User Interface Group
December 14, 2006
User Interface Group
December 14, 2006Present: Maggie Bartley, Darcy Duke (minutes), Lisa Harrington, Nicole Hennig (chair), Lisa Horowitz
1. Project SimpLR updates
The Aggregator Task Force presented their final report to the Project SimpLR Advisory Group this week. Nicole gave an overview of the discussion - the Task Force recommended that we either get a product called [xxxx] or hire a developer and use open source tools, such as Apache Solr. The Advisory Group will be meeting soon to discuss next steps.
The Metalib Task Force met with RISG and gave an interim report to the Advisory Group this week. Nicole briefly presented our progress to UIG and gave an overview of the discussion with the Advisory Group. UIG will be involved in usability testing of prototypes in the Spring. We hope to have a working tool for next Fall.
2. Priority setting for Barton
We have set aside basic "fixes" and things that are easy to do but just require a policy decision whether to implement or not - we will cover these in another meeting. In the meantime, work is progressing on obvious fixes.
The group completed a rough ranking of the remaining suggestions/features.
To start, we set aside the difficulty of implementation and focused on user impact, looking for suggestions that:
- solve a problem
- affect a large number of users
- show we're on the cutting edge
- are fun (for us and for users)
- have been requested by multiple users
The following criteria also influenced the ranking:
- features that bring users to us take priority over things that send them away (because user needs showed that often people begin elsewhere and then come to us and they already know how to easily find Google, Amazon, Wikipedia, etc.)
- things that users can't replicate in other ways/places should have priority over things that can
Darcy and Nicole will refine the rankings and incorporate difficulty of implementation as a factor.
3. Updates:
- Nicole has added 2 authors@mit event audio files to our new podcast feed on the news blog
- RSS feeds from Barton will go live December 15th
Next Meeting: 11 January 2006, 3-4:30, CubeSpace