This week's assignment was to search the PsychINFO database for information about good website design. Although PsychINFO is a specialized psychology database that at first glance doesn't seem like a great source for web design information, I am optimistic that it will contain documents on relevant topics like how people process visual information, what their preferences are for what computer screens look like, and so on. However, I still thought the amount of material might be small, so I started with a simple broad keyword search for "website." As the results show, this was not effective:
Not only are there too many results, but they don't share obvious common characteristics that suggest better or related search terms. I had previously had success in another PsychINFO search by using controlled vocabulary, so I decided to change tactics and search within the PsychINFO thesaurus to figure out better terms to use. It turns out that "website" and "web design" are not subject terms, but "Websites" is:
To be continued in the next post, as Blogger can't handle too many large images at once.
No comments:
Post a Comment