One day I will get the chance to go to SXSW. Until that day, I have to live vicariously through other peoples posts, presentations and tweets.

One of the presentations that I’ve particularly enjoyed is a collaboration between Nick Finck and Raina Van Cleave called The 10 Commandments of User Experience. Currently they only have the slides up, but hopefully soon the podcast will be available as well.

Simon Whatley has posted a list of UX books that are free to read online. It’s a list of 9 books, and they all look to be useful reads. (Found via InfoDesign)

In addition, Mark McGuinness has made his book Time Management for Creative People available for free also. (Found via LibrarianinBlack)

Will Evans of Semantic Foundry recently posted this excellent list of UX Books called The UX Canon: Essential reading for the User Experience Designer.

It’s a thorough list, and I was pleased to see that I’ve read or own a number of the books, and now I have quite a few more to add to my Amazon list!

I’ve recently discovered a new blog – 52 weeks of Ux.  It’s a tumblr run by 2 authors and features 2 posts a week about elements of UX.

It’s been quite good so far, informative, interesting, occasionally entertaining. It’s only 5 weeks in but I’m definitely looking forward to the rest of the years’ posts.

Via The Librarian in Black I’ve discovered tht the Library Journal now has a new column on User Experience. As a librarian who has moved into user experience work this makes me rather pleased.

User experience is incredibly important and I think even more so in libraries. Especially when you think about the standard OPAC available at many libraries. So many of them are awful to use, clunky and badly designed and really need a good looking at.  And often this carries across to the physical space itself. As the author, Aaron Schmidt, points out in the first post, even something as simple as moving the location of a stapler to make it more accessible to patrons can result in a huge improvement to the users experience of a space.

I’m of the opinion that more librarians need to have a basic awareness of user experience principles, so I’m pleased that someone is tackling this. I hope it gets widely read and leads to an increase in fantastic experiences at libraries everywhere.