Welcome

When I left the journalism industry two years ago not many people were thinking about the usability of their websites. Within the past few weeks I have seen a few things that make me believe that maybe they are starting to come around.

With the spike in online newspaper readership last year, thinking about the user seems to have started to become a priority.

A few weeks ago the Atlanta Journal Constitution posted a job to the CHI jobs list seeking Usability Engineer/Analyst. I also found it interesting that they posted to the CHI jobs listserv and not the typical places you would post journalism jobs. The CHI jobs listserv is one of the locations for people who are interested in the area of user centered design and usability to look for jobs.

I have seen some papers that have done some usability testing on their own without a position like this. A recent online journalism review article talked about a small paper in Alabama that conducted usability testing on their website. This article reminded me of some of the papers I read from the mid to late 90 that discuss usability testing like this on software and other websites outside of the journalism industry.

This is a very positive step for the industry as a whole. Hopefully usability testing will lead to user centered design techniques throughout the industry.