggestions of companies or 
people that the chairs and I can target to get involved in the group, I 
welcome all of your suggestions.

So, let's create a reading resource!  This will be helpful for new 
participants who are not familiar with our work.  I don't currently have 
the resources to do this myself.  Scott and Jonathan, you both seem 
interested. If you create a resource, the group can review it, and we'll 
link to it once it's in shape.

thanks,
--wendy

At 11:02 PM 1/26/00 , Scott Luebking wrote:
>Hi, Wendy
>
>We might not be seeing the purpose of the information in the same way.
>The original request for information came from a mailing list member.
>The purpose of the URL's that I sent out was to provide background
>information to list members about user-centered design and
>usability testing.  I was thinking that as more list members became
>familiar with these fields, there would be greater understanding about
>how various techniques from these fields could be useful in the
>process of developing guidelines.
>
>Perhaps, there needs to be a web page related to the guidelines working
>group which lists suggested background information materials for people
>involved with the guidelines.  List members could make suggestions about
>pages which have good online introductory materials for people who want
>basic familiarity with the various subjects.  For those people who want
>more background information, there could be links to various collections
>of online/offline materials.
>
>Scott
>
>
> > If this is a problem with dealing with the collections and the collections
> > are all about how to make things usable, then perhaps you ought to point
> > that out to the people who maintain the collections. <grin>
> >
> > Scott, why don't you pull together all of the URLs that you've been 
> sending
> > to the list and post them in one place with a bit of annotation for each
> > one?  We can point to this list from the WCAG Techniques document.
> >
> > Looking at the collections, i think you will find that they have tried to
> > address the issue of overwhelming people with information.  of the two
> > sources that marja cited, the first, the HCI Bibliography, links to a list
> > of "recommended readings" divided into several categories [available at
> > http://www.acm.org/~perlman/readings.html]
> >
> > Jakob Nielsen also tries to do some filtering by highlighting seven of his
> > "alert box" columns.  He also provides a "hot list" for reading that seems
> > categorized in easy to understand categories [available at
> > http://www.useit.com/hotlist/].
> >
> > Another site to point out, one that Jakob refers to, is "usable web"
> > maintained by Keith Instone.  He has a category called "Accessibility"
> > [available at http://usableweb.com/items/access.html].  Perhaps someone
> > could work with him to massage this into a list that is most 
> appropriate to
> > our needs.
> >
> > --wendy

--
wendy a chisholm
world wide web consortium
web accessibility initiative
madison, wi usa
tel: +1 608 663 6346
/--

Received on Thursday, 27 January 2000 15:06:54 UTC