2008 ILA Annual Conference
The Annual Conference of the Illinois Library Association is in Chicago this year.
It runs the whole week and is located at Navy Pier. Here's a shot of the entrance to the exhibits.
IA-Usability
Posted in Submitted by Leo Klein on Wed, 09/24/2008 - 2:51pm.
Usability Guidelines from the Yale University Library
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?
Posted in Submitted by Leo Klein on Tue, 07/08/2008 - 3:49pm.
Library Webpage Design and the Notion of Conversion Rates
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.
Posted in Submitted by Leo Klein on Sun, 08/19/2007 - 12:45pm.
Fonts Are the New Black
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.
Posted in Submitted by Leo Klein on Sat, 08/11/2007 - 1:30pm.
Usability Lessons from Real Life
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!
Posted in Submitted by Leo Klein on Sat, 08/11/2007 - 12:06pm.
Quote of the Day
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.
Posted in Submitted by Leo Klein on Sat, 07/28/2007 - 12:29pm.
Grids Are Good
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...
Posted in Submitted by Leo Klein on Mon, 07/09/2007 - 9:37pm.
User-Centered Design Requires Actual Users
I've been going through a lot of material in anticipation of my talk at National Louis-Benedictine next week.
USER-CENTERED APPROACH
It's amazing how many people say their approach is "User-centered". They talk about it as if it were something new. "Our innovation," they proudly declare, "is that we're finally making users the center of our design".
I'm happy to hear it! On the other hand, I can't really imagine a person or institution ever claiming NOT to be user-centered. Why hell, even the Library at Alexandria probably thought it was user-centered.
And who wouldn't? As an institution, you just don't go around saying, 'our new policy is to completely neglect the needs of our users (and oh, BTW, would you like to help contribute either financially or otherwise to this worthy goal)'.
It just doesn't happen.
Posted in Submitted by Leo Klein on Thu, 02/15/2007 - 12:19pm.
End-User Manifesto
gapingvoid posts an interesting list called the "End-User Manifesto". It's billed as "things that need to be in the mind of anyone building software, particularly for the Web." Here are the first four items:
1. Don't waste my time.
2. Help me do the right thing.
3. Respect my decisions.
4. Design well, and guide me to make the right decisions by that design.
They're all really quite good. To see the rest go here... (h/t User Centered)
Posted in Submitted by Leo Klein on Tue, 01/30/2007 - 5:53pm.
Metrics of Success for Library 2.0?
When I read posts like this, I really have to ask myself what is the measure of success for incorporating new technology: the fact that it's been incorporated at all (nice) or that it's actually being used (even better).
"[S]ocial software, Weblogs, linklogs, folksonomies, wikis, podcasts, RSS feeds, and Web services" are definitely advances in the Web as we know it. I routinely use many if not all of these myself. But their simple inclusion (whether real or imaginary) into a library's website doesn't by itself constitute a "success".
It's important when trying to incorporate the tools of Web 2.0 that we don't forget the lessons of Web 1.0: you don't shove technology down the throats of your users simply because you've become enamored by it. Rather it's your users who define what your priorities are and whatever they want, you'd better be in a position to deliver on -- big time! That's the measure of success that counts.
Everything else is bupkis.
UPDATE: Apparently this has been on the minds of a couple of people. Have a look at Sarah Clark' "Dark Side of Library 2.0"
