Is It Time to Redesign Hospice? End-of-Life Care at the User Interface

Hospice is a system of end-of-life care that’s not used to its full potential. That is, hospice is not used in the way that would benefit patients and families as much as it could. My argument is that this is an issue of usability, or ergonomics—the science of design. I illustrate how to take what we have learned from the science of usability to make hospice more accessible and approachable, and to increase hospice use among those who would benefit from it. Underneath this discussion, though, there is a more fundamental question: Can we make hospice more usable or do we need to think about redesigning hospice entirely

Teaching Children How to Like Balanced Meals

Growing up in Japan, balanced meals were always provided at home, at schools and even at restaurants. Unfortunately, children are not going to choose balanced meals from the start, so this habit has to be instilled by parents and by the educational system until it eventually becomes a personal preference for children. If children are simply given the choice to eat whatever they want from the beginning, it is unlikely that this preference will ever be developed. The emphasis of nurturing the habit of eating balanced meals, rather than just eating preferred foods, is what is particular about Japanese parenting. As a graphic designer, I developed graphically oriented learning materials that would help children to personally prefer having a balanced meal every time and help them distinguish each food groups. I created images and characters, which will appeal to children and have a positive influence on their long-term eating habits. These learning materials will help children to develop an instinctual reaction that something is wrong when they see a plate of food that is disproportionate in the food groups or unbalanced in general. These materials will be marketed as a set with my brand name. Through my project I learned how to conduct a survey, analyze the result, and develop my critical thinking to link it to my creative productions. During the process of creation, I learned what appearance, shapes and colors may attract children and knew how to adjust the usability toward the different age groups. I recently completed a website and I hope I will get more feedback from viewers and users so I can improve the existing products and add more additional products

What Are We Doing with the Website: Transition, Templates, and User Experience in One Special Collections Library

[Excerpt] At the Eberly Family Special Collections Library (SCL), we have found that our website is often the first place a researcher will look to learn about our repository. Our online web presence is a business card, our chance to make a positive first impression. While our library, among others, has devoted time and resources to the development of new access tools and discovery layers, we have learned that our online presence also needs updates, revisions, and improvements. New tools and access points are valuable, but we can also improve existing tools even as we look forward to new developments in access and discovery. Through conscious efforts to include end users’ feedback in our website design decisions, we create more effective online tools. Our website is a crucial component of our efforts to direct users to our collections, and to publicize our services and programs. In this same vein, our end users can contribute to this design partnership through dedicated user experience testing. The SCL experimented with collaborative decision-making with its website committee, as well as with user experience testing in order to support our requests for additional web development work from the Libraries’ Information Technology department (I-Tech). Through this process, our library gained a more holistic understanding of the needs of online special collections and archives users; we also learned how to communicate more effectively between the department who worked with end users (SCL) and the department performing the actual web development work (I-Tech). While development work was limited to working within the mandatory web template, our user experience testing and the efforts of our internal website committee resulted in a better online experience for our stakeholders, based on the feedback we received from usability testing. Although our website is always a work in progress, we feel that we were able to develop practical ways to adjust to a website migration within in a dispersed and hierarchical information technology environment

Ask Them—They’ll Tell You! Eliciting Student Perspectives to Improve Services

Most people avoid doing qualitative research because they think it is not scientifically rigorous and requires time and lots of money. In fact, there is a lot one can do with little overhead that reaps immediate benefits for improving services and gaining unexpected valuable insights. This study uses a web redesign and assessment project to showcase some simple ways to get useful information from students. Library web pages provide the main access point to many of the library’s services and resources, which also continue to change and accrue. Does the web site really serve students\u27 research needs today? Where do you focus energy on needed improvements? How do you integrate new services? What resources do you need to do it? In this essay, discover how to use quick and inexpensive methods to grab student feedback in order to help revise and assess web pages and other services. Learn how to identify common issues for focused improvements. Gain insight on research deficiencies perhaps better addressed through teaching and other services. The researcher presents findings on several methods used to gain students\u27 perspectives before a major web page redesign and after “improvements” some months later

Improving Primo Usability and Teachability with Help from the Users

In the aftermath of a consortium migration to a shared cloud-based resource management and discovery system, a small college library implemented a web usability test to uncover the kinds of difficulties students had with the new interface. Lessons learned from this study led to targeted changes, which simplified aspects of searching, but also enhanced the librarians’ ability to teach more effectively. The authors discuss the testing methods, results, and teaching opportunities, both realized and potential, which arose from implementing changes

Report of the user requirements and web based access for eResearch workshops

The User Requirements and Web Based Access for eResearch Workshop, organized jointly by NeSC and NCeSS, was held on 19 May 2006. The aim was to identify lessons learned from e-Science projects that would contribute to our capacity to make Grid infrastructures and tools usable and accessible for diverse user communities. Its focus was on providing an opportunity for a pragmatic discussion between e-Science end users and tool builders in order to understand usability challenges, technological options, community-specific content and needs, and methodologies for design and development. We invited members of six UK e-Science projects and one US project, trying as far as possible to pair a user and developer from each project in order to discuss their contrasting perspectives and experiences. Three breakout group sessions covered the topics of user-developer relations, commodification, and functionality. There was also extensive post-meeting discussion, summarized here. Additional information on the workshop, including the agenda, participant list, and talk slides, can be found online at http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/685/ Reference: NeSC report UKeS-2006-07 available from http://www.nesc.ac.uk/technical_papers/UKeS-2006-07.pd