I will be covering UX as a base for successful outreach and liaising activities. Kiyomi and Erin will discuss the stealth librarian liaising and the stealth librarian outreach respectively. If you can, join Erin and Kiyomi and me! If not, here are the slides of my part. The twitter hashtag is #stealthlib.
Description: Relationships are at the heart of providing a satisfactory user experience and delivering library services and programs that match with what our users want and need. Many libraries have traditionally spoken with users only when necessary or when a problem has occurred. Looking at user experience, outreach, and liaison librarianship from the perspective of relationship-building between librarians and faculty, staff, or students allows librarians to provide more targeted and desired services while increasing positive perceptions of libraries. This live webcast investigates the benefits of relationship-building in a holistic manner. Instead of focusing on one aspect of librarianship, public, technical, and outreach services are examined as different means to the same end: better services through better campus relationships.
Join three academic librarians specializing in user experience, outreach, and liaison librarianship to discover how they use relationship-building to enhance their work. Learn how user experience research, outreach, and stealth librarianship can be used to create meaningful connections within the campus community. Presenters will examine the benefits of strong personal relationships and how they can improve the visibility and reputation of the library on campus. Additionally, hear how quality relationships can lead to the acquisition of new resources and the evolution of services to better meet users needs. Participants will perform a brief environmental scan, help to create an open access list of outreach activities, and share their own tips for successful stealth librarianship.
Learning Outcomes:
Learn to create a practical strategy in order to consciously shape and deliver positive user experience with the library staff in person and online.
List specific outreach activities which will engage users in order to build positive relationships between the library and its users.
Analyze nontraditional opportunities for engagement in order to prioritize and maximize the impact of time allotted to nontraditional engagement.
Presenter(s): Kiyomi D. Deards, Assistant Professor, University of Nebraska-Lincoln; Erin Dorney, Outreach Librarian, Millersville University; Bohyun Kim, Digital Access Librarian, Florida International University
Target Audience: Librarians who want to improve the overall user experience of the library environment. Librarians who are subject specialist and/or have liaison duties with specific academic departments or schools. Librarians who perform outreach activities to faculty and students. Librarians who manage the library’s social media channels.
*** This post has been originally published in ACRL TechConnect on Mar. 13, 2013. ***
Many librarians work with technology even if their job titles are not directly related to technology. Design is somewhat similar to technology in that aspect. The primary function of a librarian is to serve the needs of library patrons, and we often do this by creating instructional or promotional materials such as a handout and a poster. Sometimes this design work goes to librarians in public services such as circulation or reference. Other times it is assigned to librarians who work with technology because it involves some design software.
The problem is that knowing how to use a piece of design software does not entail the ability to create a great work of design. One may be a whiz at Photoshop but can still produce an ugly piece of design. Most of us, librarians, are quite unfamiliar with the concept of design. ACRL TechConnect covered the topic design previously in Design 101 – Part 1 and Design 101 – Part 2. So be sure to check them out. In this post, I will share my experience of creating a poster for my library in the context of libraries and design.
1. Background
My workplace recently launched the new Kindle e-book leader lending program sponsored by the National Network of Libraries of Medicine/Southeast Atlantic Region Express Mobile Technology Project. This project is to be completed in a few months, and we have successfully rolled out 10 Kindles with 30 medical e-book titles for circulation early this year. One of the tasks left for me to do as the project manager is to create a poster to further promote this e-book reader program. No matter how great the Kindle e-book lending program is, if patrons don’t know about it, it won’t get much use. A good poster can attract a lot of attention from library patrons. I can just put a small sign with “Kindles available!” written on it somewhere in the library. But the impact would be quite different.
2. Trying to design a poster
When I planned the grant budget, I included an budget item for large posters. But the item only covers the printing costs, not the design costs. So I started designing a poster myself. Here are a few of my first attempts. Even to my untrained eyes, these look unprofessional and amateurish, however. The first one looked more like a handout than a poster. So I decided to make the background black. That makes the QR code and the library logo invisible however. To fix this, I added a white background behind them. Slightly better maybe? Not really.
My first try doesn’t look so good!
My second attempt is only marginally better!
One thing I know about design is that an image can save or kill your work. A stunning image alone can make a piece of design awesome. So I did some Google search and found out this nice image of Kindle. Now it looks like that I need to flip the poster to make it wide.
The power of a nice image! Too bad it is copyrighted…
But there is a catch. The image I found is copyrighted. This was just an example to show how much power a nice image or photograph can have to the overall quality of a work of design. I also looked for Kindle images/photographs in Flick Creative Commons but failed to locate one that allows making derivatives. This is a very common problem for libraries, which tend to have little access to quality images/photographs. If you are lucky you may find a good image from Pixabay which offer very nice photographs and images that are in public domain.
Changed the poster setup to to make it wide.
3. What went wrong
You probably already have some ideas about what went wrong with my failed attempts so far. The font doesn’t look right. The poster looks more like a handout. The image looks amateurish in the first two examples. But the whole thing is functional for sure, some may say. It does the job of conveying the message that the library now has Kindle E-book readers to offer. Others may object. No, not really, the wording is vague, far from clear. You can go on forever. A lot of times, these issues are solved by adding more words, more instructions, and more links, which can be also problematic.
