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  • From: Larry Wood <WoodL AT byu.edu>
  • To: aifia-tools AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Aifia-tools] Introduction
  • Date: Fri, 13 Dec 2002 10:01:39 -0700

Hi,

Because it appears this list is reasonably small, and because I'm a usability person, rather than an IA person, per se, let me introduce myself. I am a cognitive psychologist by training and am currently a professor of instructional psychology and technology at Brigham Young University. I have an applied interest in Usability and User-Centerd Design and have taught courses in that area for 18 years. As a result, three years ago, I was asked to reduce my faculty appointment to 1/3 time and spend 2/3 of my time consulting with the Office of Information Technology on campus to help make all the student and faculty services websites more usable.

The campus website(s) were developed by administrators (e.g., the registrar's office) and IT people with very little feedback from students or faculty. I'll bet you're surprised (:>). As a result, the labeling and organization are very much from an administrative perspective. So, one of my first reactions was to try to get some data on labels and organization that made more sense from a user's perspective. That led me to getting more acquainted with card-sorting as a tool/methodology to assist with that. As a result, I (and my son) have developed a web-based front-end to IBM's carding tools, EZSort (http://www-3.ibm.com/ibm/easy/eou_ext.nsf/Publish/410), which we have called WebSort. Those interested can read about it at: http://www.acm.org/chapters/nuchi/2002/09mtg_websort/WebSort.html. It is available for others to try out, if interested.

Developing that tool has sparked my interest in research on various issues surrounding the use of card-sorting techniques, as well as further development of tools. One of my colleagues in UPA (Usability Professionals' Association), Whitney Quesenbery, made me aware of your organization, so I queried Lou Rosenfeld to see if any of you folks were interested in and/or using card sorting techniques. That led to Erin's invitation to join your tool initiative and this group. Because our tool is quite simple at this point, my son Jed (who is full of energy) is chaffing to begin adding various features to it. I have been holding him off until we can find an opportunity to do a studies ourselves or cooperation with others where a missing feature is actually needed. That way we would be able to determine how useful such functionality might actually be. In terms of AIFIA tool initiative, I'm looking forward to learning more about IAers and what kinds of tools would be useful in supporting IA work.

- Larry Wood



  • [Aifia-tools] Introduction, Larry Wood, 12/13/2002

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