Books to read and some updates

Good afternoon, team.

I have four piece of news (you have all been sent an email about this as well).


News Bulletin 1
I found one more book, where two of the chapters are going to be useful for our user/task analysis and creating personas. I've only glimpsed at it (I'm at work you know, busy woman HA!), but this might be helpful. I'll try to photocopy this some time today.

Source: User Interface Design for Mere Mortals by Eric Butow (2007)

Did you want to preview the book? A great place to check is here (you can also try amazon, but the site below makes you want to buy any book!)
Look here: http://safari.oreilly.com/9780321447739?tocview=true

Here is the Table of Contents for the useful bits. I consider only Chapters 5 and 6 to be relevant for this project. (Note: I copied this by hand, so I hope it's accurate).

Chapter 5. How Users Behave

The Psychology of User Actions

Psychological Types

The four Primary Temperaments

Knowledge: Brain Versus World
Task Structures
Conscious and Subconscious Behavior
Transforming Difficult Tasks into Simple Ones
Creating a Conceptual Model
Case Study: Interviewing to Establish the Conceptual Model
Summary
Review Questions

Chapter 6. Analyzing Your Users

The Users' Mental Model

The Result
Implementation Versus Mental Models

The Experience Bell Curve

Different Needs for Different Groups

Understanding the User's Goals
User and Task Analysis

Constructing Personas
Watching Users in Action
Persona Evaluation

Case Study: Producing a Primary Persona
Summary
Review Questions

News Bulletin 2
I will try to speak with the IBM librarian this week. She is an expert user (librarian) but unique because she does not use the particular system we are analyzing. I'll update you on my progress.

News Bulletin 3
I have another book to circulate to the team. It's an easy to read, and a very fast read on graphics, general design, and how to use appropriate typeface.

Source: The Non-Designer's Design Book by Robin Williams (2008)

News Bulletin 4
I plan to learn how to use Adobe In Design (a desktop publishing program). I hope to create the document plan using this program and our final project. I hope to assess whether it's easy enough to learn and use in the next couple of weeks. I think it will be, but I think more than one person should work with me on it, preferably someone who plans to take the rest of the courses in this certificate. You will eventually have to use either this program or something very similar to it. I have the program for free and a book that helps you learn how to create things and tutorials.


Thank you for all of your hard work team!!!