Kate Lawrence, VP of user research at EBSCO - the massive information services (think subscriptions & aggregation for scholarly databases, articles, indexes, ebooks, and other digital resources) provider - gave a talk at the library UX miniconf I attended today.
It was A+ and I assume the TED version must be forthcoming. Here’s a few noteworthy tidbits before I succumb to the siren song of bed & book.
Middle & high school students tell research ethnographers: Google is their "mother," their "water," their "soulmate."
Google & Wikipedia = "comfort research." As in comfort objects, comfort food.
When thinking about school projects, young (elementary & middle school) students say, "I'm looking for a .edu and a .org, they are more reliable." They avoid “the dot coms.”
Page-parking is the new pogo-sticking: opening a whole bunch of new tabs to come back to later. It’s akin to a "shopping cart mentality" for info seekers.
“It's not about page load anymore. It's about cognitive load. And not putting people in forests with too many trees.”
