The presentations covered a wide range of topics relating to digital museums, from planning a realistic digital strategy to refining your metadata but those I found of particular interest related to engaging and involving users in building and using digital resources, a topic I’ve been finding myself more and more interested in of late–addressing those nagging questions about exactly why and for whom we in the digital cultural heritage and humanities sectors are building these resources in the first place.

Museums and galleries arguably have a head start when it comes to involving users in projects: direct access to them as visitors to their institutions. This is something that the Social Interpretation project at the Imperial War Museum (IWM) is making the most of: a project to record visitors’ interpretations of exhibits, bringing them the same ability to share and discuss found on the social web to the museum space, via in-museum devices, the web and mobile apps.

This project is putting the user at the centre of the design process, both directly via testing of prototypes and observation of user behaviour in the galleries.  Interestingly, it’s also been run entirely according to an agile methodology–not just the development but the design and management, so I’m really looking forward to hearing more about this.

Another participatory IWM project being developed is Lives of the Great War–a crowdsourced project to create stories of those who served and died in the First World War. This is being done principally by enabling access to the various appropriate information sources distributed across the Web, some of which are behind paywalls, via a single access point. The plan is to archive the resource permanently and also to release the data under a “CCO” licence (the most permissive Creative Commons licence); making the data available for reuse in a number of contexts.

The Outside In project, run by the Pallant House Gallery is a slightly different participatory project–providing a space for artists traditionally unable to engage with the artistic mainstream due to disability or social circumstance to display their work. The interface for doing this was developed iteratively, including in workshops with the artists themselves. The next stage is a mobile app–not for the sake of developing one but because interaction via a mobile device involves fewer cognitive steps, e.g. the need to understand concepts such as file structures when uploading content from your computer’s file storage. With a mobile app, the device which records the art work can also be used to upload it directly.

I was fortunate enough to be elected to the committee of the conference’s organising body, the Museums Computer Group–something I’m very excited about. The levels of innovation and creativity in the sector are very impressive and I’m looking forward to learning and sharing more with all involved.

Still, the Kindle’s weaknesses are really its strength: in my view it’s good for one thing and one thing only — reading with no distractions. And at that it pretty much excels. The electronic ink display is amazing. When I first got it out of its box I thought I had to peel a sticker off before I used it, not realising it was actually in sleep mode and displaying one of its wallpaper images of famous authors.

I don’t claim to understand how the E-ink works but it looks pretty close to a printed page, making it a complete joy to read. The iPad may be streets ahead in every other respect but are you really going to want to read a book on a back-lit screen — I know I wouldn’t. If you want a comparison between the two displays (literally under the gaze of a microscope), check out this blog post: Kindle and iPad displays: up close and personal.

So, I’m undecided what I’m going to use it for. My main reason for justifying it to myself was I could use it as a way of catching up on all those blog posts I never get round to reading. If you use Instapaper you can download your subscriptions and email them or transfer them via USB to the Kindle, meaning you never need to feel guilty about hitting the “Read later” button again.

I think it’s also the natural home for tech books, well at least the ones that don’t have high production values and pretty photos — which is most of them. I might try some newspaper / magazine subscriptions too (come on Guardian, your iPhone app is fantastic, it would be great to have some kind of Kindle version too). Although I’m still attached to printed books in so many ways I could imagine reading a novel on it too, so we’ll see.

I bought the Wifi only version and to be honest can’t really imagine any situation in which I’d need the 3G. I have tried to read my Gmail via the browser but to be honest it’s about as much fun as stabbing a fork in your head so I think I can live without instant Web access.

Originally posted on Posterous (6 November 2010).

• Bookmarks
• History
• Tabs
• Stored credentials

The Mozilla Weave project aims to allow synchronisation of this information across different Firefox instances. However, this particular design challenge is looking at ways that this information may be shared across different browsing devices when access to Firefox isn’t possible, i.e. via a web page.

Details of my proposal follow. It has been in part influenced by the findings of one of the Challenge’s recommended readings: Jason Hong, Contextual Web History: Using Visual and Contextual Cues to Improve Web Browser History (PDF), and other existing web-based mechanisms for managing visual assets (e.g. Flickr).

