Category Archives: usability

Career Direction, Women’s Work, and Other Musings

  By Coral Sheldon-Hess | March 8, 2013 - 9:29 am | , , , , , , ,
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girls-computer

Anyone I talked to at ALA Midwinter (and probably anyone who reads my social media accounts closely—which I suspect is no one :)) has caught on that I’m thinking about next steps in my career. I’ve passed the magical “three years of experience,” after which many more jobs seem to open up and become possibilities. More importantly, I’ve laid some really good groundwork at my current job, which I can use over the next two years to improve not only my organization’s web presence but how the organization makes decisions about our web presence. That is real, lasting change. Coincidentally, … Continue reading →

ALA Midwinter 2013

  By Coral Sheldon-Hess | January 30, 2013 - 1:44 pm | , , , , ,
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I’m combining my obligatory “lessons learned” post (past ones: here… and the others all got left in draft format) with my “how’d conference go?” post. I didn’t learn that many lessons—not enough for a full blog post—and, spoiler, I had a great conference. Quickly, my lessons: Get a prescription for sleeping pills before conference. Because, seriously, I laid in bed for hours before sleeping, each night, and it wasn’t even an uncomfortable bed. Sounds crazy, but here’s my theory: I squash down my inner introvert all day, at conference, and I act totally extrovert-like. But, as social as I enjoy … Continue reading →

Product Review: FitBit (but this post is secretly about libraries)

  By Coral Sheldon-Hess | January 18, 2013 - 1:03 pm | , , , , ,
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This isn’t normally a product review blog. Nobody sends me free samples (including FitBit). But I kind of want to write about the FitBit One because it connects to some of my library-related thoughts, recently, and because (spoiler) I really, really like it. And I know it isn’t technically the latest and greatest FitBit has to offer—they have that new wristband, to compete with the Nike Fuel. Or is that not out yet? Anyway, I looked at wristbands and ended up going with the One. It was the right call, for me. First off, before we get into the interface, … Continue reading →

Book Review: Creating the Customer-Driven Academic Library

  By Coral Sheldon-Hess | November 11, 2012 - 6:55 pm | , , ,
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I think I’ve mentioned that I asked my Web Team to read Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think together. We talked about a different pair of chapters at each meeting until we were through the book. And I’ve heard that another group on campus, also working on a website, is taking a similar approach! That made me happy. Another group within the library is also reading a book more or less together, though I think we’re just each individually reading the whole book as we get to it. The book is Creating the Customer-Driven Academic Library, by Jeannette Woodward. I finally … Continue reading →

Evolution of a Website

  By Coral Sheldon-Hess | August 1, 2012 - 11:15 am | , , , , , ,
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Because I’m working on my “fourth year”* tenure and retention** file, I’ve been reflecting, lately, on the progress I’ve made while here. And, in particular—unsurprisingly—I wanted to see what kinds of changes the website has undergone. I didn’t do a great job of grabbing screen captures, early on, so this is not a perfect reflection of every step in the site’s progress. I know there’s an intermediate step between the first two, where “More »” went away, and a Site Search popped up beside Site Index, briefly, among other things. My note-taking, back then, was good enough to confirm that … Continue reading →

Google Plus for Education

  By Coral Sheldon-Hess | February 14, 2012 - 4:40 pm | , , , ,
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And now, after looking more into it and organizing my thoughts (as much as I ever do—see photo on left), I find that I actually have more than half an hour of content to cover, in my Google Plus for Education talk. Much more. But the online session is set to shut down right after 2:30, I believe, so I’ll have to restrain myself. (The in-person session went OK. Not amazingly, but not badly.) Here are the links I’ll share: Google Plus Cheat Sheet Michelle Stephens’s talk (57 minutes) on using Google Plus with students – covers the pros and … Continue reading →

User Experience Design (ALA post 2 of ?)

  By Coral Sheldon-Hess | July 11, 2011 - 4:49 pm | , , , ,
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Probably the most valuable of the sessions I attended at ALA–rightly so, since it cost more than ALA itself–was the LITA preconference, User Experience Design for Library Websites, presented by Sarah Houghton-Jan. It gave me a lot of insight into what we should be doing to improve our web presence. First of all, our current plans are too shallow. While we keep thinking about the front page, first and foremost, and acknowledging the architecture could use a bit of an overhaul, we really need to be a bit more strategic about all of it. The whole thing. Including managing the … Continue reading →

Belated #reverb10 Musings – 11 Things, Actions

  By Coral Sheldon-Hess | December 14, 2010 - 1:08 pm | , , , , , , , , , ,
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I know I e-signed the pledge to blog every day for reverb10, but I don’t actually want to try the patience of my (I suspect fairly few, after multiple digital moves last year) readers by writing poorly thought out posts for no better reason than “I said I’d blog.” You have better things to do, and so do I. So if I don’t have the time to write something considered, I don’t write. Similarly, if the prompt isn’t compelling, I don’t bother—though that hasn’t been the case very often. 11 Things I liked the December 11th prompt, asking for a … Continue reading →