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.

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…

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.
Layout. Let your layout breathe. It’s what the slide said and it’s what you should do. Bryan and Dan remind us that at some point you need to step back from your design, break out of code view, and look at the screen. Feel what’s going on with the entire design because that’s what the eye is going to do. The human eye does not go about distinguishing individual pixel rendering choices so that it can pop up a brain alert to the effect that the 1px line in that button is what makes it most realistic. The eye just takes it all in and communicates a feeling.

Type. Use visual design patterns in typography. Using multiples of 3 or rules of ten will help to accomplish this. Check out CNN for an example of excellent visual patterning. You don’t notice it because it’s done well, but there is patterning all over this site. I know because Bryan and Dan pointed it out to me. The spacing between the header and the content works on multiples of 3 (18, I believe). Font sizing is 12. Spacing between content is 12. The wider gap between content and header is intentional and indicates to the eye that there’s a bigger distinction happening here for a reason.

I don’t even have to tell you everything that CNN has done well. Just go to Fox news for some suck-out-loud stab-you-in-the-eye design. There is just about no reproducible design behavior on this site. See that padding around the Fox news logo? Why is it there? There’s no standard spacing anywhere on this page. Notice how CNN had lots of channels but they didn’t accost you? Why does Fox news have channels within channels within pages of channels? This is design at its worst. Check out Bryan and Dan’s presentation slides to see their take on making Fox news better (ha! I know…ha!).

Some specific techniques that will benefit you in the type department

• use range kerning or CSS letter spacing to control the spacing between characters. Visually you just don’t need all of that air around the letters on a screen. This will help with the next technique.
• Avoid widows.
• Using ALLCAPS? Give characters in all capital letters more room to breathe. Your brain recognizes letters by their shapes, too much crowding makes that really difficult for the eye.
• Strive to mimic real life tactile experiences. Don’t use =”black”. Try taking on a text color that’s nearly imperceptibly different from true black. Try using HEX 111 or 333 or some percentage of black.

Pixels. Pixels are where the idea of feel becomes extra important. A pixel is tiny, the smallest unit in a digital image, in fact. Bryan and Dan suggest that you engage in some pixel hacking if you’re really looking to move from good design to great design. Pixel hacking, in my best explanation, is about using the stock options in your progs and then adding things like a 1px stroke or tweaking opacity to make these tiny changes that add up to big textural feel. For example, in Photoshop, the standard settings for dropshadows are ridiculous and will render a dropshadow that has absolutely no realism. Instead tweak the setting to 90%+ opacity and the feel becomes much more effective.

The guys are truly much more effective at discussing these concepts than I, I suggest checking them out sometime if you get a chance. But really, don’t expect too much poise and polish, these guys are big on the um and uh parts of the speaking experience.

The driving concept behind his presentation on social media is that we use this stuff to fuel our narcissism. We create what he refers to as “Planet insert name here” sites: read my blog, follow my tweets, see my feed, me me me. It seems that DL has discovered that people, particularly web users, thrive on narcissism. Isn’t that ultimately what you do online? Check yourself out, check out people who think like you, people who don’t think like you but you want to highlight because they make you look better, etc.

Also noteworthy is that the Twitter generation has decided that email is only for the old fogies out there. After all, keyboards still require more than just your thumbs, what 12-year-old is down with that?

I came away from the session with a screenful of “notes”, most of which are interesting statements DL threw out there for some reason or other. Applied to just about any twopointopian context they make sense. Here are a few I was able to decipher on reviewing my notes:

Talk about what you know. You can’t just change who you are or what you have experience with.

Use social media to be the person who brings the beer to the party, not the person who throws the party to talk about themselves.

There is no ROI on Facebook.

It used to be that you were famous for 15 minutes, now you’re famous for 15 people.

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.

Most part-time bloggers are hobbyists (so many yarn blogs!), stay at home moms and dads (blogging for diaper money, as Turner says), and students. Full-time bloggers, by contrast, tend to be professional communication, marketing, advertising, and PR specialists.

Companies hiring professional bloggers are generally going to have different criteria based upon the company’s knowledge and experience with blogs and bloggers. Small companies are most apt to look for one individual to blog on behalf of all departments. These companies will include startups and will have an interest in finding fast and flexible individuals who are willing to work on a small budget contract. Large companies are apt to have a communication/marketing/PR department that would oversee any blog-related communication and PR efforts. These guys are slow and inflexible and are likely to take their large budget to an agency for outsourced blogging. Media companies and Blogging networks have their own distinct foci, with Media companies relying on seasoned journalists to do their blogging efforts and Blogging networks offering meager per-post or revenue share payment options.

Whatever the environment you choose to do your professional blogging, expect that you will develop content which may include writing, videocasting, podcasting, and live/lifecasting on behalf of the contracted employer. Many companies will expect you to become their evangelist–so if you’re especially uncomfortable with the professional practices of an organization, you may want to reconsider the idea of blogging on their behalf.

In addition to developing content you will also be expected to converse with the company and their readership. This can take the form of e-mail, commenting, and other networked communication. Of course all of this conversation and communication requires quite a bit of monitoring. Who is reading these blog posts? What kind of buzz are they generating, is there any data mining that can be done? Finally, you have to report all of those data you collected while doing all of that monitoring. You’re going to need a fairly good grasp of analytics to do a good job with this last bit.

Blogging for a living is definitely do-able. Realize that it’s a new profession and as such the salaries may not be there yet–but on the other hand, this leaves you a lot of room to negotiate. If you can sell yourself and blogging as the solution to whatever 2.0 quandary an organization is having you may just be in a position to set your own salary. There is some expense involved in blogging for a living, the budgets vary widely at this point, and as a new profession there are very few professional guidelines and certainly no blogger union to keep everything on the level.

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)