One of the findings of the paper was that visual cues in the shape of thumbnail images of visited websites helped users to better identify sites in their browsing history: the most useful size of these thumbnails was found to be around 235 by 148 pixels (p.5). This visual approach to representing history is being used by other browsers, including Safari and Chrome.

My idea expands on the use of visual cues for browsing history and also applies them them to bookmarks, tabs, credentials and history. As the data in this example becomes visual, it also lends itself to being managed by tools similar to those for managing photos and other visual assets on social networking sites. The Flickr model of page layout and set (“folder”) management, mainly due to its familiarity to me seemed to be of particular use.

The prototypes presented have been created by Balsamiq Mockups and are deliberately lo-fi. However, they help to clarify some of my concepts. They leave aside logging in, Web Weave account management and help screens etc. and are broken down into the following screens:

• Bookmarks
• Browsing history
• Tabs
• Web accounts
• Preferences

Main menu

The main menu provides an overview visualisation of all stored data. All main headings, “Bookmarks”, “My browsing history” etc. can be expanded and hidden and show recent activity.

A search box enables users to search across all stored data (with the exception of passwords) — searches would also be filtered by data type (bookmarks, history, tabs etc.).

Both Firefox’s existing method of organising bookmarks and the bookmarking sharing service Delicious allow users to file bookmarks of websites and categorise these by tags (Firefox and Delicious) and / or sorting by folder (Firefox). Whilst this allows for cross-referencing of bookmarks, bookmarks are presented textually as the title of the website, its URL, user generated tags, and in the case of Delicious, a textual description.

My model presents the data visually, showing thumbnail images for each bookmark, alongside its metadata, some of which is automatically generated (URL, site title, date visited), other parts of which are user generated (tags). In this visualisation, all data can be edited in place (as with editing photo metadata in Flickr). Bookmarks can also be deleted via clicking on an icon with a suitable “delete” metaphor, and filed in one or more folders (like Flickr “sets”). The method for filing shown in the prototype was also influenced by Google Mail and Reader‘s method of associating emails / feeds with one or more folders.

The folders created by the user are shown to the right, much like sets in Flickr. These can be edited by activation of the relevant edit link. Users may wish to edit the folder’s title and thumbnail image, using either the thumbnail of a representative website or an image selected by URL or direct upload. A default placeholder image would be used in the absence of a selected image.

Browsing history

Firefox’s current “show history” option presents a textual list of previously visited sites, showing the following metadata: site title, tags and location (URL).

Jason Hong’s paper cites research that, although up to 81 per cent of web pages visited by users are revisits, web browser history functions are only used around 0.2 per cent of the time to initiate these visits.

In this model, browser history is visualised as it is to an extent in Safari and Chrome, but with more accompanying metadata and the ability to add the sites as bookmarks. Selecting the “Add to bookmarks” functionality allows users to add and amend site metadata and file the bookmark in an existing folder (or in  a a new folder).

The time periods selected for differentiating browsing sessions are kept as per the standard Firefox organisation, i.e. today, this week, then previous months. A calendar widget is suggested as an alternative way of browsing by particular day, with the page content updated dynamically as the user clicks through dates. Other sort options which might suggest themselves are: web site title, URL, the device the page was accessed on or by tabs.

Part 2: tabs, web accounts (credentials) and preferences.

Please read: part one: introduction, bookmarks and browsing history first.

Tabs

Visualising tab history across a number of devices is possibly a little more challenging than considering bookmarks and general browsing history. Tabs can be open on any number of the user’s devices so one obvious question to be considered is how to arrange this information.

The tabs visualisation stays with the main visual metaphor, with history broken down per tab per device. This assumes the user has some way of adding and deleting participating devices — e.g. a copy of Firefox at home, or another browser running on another computer such as a work PC, laptop or mobile browsing device.

