Tidy Guide – A Beginner’s Guide to an Organized Home

Search for how to organize on the web, and you will be inundated with endless resources. Organizing information is everywhere, making the task seem intimidating. For my thesis project, I sought out to create an interactive, instructional, web-based application that would coach users on how to organize objects within a specific space. My goal was to create a unique, visual, creative solution - one that did not already exist on the web, and one that would become an important tool for users who were seeking organizing assistance and advice. Not only did I intend the application to be unique, visual, and creative, it had to function seamlessly in all major browsers using the most current HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript technologies. I also aimed to implement the project, Tidy Guide, using conventional processes, starting with user experience research, moving into user interface design, and finally ending with development and user testing. My end goal was to produce a modular structure that could be continuously built upon as more rooms and spaces were added to the application over time. The project\u27s research, design, and implementation were dramatically altered during its development over the course of two years, but the objective remained unchanged. Visit the website at www.katiecreative.com/tidyguide

On Birthing Dancing Stars: The Need for Bounded Chaos in Information Interaction

While computers causing chaos is acommon social trope, nearly the entirety of the history of computing is dedicated to generating order. Typical interactive information retrieval tasks ask computers to support the traversal and exploration of large, complex information spaces. The implicit assumption is that they are to support users in simplifying the complexity (i.e. in creating order from chaos). But for some types of task, particularly those that involve the creative application or synthesis of knowledge or the creation of new knowledge, this assumption may be incorrect. It is increasingly evident that perfect order—and the systems we create with it—support highly-structured information tasks well, but provide poor support for less-structured tasks.We need digital information environments that help create a little more chaos from order to spark creative thinking and knowledge creation. This paper argues for the need for information systems that offerwhat we term ‘bounded chaos’, and offers research directions that may support the creation of such interface

Ideation as an intellectual information acquisition and use context: Investigating game designers’ information-based ideation behavior

Human Information Behavior (HIB) research commonly examines behavior in the context of why information is acquired and how it will be used, but usually at the level of the work or everyday-life tasks the information will support. HIB has not been examined in detail at the broader contextual level of intellectual purpose (i.e. the higher-order conceptual tasks the information was acquired to support). Examination at this level can enhance holistic understanding of HIB as a ‘means to an intellectual end’ and inform the design of digital information environments that support information interaction for specific intellectual purposes. We investigate information-based ideation (IBI) as a specific intellectual information acquisition and use context by conducting Critical Incident-style interviews with ten game designers, focusing on how they interact with information to generate and develop creative design ideas. Our findings give rise to a framework of their ideation-focused HIB, which systems designers can leverage to reason about how best to support certain behaviors to drive design ideation. These findings emphasize the importance of intellectual purpose as a driver for acquisition and desired outcome of use

Access and usability issues of scholarly electronic publications

This chapter looks at the various access and usability issues related to scholarly information resources. It first looks at the various channels through which a user can get access to scholarly electronic publications. It then discusses the issues and studies surrounding usability. Some important parameters for measuring the usability of information access systems have been identified. Finally the chapter looks at the major problems facing the users in getting access to scholarly information through today's hybrid libraries, and mentions some possible measures to resolve these problems

Issues in usability studies for alerting in digital libraries

Alerting Services inform users of Digital Libraries about new or changed content of their favorite Digital Library collection, or about new documents discussing a topic they are interested in. The users define their interest in form of subscriptions; the alerting service filters new or changed documents against all user subscriptions and notifies the users about matches found. To define their subscriptions, users may, e.g., select a journal from a list, or a topic from a classification. Few services support the definition of IR type queries, or advanced combinations of queries and metadata selections

Youth and Digital Media: From Credibility to Information Quality

Building upon a process-and context-oriented information quality framework, this paper seeks to map and explore what we know about the ways in which young users of age 18 and under search for information online, how they evaluate information, and how their related practices of content creation, levels of new literacies, general digital media usage, and social patterns affect these activities. A review of selected literature at the intersection of digital media, youth, and information quality -- primarily works from library and information science, sociology, education, and selected ethnographic studies -- reveals patterns in youth's information-seeking behavior, but also highlights the importance of contextual and demographic factors both for search and evaluation. Looking at the phenomenon from an information-learning and educational perspective, the literature shows that youth develop competencies for personal goals that sometimes do not transfer to school, and are sometimes not appropriate for school. Thus far, educational initiatives to educate youth about search, evaluation, or creation have depended greatly on the local circumstances for their success or failure

A Study of the Role of Visual Information in Supporting Ideation in Graphic Design

Existing computer technologies poorly support the ideation phase common to graphic design practice. Finding and indexing visual material to assist the process of ideation often fall on the designer, leading to user experiences that are less than ideal. To inform development of computer systems to assist graphic designers in the ideation phase of the design process, we conducted interviews with 15 professional graphic designers about their design process and visual information needs. Based on the study, we propose a set of requirements for an ideation-support system for graphic design

Investigating the information-seeking behaviour of academic lawyers: From Ellis's model to design.

Information-seeking is important for lawyers, who have access to many dedicated electronic resources.However there is considerable scope for improving the design of these resources to better support information-seeking. One way of informing design is to use information-seeking models as theoretical lenses to analyse users’ behaviour with existing systems. However many models, including those informed by studying lawyers, analyse information-seeking at a high level of abstraction and are only likely to lead to broad-scoped design insights. We illustrate that one potentially useful (and lowerlevel) model is Ellis’s - by using it as a lens to analyse and make design suggestions based on the information-seeking behaviour of twenty-seven academic lawyers, who were asked to think aloud whilst using electronic legal resources to find information for their work. We identify similar information-seeking behaviours to those originally found by Ellis and his colleagues in scientific domains, along with several that were not identified in previous studies such as ‘updating’ (which we believe is particularly pertinent to legal information-seeking). We also present a refinement of Ellis’s model based on the identification of several levels that the behaviours were found to operate at and the identification of sets of mutually exclusive subtypes of behaviours