Re: some references on user need assessment

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

Received on Wednesday, 26 January 2000 23:04:08 UTC