Tab data includes the title of the page being viewed and the tab history. The visualisation displays a thumbnail of the currently open page and previously visited pages. There should be a straightforward way for users to open this on their current device (and possibly all tabs open on other devices), and to save to bookmarks (or if the site is already stored as a bookmark to easily see this).

Views may change slightly depending on how the data is sorted — for instance, if the list were sorted by device name, then the displayed metadata could include information about the device the site was initially opened on.

Accounts (credentials)

Whilst it might be useful for users to synchronise account data across a number of devices, it is also the type of data which lends itself least readily to being visualised; in fact it is not appropriate to visualise data such as passwords.

In this model, sites with stored credentials are again presented as browsable thumbnails lending the user the ability to log in directly to protected sites. Some sites may offer API functionality which allows users to manage their credentials via Weave, but the majority will require the user to visit them in order to do so. Any changes to credentials would need to be synchronised immediately in Weave.

Preferences

Firefox preferences include a number of different options, the more obvious being browser home page, or Firefox persona. Some of this information may be Firefox-specific, other less so (e.g. home page). The visual metaphor can still be used, employing site thumbnails for selected home page or a visual representation of the selected persona. It could also be useful for users to be able to export the relevant parts of this information for use with other browsers if it cannot be directly applied (e.g. for Internet Explorer, Safari or Chrome); similarly options should be available to import data from a file generated by another browser or to be accessed via Firefox’s preferences menu, providing an option to pull the information directly in from Weave.

Summary

The model presented is quite simple and does not attempt any advanced data visualisation. Instead it uses models of organisation and interaction that users may be familiar with from using other social networking / asset organising websites. It is particularly influenced by models for organising visual information, for instance Flickr’s model of managing photo metadata.

M873 is a postgraduate module which you can take either as a standalone or as part of various MScs in Computing. I took it for professional development reasons: having realised that my real passion in Web work is designing and building usable interfaces, I wanted to get a stronger theoretical background in the area.

The course is designed to be practical — although it provides an overview of key concepts in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), it always has an eye to how these would be applied outside of academic discourse. There are three course books covering the various iterations of the user-centred design process: requirements, design and evaluation.

Personally, I found the design book and related assessment most enjoyable. You need to produce three Tutor-Marked Assessments (TMAs) for the course, and these are all focussed on a particular system you have chosen to look at. I chose a section of a website at work to look at, mainly because I was getting funding from work to do the course, but also because I hoped it would give me the opportunity to implement any design changes I came up with. You could choose any system in theory, from a DVD player remote control to an existing website.

The TMAs were incredibly time-consuming. The course notes suggested you should take around 10-15 hours for each one, but in practice I (and others I spoke to) took far longer: at least twice of this. Which brings me to my biggest complaint about the course. The overall mark is based on the TMA marks and the exam marks. You need to get 40% in both to pass which I feel isn’t a fair weighting: after all you might spend between forty and sixty hours on the TMAs and you get just three hours in the exam hall.

I thought the exam expected a little too much: both in the amount of questions you were supposed to answer (four in three hours) and the amount of lists and tables you were expected to learn by heart. If the course must be assessed by an exam, I’d prefer to see the course weighted more in favour of the assessments or at least fewer exam questions.

I wouldn’t say the course was enjoyable as such: it was very demanding and there were many concepts to try and understand. However, it was very useful and although it’s not going to guarantee me a glowing future as a usability professional in itself, I’ve already employed many of the concepts and ideas in my day-to-day work. Would I recommend it? Yes, but with caveats: I think the course materials could be slimmed down and I do think the coursework / exam mark ratios should be addressed.

It’s also worth bearing in mind how you will cope with distance learning: it worked well for me, fitting in with other commitments, but you do feel you’re on your own and there were few opportunities to bounce ideas off other people or to get a tutor to go over a particular issue. There was a course forum, but this seemed to die about a month into the course. One of my co-students set up a Facebook group which saw a little more action, but not much.

As a postscript: it should be pointed out that apparently this course is not going to last much longer in its current format. It’s been long overdue for review, so I think that it’s not going to be offered after this year or next (but please don’t take my word for it!).