shinylib

An open letter to my colleagues and coworkers

Dear Friends,

It’s been a crazymaking series of events we’ve had going on around here these past few years. We’ve rolled out an entirely new website, new subject guides (with new software on the backend), gone live (and excelled) with chat/SMS reference, completed a thorough round of usability testing, watched 14 hours of raw test footage about 4 times over,  and we continue diving further into the maw of madness. We’re hiring a second full time digital resources specialist to support us in all of this digital change.

In addition, we’ve done all of these big projects while all of us had wild life stuff going on. It’s the way it goes.

So, as we move forward, I have a few things to share and ask of you. If you’re not a colleague at MPOW I bet that the team at YPOW would appreciate you doing similar.

• Please stop complaining to our student users about the library catalog interface. I know it’s frustrating and I am working my butt off to make things better for us (as are other colleagues). However, it’s so disheartening to work with a student user who is frustrated, and to do my best to walk them through the pain points, only to realize they aren’t hearing me because they already heard you tell them this thing was pointless.
• Following the previous request, by all means let us know when things aren’t working. Please understand that our requests for issues that can be replicated and for screenshots where applicable are not designed to keep you from submitting feedback. These requests are actually so that we can address the issues and get them corrected.
• Please treat the incoming digital resources specialist with the same respect you’d offer any big-L-librarian despite the fact that we’re not hiring them to join the faculty. It is, I’m sure you know, inappropriate to begin requests with, “Well, you’re not a librarian here and my time is worth more than yours…”
• Please understand that I am a human, not a machine. It does actually impact my ability to maintain a positive working relationship with you when you publish opinion pieces questioning my self esteem and decision-making faculties.
• The website will never “be finished.” It’s fine to keep asking for a date but you’re going to keep getting the same answer. Perpetual beta means that we’re constantly in a cycle of designing, testing, and redesigning. It’s how you know we’re doing our jobs.
• Please, at least once a term, actually go look through the entire website. The main reason for this is so that you can do a more effective, less labor intensive job of supporting students. Also, if you’re going to submit complaints about the website, they have more weight when we know you actually are familiar with the content.
• Use the communication channels that are setup for these purposes, streamlined works well in this case. Communities of practice, website feedback forms, and other avenues help keep the communication rolling between the appropriate parties. Randomly spamming the entire library list with your musings is confusing to all parties involved.

What kinds of things would you share and ask of your library web team, whatever they may be called? It’s definitely not a one way street and I genuinely want to know what the issues are and how to address them in a way that keeps the values and needs of the many library stakeholders at heart.

Design is everywhere!

Once you start thinking about design and usability they start to haunt you everywhere you go. Here in Portland we’ve been having Arctic Blast 2008!*

This got me thinking that I’d really like to have a pair of moonboots. Moonboots are what I grew up calling those non-sport snow boots. Kinda like puffy nylon Uggs?

Anyway, first I went over to the Joe’s Sports website (Joe’s is cheap and near my house). I was trying to sort out how best to find these boots, and I was thinking for some reason that moon boot was a phrase my mom invented. So I typed in something like snow boots and Joe’s showed me some Asic running shoes, a bunch of snow tubes and toboggans, and some sidenav with different categories. I decided that the Joes site is possibly designed with browsing/categories in mind, so I tried a different tact. I searched for snow and then clicked the footwear category, thinking it would sort my results that way.

There are the Asic running shoes again. Hrm, weird. This time I tried using the topnav to go to Apparel & Footwear, thinking that I’d just try to find the coldweather footwear somehow. I found the Asics. After squinting at the screen for a bit I noticed that the Asic running shoe is a featured item and shows on every footwear-related results page. Ohh. Well that was confusing. I scan the categories of footwear but see absolutely nothing that looks like it would keep my feet warm or dry. At this point I’ve been at this for 5-7 minutes and I’ve given this way longer than seems reasonable.

I go to visit the fine folks at Columbia Sportswear (we have an outlet here!) and am greeted on the homepage by some “human element” photos and some topnav. I choose footwear and am automagically whizzed off to a page with—oh my stars—pictures of really awesome-looking snow boots. My options, according to the helpful text and images, are to see the coldweather footwear for chicks, dudes, and crumbsnatchers. Why wouldn’t you highlight the coldweather shoes? It’s freakin winter!

This is awesome. This is what needs to happen to help me find what I’m looking for and it didn’t really take a lot, on the surface, to get it to me. Sure it takes a fair amount of design and user interface construction but as the end user it required absolutely nothing of me—and that’s what most consumers (of information, footwear, groceries, whatever) want of the experience.

You know where this is going, you have to. What is your online experience offering your end user? Are you a Columbia or a Joe’s Sports? If you’re not sure, you might want to take some time exploring the idea. What are the experiences you have in the “real world” that cause you to reflect on the library experience? I have some other thoughts involving our campus cafeterias…more on that later. Those snowboots from Columbia are awesome, but I’m stuck on this moon boot thing, so I’m off to do more searching… Oh, these are cool.

*The local hysteria involving weather incidents is ridiculous. The local news folks have hijacked all of the airways and are playing endless coverage of what they call Arctic Blast 2008! We’re talking about a week of snow, folks. I’m thinking there are people who endure this all winter long, without too much trouble.

Roads too few or too many?

We’re having a number of debates discussions amongst our librarians these days. Principally the discussions have taken two avenues: 1) access to electronic information via the library website and 2) federated searching via the library website. Basically it’s all about our website and how we envision it being used.

Some librarians advocate for the most simplified process possible. Students don’t need to know that articles come from databases and that peer review is an editorial process. Proponents of this argument suggest that we add links to the homepage that will take the user to the expected content with as few decisions (clicks) as possible along the way. Want a peer reviewed article? Follow the peer reviewed article link, in which the requisite checkboxes will have already been checked on your behalf.

