'User-Centered Library Websites: Usability Evaluation Methods' by Carol A. George finally came in.
It sounded a bit basic but I thought I'd give it a look. It's listed as "Temporarily out of stock" at Amazon.
Usability is a major objective for Drupal 7, the new upcoming version -- so much so that they've set up a site entirely devoted to it called, 'Drupal 7 User Experience Project' -- or 'D7UX.org' for short.
You've got to love a site which wears a declaration like this on its sleeve:
"Our UX Principles: 1. Make the most frequent tasks easy and less frequent tasks achievable. 2. Design for the 80% 3. Privilege the Content Creator 4. Make the default settings smart"
It's the first thing you see!
We've come a long way from the days of 'you must learn our system in order to use it'. From the Usability Guidelines at Yale University Library:
| Factor | Examples |
| Simplicity. Scale back features and dramatically simplify the experience for initial use. This should reduce unnecessary distractions, excess information, from initial screens. An initial search screen should not include advanced features, such as search by publisher or call number. | Avoid wordiness -- only show most necessary text, be concise. |
| Initial page should include only the most important and common tasks for this service with unobtrusive links to other advanced functionality. |
P.S. Remember the Yale site when the front page was one big graphic of nothing but a bunch of leather book spines?
A while back, I mentioned in response to a post by Don Norman on "Simplicity Is Highly Overrated" that the washing machines where I lived are so complex that someone had lost all patience and crowbarred one of them open.
This was significant, I felt, since Don Norman had mentioned washing machines as one of the things he wanted all the bells and whistles for. But what sense did this make as a rule for design, I countered, if you end up with a product where the user is forced to jimmy open the door because he can't figure out how to get his clothes out?
Well, I regret to report that a second machine has fallen victim to one of my neighbor's exasperation. It's hard to tell in the picture because the doors are all black, but the handle on the machine furthest to the left is completely busted off.
That makes two out of four machines or, in other words, a 50% crowbar rate!
We're all familiar with usability. Basically it's a way of assessing the success rate of any one task. Successfully finding a book or journal article starting from the home page would be a typical task to measure.
I'm wondering if it might also be helpful to think of task completion in the way marketers do, namely as "conversion rates".
MARKETING 101 FOR LIBRARIES
When librarians use the work "marketing", usually they mean 'getting the word out'. Marketers go one step farther: marketing for them means actually selling a product.
This notion of a complete transaction can be useful.
We all have user populations. When these users come to our site, they represent potential "sales" of our products and services.
This is where conversion rates come in.
I never thought I'd be reading this in the New York Times -- especially in relation to highway signs:
"Fonts are image, and image is modern America".
It comes from an excellent article called "The Road to Clarity" by Joshua Yaffe that looks at signage on U.S. Highways and efforts to improve readability. Begun almost twenty years ago, the process marks:
... the first time in the nation’s history that anyone attempted to apply systematically the principles of graphic design to the American highway.
The author then embarks on a breathless history of how the new font for road signs, Clearview, was developed using it as a vehicle to explore issues in Design and Typography. At one point, he declares:
Stodgy or irreverent, timely or timeless, typography helps establish the ethos and identity of a brand — and it can have a similar effect on the highway.
"Type on the roadway is very much like the corporate identity of a country," says Graham Clifford.
Touching base on everything from Milestones in Roman Times to Volkwagon Ads in the Sixties, the article serves as a wonderful introduction to the importance of getting the lettering right.
We're so used to thinking of usability in terms of computing that we forget that there's a whole physical world out there where usability plays just as critical a role. Indeed, lessons from one environment can lead to understanding problems in the other.
Change User Defaults at Your Peril
The first lesson would be 'Change User Defaults at Your Peril'. We know this from search interfaces that wander from unofficial "standards" of market leaders like Google.
Well, what if you had a whole State of drivers used to going right at Toll Booths for electronic payments now expected to go left? You'd have a lot of traffic back-ups!
That's precisely the situation in Indiana as reported in the Sun-Times:
The problem is that the [Indiana] Toll Road's new electronic lane design expects drivers trained by the [Chicago] Skyway setup to suddenly veer left for I-Pass payments instead of right as they do on the Skyway.
That plus confusing signage and lack of staff to mitigate confusion results in "up to 16 percent of vehicles ... pulling into the wrong lanes".
The irony is that it's the same private company running both systems!
ALA has been in the process of redesigning their site for a while now. They did a Usability Assessment Report (pdf) at the end of last year. Now, Rob Carlson, ALA's Manager for Web Development, has just posted a link to wireframes for the new site. He's also posted a link to an online survey for user feedback.
Carlson cautiones that the wireframes are just "rough early sketches" without the visual detail or content of the finished site. They're there to give you an idea of where things are heading and how they'll be arranged. With that in mind, have a look yourself. The survey runs till the end of the month.
You can find out more about ALA's Website Redesign Project by going to the ALA Web Planning Wiki.
I was looking for a picture of the infamous "Butterfly Ballot" when I came upon this AskTOG article by Bruce Tognazzini.
It's a great read illustrating how lousy design can lead to catastrophic results. One of the best lines is:
This is yet another disgraceful example of what happens when you don't bother to user test.
I've wanted to link to this for quite a while now. It's a PowerPoint presentation by Khoi Vinh called "Grids Are Good". Khoi Vihn is the lead designer at the New York Times and he gave this presentation along with Mark Boulton at SWSW.
The importance of the topic, namely that grids are essential to how we lay out information can hardly be overemphasized.
Look at the image below from Vihn's presentation. Note how easily the page fits into a grid.
Next, look at the home page of Cornell Library. (It's what got me started on this.) Note how the boxes in the center columns don't line up.
On Cornell's page, this isn't a big deal but it's easy enough to find examples that are far worse.
Whatever the degree, it's clear they hadn't seen Vihn's presentation. If they had, they would have known that visual order is an aide to cognition and that it conveys meaning. The less of it we have, the less clear our design.
You can download the presentation here... A podcast from SWSW is available here...
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