Jon Udell offers a nifty new bookmarklet to boost your use of your local library catalog, and in the process finds an elegant and compelling argument for why the future of information technology webservices needs the REST paradigm:

When I showed one librarian why her OPAC system wouldn't cooperate with LibraryLookup, she concluded that her vendor had used "the wrong kind of software." And I agreed. She has never read Roy Fielding's thesis and never will, but she groks the REST principles intuitively. What she was saying, though she lacked the terminology to describe it, is that her OPAC is broken because it's not RESTful. And if she has any say in the matter, the next OPAC her library buys will be.

[ Source: The Beauty of REST ]

We tell our clients that, in the great grand scheme of things, no one is ever going to remember expensive graphics and stylish page design, people will remember what you say and how you say it; working with the web is working with conversations, and say what you will about the importance of Gucci shoes and Armani suits, in the final analysis, it's not the packaging but the toy that gets played with.

Nonetheless, how you say your bits online does carry some weight, but perhaps not in the way you might think. We all know the drill about form and balance and Fitts Law and fonts, and yes, there is that pile of amygdala research to say a few booth babes (or hunks) and some juicy food will pique both attention and memory, but let's face it, we also know far too many flaming guitar sites that are turning real ROI while many an elegant web foyer drops into the Pit of the Unknown --- according to the ever-pragmatic UI empiricist Jared Spool, what really clicks with the online audience is getting what they expect ...

Usability folks often get carried away with the number of clicks and the architecture of sites. But as Spool's study demonstrates, even the most horribly designed and constructed site can achieve wonderful results - just so long as the visitors feel confident that they will achieve their tasks.

Up2Speed gives us a tour of this latest research report from the Use IT labs where it seems the predictability of an interface far outweighs any issues of design, and in a triumph for Alan Cooper, Jared's researchers are finding what Interaction Design engineers have known all along: Form is nothing if there is no apparent function.

This might be thought of as a general topic for a list of specific items that have been known in interaction design circles for decades:

• any successful device must reveal itself in the way the two knobs on the back of a spring-drive alarm clock very clearly illuminate their function
• an interface should leverage the set and setting of the user, build on their cultural expectation set -- this does not mean everything must look like MsWord, it means that red means something different to people from China than to people from Mexico.
• tool-tips are a band-aid, they arrive too late, appealing to the explorer user, not to the person who just wants to get their job done.

With each click, users told us they were more confident they would succeed on those sites where they actually did succeed. Somehow, they were predicting their success.

Spools report is going to fall on a lot of "it can't be" nay-saying dead ears, but if you ask me, we ignore this result at our peril.

[ Source: Up2Speed: Study Delivers 'Ah-ha' of Site Usability: Creating Confidence ]

An alert to all members on teledyn.com to go and check your "edit account":/user/edit page for the new selectable margin boxes. All accounts can now select from about a dozen optional sidebar boxes including many of our popular "knowledge industry news channels":/import/bundles -- instead of wading through the whole list, you can add your favourites to the front page and save yourself thousands of seconds every year! :)