The best definition of a trade or skill that I can think of is being able, through your 'expertise', to make a significant improvement either in people's lives or in how they get things done. This applies to many things; it even applies to Content Management.
I remember the website I did for a relatively large non-profit organization. The original site consisted of nothing but a drab collection of web links and PDF files. It didn't take much work on my part to automate the site. But this minor yet significant change fundamentally altered, it turned out, how the people in that organization approached their online content -- to the extent that the energy and dynamism of their activities in the real world were finally reflected in their web presence as well.
I was reminded of this again a week or two ago at UIC. A number of people from Classroom Scheduling were looking at an application I had put together that told students what room their final exam would be in (see page here). Since we were getting close to the end of the Semester, something like this was bound to be handy.
The demonstration with the scheduling people went well. I had promised that the application would be easy as hell to maintain and it was. But what they really liked were the feeds -- not the usual RSS feeds but the ones specially formatted as MS Word and Excel files (thank you, Views Bonus Pack module). This meant that every time they had an edit, they no longer had to distribute or print out for the entire University a completely new Word or Excel file. They could just point to the feed which like all feeds would be updated on-the-fly -- only again not as RSS but as a Word or Excel file. This they really liked!
Anyway, the time it had taken me to put this feature together was a little itty bitty second. In fact, the whole project didn't take me more than a day or two. So what's most gratifying then is the positive effect it produced in others -- almost sinfully out of proportion to the amount of effort I put into it. And that's a wonderful thing!
Posted in Submitted by Leo Klein on Sun, 05/30/2010 - 12:28pm.
I'm hijacking the title of an editorial in the latest issue of Journal of Academic Librarianship because I believe it illustrates a problem rather than a solution to our approach as librarians to technology.
In the piece, the author describes two approaches to meeting user needs:
...[To] wait for someone to tell you what they want (which assumes they know their needs and the solution possibilities clearly) or to know your customer and the solution possibilities well enough to provide a useful solution that would likely never have occurred to them.
So which, according to the author, should we pick? Why the latter, of course, which the author calls "opportunity-driven" and characteristic of Steve Jobs:
As trained information specialists who are also dealing daily, upfront and personal, with the changing information environment, I believe we are particularly well positioned to develop the insights and perspectives that allow us to see opportunities and possibilities that are not as clear or as obvious to our patrons.
The obvious, almost classic problem with this approach is that it moves the focus from our users to ourselves and while that might make for applause lines at library confabs where we're basically talking to ourselves, it risks ending up with solutions more suited (surprise, surprise) to our own needs rather than to those of our poor 'benighted' users.
The fact is, the library doesn't exist in a vacuum. Sure, we're in the information business but so are a lot of others. When our users come to us, they don't want a "19th-century library" as the author jokes. They want everything online and easy to find -- just like they've come to expect on every other site that seeks to attract their business.
To do this, we don't have to reinvent the experience. We don't need Steve Jobs even if we could afford him. All we need is to do our homework, to keep the focus always on our users, seeing what they prefer and how they prefer to work, melding our own wares to their requirements. Our users have already told us what they want. It's in the usage statistics of the most popular websites. Now all we need are librarians smart enough and sharp enough to listen to what they're saying.
I liked the article in BusinessWeek on the 'Real-Time Web'. It being BusinessWeek, they naturally devoted a significant portion to speculation on how to make money from this emerging trend and I had to laugh at the illusive precision of there being "at least $5 billion to be made on the real-time Web". What, just $5 billion?
Anyway, to give them their due, they correctly identify the trend:
In just the past couple of years, several developments have come together to make the Web more of a real-time experience: ubiquitous high-speed Internet connections; a growing number of mobile devices such as the iPhone with full Web browsers; and new Web technologies that enable instant transmission of messages and data. That mix has made always-on, real-time communications easy and addictive.
Okay, that sounds pretty 'real-time' to me. What I can't understand though is the focus, bordering on fixation, on Twitter in this and other articles. I mean, here it is, we've got an emerging technology that's giving us real-time group communication both in text, voice and video and the most impressive thing they can think of is a text stream limited to 140 characters?
You can't be serious. Off the top of my head, the number of possibilities include:
- Switch from traditional telephones to more computer- and network-based audio
- Conference calls on steroids -- now with video
- More ways to interact remotely at meetings and conferences -- routine live blogging and group chat are just the beginning
- Greater use of video chat -- for no better reason than there being a video camera on everyone's laptop
- Remote mentoring including real-time online editing of student research papers
- Easier and more dynamic ways to collect and organize research
And yes, I've seen the video introducing Google's ambitious Wave Project. It's nice but I'm most optimistic about initiatives that build on past successes and move forward by incremental steps. The kind of technology we've become familiar with as hallmarks of Web 2.0 (YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, etc.) has prepared us well for this next step.
