Neuroscience
Heard a great story on APM's Future Tense about "Feature Fatigue." Jon Gordon interviewed Roland Rust (U Maryland) about his recent Harvard Business Review article (Feb. 2006) called Defeating Feature Fatigue.
From the citation in PubMed (who knew they indexed HBR? but I digress): "Consider a coffeemaker that offers 12 drink options, a car with more than 700 features on the dashboard, and a mouse pad that's also a clock, calculator, and FM radio. All are examples of 'feature bloat', or 'featuritis', the result of an almost irresistible temptation to load products with lots of bells and whistles. The problem is that the more features a product boasts, the harder it is to use."
Rust pointed out in the interview with Jon Gordon that he was testing college students and THEY were overwhelmed with all these extra features.
Fascinating stuff. What does it tell librarians and database vendors about how library databases are designed? And how patrons are reacting to them?
ps, I got an iHome radio yesterday, and not only does it come with batteries for the backup, the batteries were INSTALLED, and the clock was set to the correct time. How’s that for anticipating user needs?!
- Polio
Today's New York Times has a feature story about polio: Rumor, Fear and Fatigue Hinder Final Push to End Polio By CELIA W. DUGGER and DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. Read the full article. - Anthony H. Risser | neuroscience | neuropsychology | brain...
- More Library Instruction Or Better Database Interfaces?
My librarian friend Emily Alling recently posted a question on Facebook asking if you were the head of a reference department: which should / would get more priority, more instruction on how to use library resources, or better interfaces for those resources?...
- The Future Of Reference
A colleague (hi Terry!) asked me to speak on a panel in his class about the future of reference. I'm a poor prognosticator (tho' I like to say the word), but I have a few thoughts. Here's a bit of what I said in class: Even before I talk about...
- Citation Tracking
Roy Tennant's excellent library literature abstracting service Current Cites points to an interesting short article about citation tracking: Bakkalbasi, Nisa, Kathleen Bauer, and Janis Glover, et. al. "Three Options for Citation Tracking: Google...
- Technology + Pubmed Searching Tips
The University of Washington Health Sciences Libraries has created a very cool set of training “videos” online for PubMed. They use the Camtasia software to capture both actions taken on the screen as well as accompanying audio to create an online...
Neuroscience
(Database) Feature Fatigue?
Heard a great story on APM's Future Tense about "Feature Fatigue." Jon Gordon interviewed Roland Rust (U Maryland) about his recent Harvard Business Review article (Feb. 2006) called Defeating Feature Fatigue.
From the citation in PubMed (who knew they indexed HBR? but I digress): "Consider a coffeemaker that offers 12 drink options, a car with more than 700 features on the dashboard, and a mouse pad that's also a clock, calculator, and FM radio. All are examples of 'feature bloat', or 'featuritis', the result of an almost irresistible temptation to load products with lots of bells and whistles. The problem is that the more features a product boasts, the harder it is to use."
Rust pointed out in the interview with Jon Gordon that he was testing college students and THEY were overwhelmed with all these extra features.
Fascinating stuff. What does it tell librarians and database vendors about how library databases are designed? And how patrons are reacting to them?
ps, I got an iHome radio yesterday, and not only does it come with batteries for the backup, the batteries were INSTALLED, and the clock was set to the correct time. How’s that for anticipating user needs?!
- Polio
Today's New York Times has a feature story about polio: Rumor, Fear and Fatigue Hinder Final Push to End Polio By CELIA W. DUGGER and DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. Read the full article. - Anthony H. Risser | neuroscience | neuropsychology | brain...
- More Library Instruction Or Better Database Interfaces?
My librarian friend Emily Alling recently posted a question on Facebook asking if you were the head of a reference department: which should / would get more priority, more instruction on how to use library resources, or better interfaces for those resources?...
- The Future Of Reference
A colleague (hi Terry!) asked me to speak on a panel in his class about the future of reference. I'm a poor prognosticator (tho' I like to say the word), but I have a few thoughts. Here's a bit of what I said in class: Even before I talk about...
- Citation Tracking
Roy Tennant's excellent library literature abstracting service Current Cites points to an interesting short article about citation tracking: Bakkalbasi, Nisa, Kathleen Bauer, and Janis Glover, et. al. "Three Options for Citation Tracking: Google...
- Technology + Pubmed Searching Tips
The University of Washington Health Sciences Libraries has created a very cool set of training “videos” online for PubMed. They use the Camtasia software to capture both actions taken on the screen as well as accompanying audio to create an online...