The below slides outline the updates to Scopus released last weekend. While most of these changes have already been announced on the SciVerse blog, this goes into a bit more detail on why the updates were made. It also mentions some of the smaller updates not yet announced and introduces some of what I feel to be the most interesting new SciVerse Applications for Scopus.

For two of the more interesting projects, I would like to go into more detail on the process and rationale behind the changes. One of the most noticeable changes is that the interface of the  main panel of the Document Details (Abstract) page has been completely overhauled.  The primary goal for this revamp was to improve the scanability and readability of the page.

We started with the user research already done for the Article of the Future and the new article page on ScienceDirect. From that foundation, our User-Centered Design group developed a prototype and conducted usability studies with researchers and librarians to determine which design elements transferred to  Scopus. As part of this research, we gathered information on which parts of the page users scan for first. The implemented design then focused on optimizing the visual hierarchy, so that the most used information is more prominent. Fonts were also optimized throughout to make reading of abstracts and other elements easier.

The other most noticeable change is the replacement of the tabs from the Document search results pages. When enabled, these tabs would run a users search on Web and Patent content from Scirus. The new links instead display the results in SciVerse Hub. While all existing functionality remains, Hub offers a lot of advantages to the tab structure. Most importantly, Hub offers improved relevancy rankings and additional refine options.  Hub also collapses multiple copies of the same document into a single record.

As part of this update, we now only display the links if results are available and display the results count in the link. Some readers may remember that this count used to be in the tabs, but was removed. Usage has since proven that display of this count is extremely important for users. The More tab has been replaced by a link to “Secondary documents” that works exactly the same as the tab. Our User-Centered Design group also developed a prototype and conducted usability studies to optimize these changes.

Hopefully the the above slides and description, help to give a full picture as to how the recent updates help improve the Scopus user experience.  Please feel free to leave feedback on these changes in the comments.

• AxsJAX Brings Accessibility Features to Web 2.0 | Compiler from Wired.com

  This will make it a lot easier for government websites, library sites, etc. to improve the usability on their sites. One less excuse…

  (tags: usability ajax accessibility google)

Faceted Friending is a term that I have started using to describe what I see as one of the next major stages of how tagging will improve social software. In his recent post titled Sharing and Following/Listening in the Social Web, Thomas Vander Wal discusses how networks are beginning to allow users a deeper level of granularity into how their defined relationships effect their sharing. For example, the Family, Friends, and All distinction in Flickr is built into how information is shared. Thomas’ post highlights some of the top level distinctions that people are making along these lines. While many of the following points will overlap with what Thomas is writing about, I believe that I offer a different perspective on many of the same issues.

One example he uses is “Geo Listening and Sharing”. Basically this includes sharing and listening to people in your geographic vicinity. I had the pleasure of working with Thomas on a mini interactionary at DCampSouth. There we were broadly tackling how to improve status updates and Facebook feeds. One of the ideas we came up with was to allow sharing within a geographic area.

The concept of faceted friending is being employed elsewhere on the web as well. The subscription function in del.icio.us is another popular example. I don’t necessarily want to subscribe to my contacts bookmarks about cats and local politics, but I might want to subscribe to their bookmarks on folksonomy and tagging. In fact, with resource sharing applications like del.icio.us, the utility is highly diluted when employed as a straight network. This is why at BiblioCommons, tagging and subject headings are the bonds that hold the network together. Rarely do I care about all of the topics that a person is reading up on, but I often am interested in one unique facet of our shared interests.

This is also important in more social instances. This became particularly noticeable to me when Facebook opened up to the world. Before, I primarily used Facebook to interact with local friends, friends from college, etc. All of a sudden half of my Facebook friends were librarians. While they are librarians who I consider friends, they don’t necessarily need to know my local happy hour plans and I don’t necessarily need to know about stuff they are doing outside of our shared participation in the library world. This background is how the idea of being able to focus status updates by shared personal facets or geography entered my mind when working on the design challenge with Thomas at DCamp.

