User experience is immeasurably important for your patrons as they access your Web site. This article presents tips and strategies for testing user experience, suggests a number of different popular technologies and tools that are used in the UX field, and lays out a plan for sharing and utilizing data to make improvements on your Web site. It is…

The Friends of the Pikes Peak Library District (PPLD) had a legacy website that was remotely hosted and maintained by a volunteer. They wanted a more significant presence on PPLD.org and an easier interface with which to update information. The developers decided to create a new Friends site in Drupal, using RWD, CSS3, and HTML5. The plan was to…

The problem of human-computer interface design was brought to the foreground with the emergence of the personal computer, the increasing complexity of electronic systems, and the need to accommodate the human operator in these systems. With each new technological generation discovering the interface design problems of its own technologies, initial…

The purpose of this article is to describe an internet-based mass customization assignment in Operations Management/Supply Chain Management classes where students utilize the Web site of a company that offers a customized product. Students evaluate the user interface, judge the value proposition of the product they demonstrate, and discuss issues…

According to the "Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections," a good collection is broadly available and avoids unnecessary impediments to use. Two challenges, however, are the constant change in users' expectations and the increasing volume of information in local repositories. Therefore, as academic and research…

It's been well documented in a number of articles regarding the contemporary library patron that with the rise in mobile computing and smart phone technology, patrons are looking for fast and easy service from whichever technological avenue they are using to access library services. Libraries are responding with increasing numbers of online…

The menu has become an integrated component within nearly all professionally designed websites. This teaching tip presents a no-code way to design either a vertical or a horizontal fly-out menu by using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) within Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. The approach described in this tip helps students fully understand how to…

As e-resource systems and web coordinator for Southern Oregon University, the author is deeply involved with the university library's website. In the latest revision of this website, the author knew she needed to jazz it up a little. With screen real estate on the main page at a premium, the author hoped to use a tabbed box and an accordion-style…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present a user interface for web lectures for engaging with other users while working with video based learning content. The application allows its users to ask questions about the content and to get answers from those users that currently online are more familiar with it. The filtering is based on the…

Every year, more and more reference sources go from print to online, from the stacks to the library's homepage. The librarians at Quinnipiac University's Arnold Bernhard Library in Hamden, Connecticut, realized that these subscriptions are more than the occasional web offering to supplement the library's mission. They have become an important…

This article surveys research in the areas of aesthetics and design, usability, visual aesthetics in education, and recent statistics related to online education. The focus of the article is on defining the role of visual content and aesthetics in the user interface and exploring what importance aesthetics and visual content have to education.…

Some remember when they accessed the Internet through the telephone on a 300-baud modem. It was slow and it was not easy, but it gave them a view of the world. Now there is the web, idiot-proof email, and practically unlimited wireless connectivity. Having gone from desktop computers to laptops, now a major push is moving connectivity into the…

Academic libraries customize, support, and provide access to myriad information systems, each with complex graphical user interfaces. The number of possible information entry points on an academic library Web site is both daunting to the end-user and consistently challenging to library Web site designers. Faced with the challenges inherent in…

Those who work in libraries focus much of their energies on providing access to information, and major changes seen in the last decade have shown the need to be flexible in the ways that librarians approach content delivery. Library users span all the generations of information distribution mechanisms. Some prefer to receive information in their…

TheBrain was created to take advantage of the most powerful information processor in existence - the human mind. Explains products of TheBrain Technologies Corporation,, which has developed computer interfaces to help individual users and corporations organize information in ways that make sense to them in the proper context. Describes a…