The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two. And Free Usability Reviews
July’s keynote speech will be given by Dr Fiona McPherson, an internationally recognised expert on memory and memory improvement. Fiona is the author of the books ‘The Memory Key’ and ‘Remembering Intentions’, and her website is http://www.memory-key.com.
Fiona will be speaking on:
Beyond the magical number 7 – what “24” has to teach us about working memory capacity:
What really governs how much information a user can handle; the importance of attention, what it is, and how you can control the user’s experience.
There will be an opportunity to ask questions related to memory and usability after her talk.
The second half of July’s meeting will be your chance to show off your usability skills, and hear others’ insights, by helping make suggestions for improvements to websites. The sites will be displayed by projector, but if you want to make a start you can visit the sites before the meeting. We will start with Fiona’s site and then moving on to Te Ara’s site.
“Visitors to my site (http://www.memory-key.com/ ) stay an average of 3 ½ minutes, so they do usually make it past the entry page, but it’s a reasonably large site and I’m concerned about how easily they can find what they’re looking for, or perhaps more importantly, realize what’s available (even if they weren’t looking for it). My visitors are just as likely to enter my site through any of my pages, although the home page is one of the top two entry pages, and the top two are the point of entry for around a fifth of my visitors. But the top 50 accounted for over a third of visitors, so it really is very spread. There are hundreds of pages. So the main issue is not so much the home page (though I’d welcome any suggestions for improvements!) but how to make the internal pages better portals. You can see a work-in-progress example on my new layout at http://moodle.memory-key.com/MemWorks/braindevt.php — if you use Firefox; I haven’t got the menus to work right in IE yet”.
2. Tessa Copland is looking for feedback on a particular search result page of Te Ara’s (http://www.teara.govt.nz/) website.
3. If you have a website, application or a product etc that you would like people to give feedback on please contact me richard [at] optimalusability.com and if we have time we will include it at this meeting, and if not, at a future meeting.
Meeting Details
- When: 12 noon to 1.30pm, Tuesday 3 July 2007
- Where: Optimal Usability, First Floor, 126 Cuba St, Wellington
- RSVP by July 2 to richard [at] optimalusability.com
- Please bring along your own lunch. Optimal Usability will provide tea and coffee.
Directions
Optimal Usability is on the first floor of 126 Cuba St. Directly above Good Luck Bar, which is just to the right of The Friendly Bakery, and across from Tulsi restaurant. Come through the black slatted doors, through the glass doors and up the spiral staircase.
Lastly, Feedback
In an effort to keep the momentum of these meetings going and keep them relevant please take a moment to answer at least some of the questions below (and remember to add your RSVP if you are attending the meeting):
- What are your interests? e.g. Information Architecture, Usability, Accessibility, Etc. And what topics would you like to hear about?
- Can you present? Or do you know of interesting speakers who might be able to speak at a future meeting?
- Can you offer a venue where we can hold meetings?
- Have the sessions been too technical, or not technical enough?
- If you have (or have not made it to a session yet), what else can we do to make these sessions something that you would try and come to on a regular basis? E.g. Do we need to vary the times, topics, presenters etc more?
We will discuss the results of this feedback after the main presentations at the end of the meeting.
Cheers,
Richard Kerr
p.s. George A. Miller’s original article: The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information can be found at http://www.musanim.com/miller1956/
