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!!!

Brainstorming -- class project

I've decided that working on an "open source" project and creating documentation for a piece of software is the way to go. Not only can we contribute our documentation to a team when we are done with the course, but we can put on our resumes that wrote documentation and it's out there for the world to see; it's a publication!

A great place to look for open source software is:

http://sourceforge.net/

Updates I'm writing this on Wednesday evening (Jan 9) 2 days later (I've been researching)

I have three ideas for this project. To ensure that everyone has access to the software, my requirement when searching was that the software was open and free. Open is hard concept to define here so I defer to wikipedia or opensource.org. I also don't want to pay for it, but legally. I also wanted to brainstorm about software that everyone would be familiar with and that they've seen before. The categories of software I state in this modest list should be familiar with everyone in our class -- so the basic concepts of how to use this won't be too difficult to grasp.

1. Instant messaging software
   
2. Blogging software
3. Photo management software

Let me give some examples of software we can work on for the project, going through each idea above.

1. Instant messaging software

The IM clients Pidgin and Miranda have FAQ and some documentation already, but we could improve on it or we could reorganize some of the information. We can also contribute to these projects -- they are continuously being developed.

2. Blogging software

I don't have any other ideas other than Wordpress. It's an open project, not owned by a company and anyone can use it.

3. Picture management software

We could document Picasa, but it's owned by Google. I don't know if we would be able to publish our documentation when we finish this course.