A good bit of support for the first viewpoint (shortcutting) says that we see and interact with so few students in the library (distance learning, y0), via email, or on the telephone that we have to assume a large percentage of the unseen are not finding what they are looking for. And if they’re finding it, they’re likely doing so with more frustration than necessary. For this reason it has also been suggested that we invest in some kind of federated searching tool.

For me, personally, I have a difficult time wearing the librarian hat and the design hat at the same time. I’ve been accused of striving for the ideal (and perhaps missing the reality) in these discussions—and I’m generally okeh with that.

My librarian objection is that is our job to teach these skills and I fear our students will go out into a world full of libraries that might not have a “Peer Reviewed Articles” link. If we’ve taught them to think categorically about research they will know that they learned that articles are found in databases and try to start there. I don’t want to find that we’ve handicapped our students by “dumbing things down.” True, not all of our students (by far) have any plan for further formal education. I still expect them to become competant consumers and producers of information. This also doesn’t mean that I don’t grok the other argument, I’ve just chosen to hope for the best, I guess.

If our students don’t have these skills let’s work harder to get the education to them, not make it easier to check-out on the process. Distance learning students need librarians and IL instruction—hell, everyone needs this stuff if you ask me—and I’m just going to have to stalk those students who are roaming the campus but never coming in the library. Don’t want to learn controlled vocabulary in the library? Fine, I’ll bring it to you in the cafeteria, the gym, and this here screencast tutorial.

My design stance on this is that providing all of these links is just adding clutter to the homepage. Good design needs room to breathe and all of that jazz. It’s a pretty short argument, but an important one. We just spent the better part of year a completely scrapping our woefully inadequate website and building a new one. The last thing I want is to see it overrun with rampant linking. That’s what all that beautiful nav is about.

A colleague’s Frostian reflection today was that she wished our students didn’t have to choose between two roads (on our website) in order to search for information. I think this is an interesting notion. Where she sees too many roads, I think I see too few. I see the need to simplify access for some students but not at the expense of options and precision.

How do you navigate these discussions in your library? Where is the happy medium? Do we need to go to the completely customizable portal model? Click here if you want your website eerily simplified, click here if you’d like frustration with a side of controlled vocabulary…

Webvisions podcasts

Webvisions podcasts are now up at http://www.webvisionsevent.com/wp/?p=65. And on that note, I’m too lazy to finish those session reviews. Email me if you want my notes. (:

Webvisions: Design is in the details

These guys win my award for best presentation slides of the entire conference, no contest. Sadly I can’t give them the same award for polished verbal presentation, but you can’t winnem all, eh? I wasn’t really sure whether the schtick about forgetting who was presenting which slides was authentic disorganization or a poorly executed attempt at humor. In any case…

Design is in the Details, presented by Bryan Veloso and Dan Rubin focused on how the tiny details are what distinguish a good design from a great design. You can check out the entire presentation at their site, Design is in the Details.The presentation focused on the essentials of good design feel: layout, type, and pixels.
Continue reading…

Webvisions: Hacking the enterprise with social media

DL Byron is nothing if not a nut. He’s the geek behindTextura Design,and the co-author of Publish & Prosper: Blogging for Your Business. He runs the srs bike culture blog, Bike Hugger and does cool stuff like host Twitter giveaways at conferences. To be clear, I like any dude who starts a presentation by encouraging the audience to do epic shit. Although I didn’t really get all of the aspects related to hacking the enterprise, DL did give a decent seat-of-his-pants overview of 2.0 social stuff, peppered with such phrases as “Yeah, you gotta pursue your vision — stuff you love, and rock it hard.”
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Webvisions: Blogging for a living

Blogging for a living: Taking your skills to the next level

Jim Turner, founder of Bloggers for Hire and creator of the Genuine Blog (a “Daddy blog”) spoke about the challenges and triumphs of blogging professionally. He suggests that there are significant differences between those seeking to blog part-time and those looking for full-time professional blog-writing gigs.
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Webvisions 08

Webvisions is officially done and over with. It was an awesome time. I think I will have quite a lot to say, but I’m going to attempt to break things up into smaller, segmented posts. We’ll see how that goes—my conference writeups are always sorely lacking and out-of-date.

From my standpoint as a librarian, Webvisions was everything I wanted Online Northwest to be…but without all the pink sweaters and discussion of cats. Also missing is a critical discussion of aboutness, classification, and human language. That is, Webvisions is an awesome place to geek out about design, but as a practicing librarian I have to take all of that design and interface geekery and apply it to the library context.

In general it was a supremely refreshing experience to immerse myself into design, interface, and interaction but I did find myself wishing for less theory and more practical application. I know, those of you who know me are finding it difficult to reconcile that statement with the theory monkey you’ve come to love and tolerate. I think my friends would tell you that I am pretty intolerable after several days of immersive geekery—I become hypercritical of the discrete elements in the world and how they fail to seamlessly flow together.

Rather than attempt to apply a structure to the posts, I’ll just do them chronologically. I’ll leave it to you to decide how the session information interrelates.

Day 1 at Webvisions

• Blogging for a living: Taking your skills to the next level (Jim Turner)
• Hacking the enterprise with social media (DL Byron)
• Design is in the details (Dan Rubin & Bryan Veloso)
• Total recall: Complementing information architecture (Sean Cowne & James Keller)

Day 2 at Webvisions

• Data portability, privacy and identity: Welcome to the Open Web (Scott Kveton)
• The language of interaction (Bill Rouchey)
• The Web is dead (Roger Black)
• Website optimization in seven easy steps (Kim Blessing)