1 What to read instead

Summary

On this page are links to the source material and notes about a couple of things I didn’t include when creating this book. You may prefer to read them instead.

Given the enormous economic value of the world wide web and attracting users to one’s site, there are considerable research efforts into user experience (UX) design in both the commercial and public sectors.

Two leading groups are the Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g), a private sector company based in the USA, and in the UK public sector the GOV.UK: Government Digital Service.

Both these groups provide extensive materials detailing their research and guidance on what works (and what doesn’t). I encourage readers to explore their websites and beyond.

Here are some links to pages I consider relevant for librarians creating webpages:

NN/g: Writing for the Web Articles & Videos
NN/g: Psychology for UX: Study Guide: a collection of links to NN/g articles and videos about principles of human psychology and how they relate to user experience design.
GOV.UK: Content design: planning, writing and managing content: this page covers and links to NN/g research, but from a UK public sector viewpoint
GOV.UK: Government Design Principles: this page covers the principles of design which may be relevant for thinking about whether a webpage needs to exist at all.
If you prefer books Letting go of the words by Janice Redish (Redish 2012) covers many of the same topics and NN/g publish a book called How People Read on the Web (Pernice, Whitenton, and Nielsen 2021).

1.1 What’s not covered

1.1.1 User testing

It’s worth noting that both NN/g and GOV.UK use data and user testing as part of their UX design process. This is not something we’re considering in scope here, but one would expect this to improve our webpages if we could include this too.

If data-driven design is of interest to you this November 2023 blog post from the GDS details how they used data from their existing pages to guide the update of GOV.UK webpages.

1.1.2 Videos and other media

Here the scope does extend to webpages that include images, but not to video or other media. However, most of the considerations that apply to images, apply to videos and other media (See Chapter 5).