One of the tricks to employing Faceted Friending is to make the process simple enough that users take advantage of it. That is why our group decided to minimize the facets that could be attached to a status update to those that would be most useful to that feature. Given that students often use it to share their whereabouts, the geographic importance of status came through as a major facet. The difference between core friends and acquaintances came through as a second, which lead us to the concept of a VIP status update that is only sent out to a core group of friends.

A second way to get people to take advantage of faceted friending is to automate the process as much as possible. So for example, when I add someone as a del.icio.us contact, the system could compare our tags, offer up the most common shared tags, and then offer that I pick tags to follow. Again, BiblioCommons is doing this very well and a lot of my belief in this concept comes from my time with them.

Another example of automating this process is through automatically determining geographical information. In the Facebook status updates example, Facebook could determine a users whereabouts by IP address and share their location oriented status updates with friends in that vicinity. Of course GPS can be used similarly.

A third way to simply the process of faceted friending is through embracing and developing open standards that can allow people to maintain categories of friends across social networks. Beginnings of this can be accomplished through adoption of creative uses for microformats such as XFN. This is a topic Chris Messina brought up at last years BarCampRDU that has been gaining increasing traction lately.

I hope to host a session on Faceted Friending at tomorrow’s BarCampRDU. Unfortunately, I will miss the morning sessions, but will pitch the idea for the afternoon.

I plan on writing a lot more about this topic, but was just trying to get a preliminary sketch of my ideas out there. I will be writing more on faceted tagging as well. Ultimately, I see the intersection of faceted tagging and faceted friending as fueling the next generation of social software.

• Help, I need somebody to tag
  This student needs help conducting research on his Master’s Thesis on “Collaborative Indexing Systems”, i.e. tagging. Please take his 15 minute tagging “survey” if you get a chance. “Tobias Kowatsch, Student of Computer Science in Media at Hochschule Fu
  (tags: folksonomy research tagging thesis survey experiment TobiasKowatsch Folksonomies)
• Pattern Recognition » Why ALA will never learn
  BIGWIG got in trouble with LITA for not using enough LITA branding. However, I am joining LITA because of BIGWIG.
  (tags: lita bigwig ala ala2007)
• Library Web Chic » Blog Archive » Exhausted but gratified
  Karen Coombs’ response to Jason’s post and the LITA Letter. “But the truth is that the only way the system changes is if people participate and try to change it.”
  (tags: ala lita bigwig ala2007)
• Free Range Librarian » Blog Archive » Educating LITA
  A deeper discussion of ALA committees resulting.
  (tags: ala lita bigwig)
• del.icio.us usability – a photoset on Flickr
  A peak at Del.icio.us usability testing. Posted on Flickr of course.
  (tags: del.icio.us delicious usability photos)

• A Hipper Crowd of Shushers – New York Times
  Librarians on the front page of the NYT style section is a GOOD thing. Was it fluffy? Yes. Was it an overall positive portrayal? Yes. Most professions would be thankful for such coverage.
  (tags: librarianship style stereotypes)
• Technology’s Untanglers: They Make It Really Work – New York Times
  Article on usability professionals.
  (tags: usability)
• ICWSM Blog: Personality Impressions Based on Facebook Profiles
  Brief research article on how closely social networking profiles (on Facebook) match actual personality traits. Replicates earlier findings on personal web pages. “But how accurate are the impressions based on OSNW profiles? Our previous research on pers
  (tags: facebook research identity)

In my psych. of HCI seminar, we were talking about the effect of aesthetics on perceived usability. That made me think of an article that appeared in Arts & Letters Daily a while back that discussed studies about attractiveness in human-human interaction. Given that one of the other topics considered in the class is how people tend to treat computers as social agents, I wondered if it might be effective to look at traditional characteristics of human attractiveness for ideas when designing aesthetically interfaces. One of the main characteristics of attractiveness that I remembered from this paper is that of symmetry. When I brought this up as a measurable attribute of human attractiveness, my class found it rather amusing. Anyway, below is the link to the article:

Looks Do Matter
Wilson Quarterly