Lessons learned

Integrating usability into your work patterns means being able to demonstrate that you are in touch with the full range of users in a non-jargonistic way that excludes no-one. If you want to bootstrap usability, you will find that it has to influence and inform every...

How successful have we been?

Our project plan lays down two kinds of success metric: quantitative and qualitative. However, a secondary aim is looking at identifying a method whereby these practices could be built into existing projects without much additional cost and enhance the quality of the...

Bootstrapping usability

As more and more content was added to British History Online (BHO), the listings pages and search results became longer and users were confronted by growing amounts of information which they would need to sift through to help them decide on which sources were going to...

BHO Issue 9: ‘Users have no way of re-ordering a list’

Page Listings and source Heuristic Subjective Description Listings pages are sequenced by an editorial weighting: if a user remembers a source by time period, or by name, they have no way of re-ordering the list. Although source pages are arranged alphabetically, they...

BHO Issue 8: ‘It is not clear what the top sources are’

Page Listings Heuristic Learnability Description A page listing sources for a specific taxonomy dimension will list the most relevant sources at the top. However, they are visually indistinct from sources which contain a lower quantity of relevant content. Impact...