Log of my research
Since I wrote this article as part of a course module on electronic research, I had to keep a logbook of my research.
0.) Spent two days reading web search tutorials like www.ifkw.de/usus/ (USUS - the Internet Guide for Journalists from Global 98) and www.suchfibel.de (a tutorial in German).
1.) General search for "web design" in Search Engines like Alta Vista, Infoseek and Yahoo.
2.) Browsed through some documents to get a feel what the topics were. Also read the articles and papers on web design written by students from Global 98 and the partner course in South Africa (http://nml.ru.ac.za/carr).
3.) Searched for mailinglists on different tools we were told (found that liszt.com was best), found a couple and joined four: webdesign-l@hesketch.com, netzschule@onelist.com, ADVANCED-WEB@LISTSERVER.COM, Spiderwoman@amazoncity.com.
4.) Focussed on usability (and the possible conflict with fancy design) - at that time I tought exploring this conflict would make the article more interesting.
5.) Did a more focussed searches like "web design" AND usability, "web design" AND usable or "web design" AND effective "user interface design" AND web.
6.) Apart from many web pages also found a jumplist (www.usableweb.com) with more than 400 links to more very useful pages.
7.) Looked through some of them, printed some and pasted the rest of the seemingly useful URLs into a Word document (in a rough order of estimated relevance) accompanied by the title and sometimes a short description to maybe come back to them later. (Came accross the same couple of names of web designers/usability experts over and over again: Jakob Nielsen (called "the guru of Web page usability" by The New York Times, one of the principals of the business consulting company Nielsen Norman Group founded in 1998, was an expert for software and web usability engineering and testing at Sun Microsystems before), Jared Spool (Founding Principal of User Interface Engineering (1988), a firm conducting software usability studies and consulting, background: software developer and programmer), Keith Instone (Web Usability Consultant, who maintains Usable Web, the leading guide to Web usability resources, Web Review's usability matters columnist, owner of the mailinglist CHI-WEB), Lynda Weinman, Jennifer Fleming, David Siegel, Lou Rosenfeld...
8.) Ordered three books by some of these designers through the foreign loan at the library - David Siegel: Creating Killer Web Sites, Lynda Weinman: Designing Web Graphics, Jennifer Fleming: "Web Navigation: Designing the User Experience". (Only the first two arrived in time, and I only had time to read small sections of them.)
9.) Got the name of a person in charge of web design at Germany's largest PR-Company, Kohtes & Klewes, (Jörg Hoewner) from a friend. Got the e-mail-address of a South African Web-designer that puts emphasis on functionality (Brett Lock) from Roland.
10.) Searched the archives of the mailinglists where possible. Left one list immediately afterwards, because it was too unprofessional, but kept in touch with the owner of the list, who sent me a whole list of links and another mailing list, that I hadn't found before, CHI-WEB@ACM.ORG. (Among the about 730 subscribers are the "big names" of the scene, like Instone (the owner), Nielsen, Spool, Fleming, Rosenfeld, etc.) The mailing lists filled my mailbox with 200 mails per day. (Because of the poor quality of most of the contributions to the mailinglists, I refrained from taking part in newsgroups) After a couple of days I left Spiderwoman, after two weeks advanced-web and webdesign-l, because the topics were too widely spread in the field of web design and having to go through the masses of mails every day was taking up too much time. The list I stayed on (CHI-WEB) also didn't prove to be of too much use during my time of subscription, but rather because I could search their archive and because I looked some of the members' personal or company sites when they were listed in the signature. Furthermore, the organization behind this mailinglist, SIG-CHI (Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction), had a homepage with a lot of useful links and the papers of speeches held at the yearly CHI-conferences.
11.) Contacted Jakob Nielsen, Brett Lock, Jared Spool, Keith Instone and Jörg Hoewner by e-mail, asking them to answer five questions.
12.) Did a very limited search on Altavista (best for complex Boolean search strings) hoping to explore the possible conflict in my topic: usability NEAR design NEAR (conflict OR interfere) AND (internet OR web) and found mostly documents I had already seen before, but also some new ones. (Decided that this would not be the main focus of my article, since this conflict is dissolving and this is only one feature within the development of usability)
13.) Subscribed to two Newsletters and searched their archives: UIETips from: http://www.uie.com (topic: recent research about user interface design for the web) and another one from http://www.WebWord.com/ (topic: Internet usability and human factors)
14.) Went back to some of the URLs saved in my Word-document.
15.) The e-mail to Brett Lock failed to go through on both of his addresses. Only one of the other people I contacted, Jörg Hoewner, answered me, even though I wrote a reminder-mail some days after the first one. And Jörg didn't answer me before Sunday afternoon and his e-mail did't reveal real news. (So please excuse my constant use of quotes from experts that are attributed to other peoples' articles.)
(Maybe I should have posted my questions to the whole CHI-WEB-mailinglist, but I didn't want to annoy more than 700 people and I thought that people might be less likely to transfer the mail directly to their trash if they are addressed personally.)
CONCLUSION: The amount of information overwhelmed me right from the beginning. I think I spent too much time digging up more and more sources and started to actually read them too late. Also, I felt I would have needed more time to collect more knowledge before asking questions to people and to allow them to answer them or contact other people. He feel that I have started to build up some knowledge, but my article is too general and doesn't really contain news.