[h/t ReadWriteWeb]
NYUonline (2001):
New York University is closing down its for-profit electronic learning operation, NYUonline, and moving some of its curriculum and staff into its School of Continuing and Professional Studies.
U of I Global Campus (2009):
[University of Illinois] trustees meeting in Chicago voted to follow a faculty task force plan to scrap much of the current version of Global Campus.
NYUonline (2002):
In two and a half years of operation, NYUonline received nearly $25 million from the university, but enrollment remained anemic at best: just 500 students at its peak.
U of I Global Campus (2009):
The $10 million program had only attracted about 360 students as of last month.
NYUOnline (2001):
The university blames last month's closure of the distance-learning company, called NYUonline, on the economy.
U of I Global Campus (2009):
...[Prof. Nick Burbules] said, a global recession has changed conditions under which the older initiative was established.
NYUonline (2001):
"I believe that the value of our work -- some of which will continue to be carried on by the university, and some non-academic portions of which may be acquired by third parties -- will become even clearer with time," [NYUonline CEO Gordon] Macomber said in the release.
U of I Global Campus (2009):
Burbules said the 2.0 model draws from the UI's experience with the initiative. "I think what is driving this process is the belief that the mission of expanding the online offerings is important," he said. "I give [U of I President White] full credit for inspiring this work, and I personally believe it is the future of higher education."
Note, there were significant differences between the programs, though stated goals tended to shift over time. Nevertheless, what the two shared was an inability by the people in charge to truly understand what the technology was capable of and what it wasn't. Decision-makers themselves had no strong background in online content development for higher education. This lack of background made it hard to evaluate alternative strategies. Instead of identifying successful initiatives already in place and extending those, they chose to concoct their schemes out of whole cloth.
The outcome should come as no surprise.
I had a very pleasurable time at the Garfield Park Conservatory on Chicago's West Side several weeks ago. Finding it however included a mishap due in part to this extremely poorly constructed map which I found while wandering around looking for directions.
You can see a larger version of the entire billboard here -- plus a close-up of the map itself.
I was at the "Gold Dome Fieldhouse", looking for the main Conservatory building. Can anyone guess why I started heading (incorrectly it turned out) west?
Time's up: You can make a map in a thousand different ways (just look at mass transit maps from various cities), but one of the few conventions is that the top generally points north, the bottom south, the left west and the right east. That's how maps are laid out.
Unfortunately, the person who designed this one, decided to ignore the convention and turned the thing 90 degrees counter-clockwise. This way, it may have been easier to fit in with the rest of the information on the board -- that's probably why they did it -- but it's really going for convenience of composition at the expense of comprehension.
Nobody looking at this is going to instinctively tilt their heads sideways to figure it out. Instead they'll do what I did and head off in the wrong direction.
I was saved by friends who, lucky for me, drove over and picked me up. Others might not be so fortunate. The whole point however is that bad design happens when it doesn't take user assumptions into consideration. The result can be not simply making things harder to find but causing users to make incorrect and possibly disastrous decisions. Just ask the person who designed the "Butterfly Ballots" in Florida.
Posted in Submitted by Leo Klein on Sun, 11/16/2008 - 11:07pm.
First people, please don't mention the Kindle and the future-of-print in the same breath. That would imply that one has something to do with the other and why do Amazon's marketing for them?
But ignoring that for a moment, I think the whole concept of a dedicated "ebook" reader is somewhat dodgy. I mean, if that's all they do, why bother?
You can't copy out bits and pieces of the text, import them into something you're working on, share them with friends, blog about them -- or do any of the million other things you're used to doing on electronic devices that are increasingly just as small and inexpensive.
In other words, an 'eBook' reader completely sucks as an 'eBook' reader because it treats what you're reading as a complete digital dead-end.
Aaron Schmidt rightfully quotes himself with pride from an article in the Chicago Tribune:
"There's a lot of dead wood in libraries, and I think there's a lot of administrations that are kind of just biding their time for retirement and don’t feel like putting forth a lot of effort," he said. "I think there’s a general culture of resistance to change. That needs to go away."
He's right of course but I think the problem is a bit more complicated.
(more after the jump...)
This isn't a post trashing Second Life. (For that, go here...)
Rather it's about allocating resources in the face of constantly changing technology. It's about which pony to bet on in the race for relevance. We can't bet on all the ponies so what should we look for when choosing a favorite?
(more after the jump...)
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...
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.
(more after the jump...)