But one thing is clear. These are not pretty. And what that means is that if I print this and hang up on the wall around the library, our new Kindle e-book lending program would fail to convey certain sentiments that I had in mind to our library patrons. I want the poster to present this program as a new and exciting new service. I would like the patron to see the poster and get interested, curious, and feel that the library is trying something innovative. Conveying those sentiments and creating a certain impression about the library ‘is’ the function of the poster as much as informing library patrons about the existence of the new Kindle e-book reader lending program. Now the posters above won’t do a good job at performing that function. So in those aspects, they are not really functional. Sometimes beauty is a necessity. For promotional materials, which libraries make a lot but tend to neglect the design aspect of them, ‘pleasing to the eyes’ is part of their essential function.
4. Fixing it
What I should have done is to search for examples first that advertise a similar program at other libraries. I was very lucky in this case. In the search results, I ran into this quite nice circulation desk signage created by Saint Mary’s College of Maryland Library. This was made as a circulation desk sign, but it gave me an inspiration that I can use for my poster.
An example can give you much needed inspiration!
Once you have some examples and inspiration, creating your own becomes much easier. Here, I pretty much followed the same color scheme and the layout from the one above. I changed the font and the wording and replaced the kindle image with a different one, which is close to what my library circulates. The image is from Amazon itself, and Amazon will not object people using their own product image to promote the product itself. So the copyright front is clear. You can see my final poster below. If I did not run into this example, however, I would have probably searched for Kindle advertisements, posters, and similar items for other e-book readers for inspiration.
One thing to remember is the purpose of the design. In my case, the poster is planned to be printed on a large glossy paper (36′ x 24′). So I had to make sure that the image will appear clear and crisp and not blurry when printed on the large-size paper. If your design is going to be used only online or printed on a small-size item, this is less of an issue.
Final result!
5. Good design isn’t just about being pretty
Hopefully, this example shows why good design is not just a matter of being pretty. Many of us have an attitude that being pretty is the last thing to be considered. This is not always false. When it is difficult enough to make things work as intended, making them pretty can seem like a luxury. But for promoting library services and programs at least, just conveying information is not sufficient. Winning the heart of library patrons is not just about letting people know what the library does but also about how the library does things. For this reason, the way in which the library lets people know about its services and programs also matters. Making things beautiful is one way to improve on this “how” aspect as far as promotional materials are concerned. Making individual interactions personally pleasant and the transactions on the library website user-friendly would be another way to achieve the same goal. Design is a broad concept that can be applied not only to visual work but also to a thought process, a tool, a service, etc., and it can be combined with other concept such as usability.
Resources
While I was doing this, I also discovered a great resource, Librarian Design Share. This is a great place to look for an inspiration or to submit your own work, so that it can inspire other librarians. Here are a few more resources that may be useful to those who work at a library and want to learn a bit more about visual design. Please share your experience and useful resources for the library design work in the comments!
*** This post has been also published on ACRLog on Oct. 29, 2012. ***
Today’s library users do not carry pencils and notebooks to a library. They do no longer want to be isolated to concentrate on deep study or contemplative reading when they are at a library. Rather, they have the dire need to be connected to the biggest library the human race ever had, the World Wide Web, always and even more so when they are at a library walking through the forest of fascinating knowledge and information. The traditional library space packed with stacks and carrels does not serve today’s library users well whether they are scholars, students, or the public visiting a library for research, study, or leisure reading. As more and more library resources are moved to the fast and convenient realm of the World Wide Web, libraries have been focusing on re-defining the library space. Now, many libraries boast attractive space almost comparable to trendy, comfortable, and vibrant coffee shops. The goal of these new library spaces are fostering communication, the exchange of ideas, and social learning.
How the loss of book stacks and carrels affects library patrons
However, some library patrons complain about this new and hip research and reading environment that libraries are creating. They do not experience comfort and excitement, which today’s libraries strive to provide in their new coffee-shop-or-makerspace-like library space. These patrons rather miss the old dusty moldy stacks packed with books, many of which were left untouched except by a handful of people for a very long time. They miss the quiet and secluded carrels often placed right outside of the stacks. They say that browsing a library’s physical collection in those stacks led them to many serendipitous discoveries and that in those tiny uncomfortable carrels, they were completely absorbed into their own thoughts reading away a pile of books and journals undisturbed by the worldly hustle and bustle.
This is an all-too-familiar story. The fast and convenient e-resources in library websites and the digital library collections seem to deprive us of something significant and important, that is, the secluded and sacred space for thought and contemplation and the experience of serendipitous discovery from browsing physical library collections. However, how much of this is our romantic illusion and how much of it is it a real fact?
How much of this environment made our research more productive in reality?
What we really love about browsing book stacks at a library
In the closing keynote of 2012 ACCESS Conference last Sunday, Bess Sadler, the application development manager at Standford University Libraries noted the phenomenon that library patrons often describe the experience of using the physical library collection in emotional terms such as ‘joyous,’ ‘immersive,’ and ‘beautiful’ characteristic to our right brain whereas they use non-emotional terms such as ‘fast’ and ‘efficient’ to describe their use of a library’s online/digital resources. The open question that she posed in her keynote was how to bring back those emotional responses associated with a library’s physical collection to a library’s digital collection and its interface. Those terms such as ‘joyous,’ ‘immersive,’ and ‘beautiful’ are often associated in a library user’s mind with their experience of serendipitous discovery which took place while they were browsing a library’s physical book stacks. Sadler further linked the concept of serendipitous discovery with the concept of ‘flow’ by Csikszentmihalyi and asked the audience how libraries can create such state of flow with their digital collections by improving their interfaces.
One of the slides from Bess Sadler’s Closing Keynote
The most annoying thing about the e-resources that today’s libraries offer is that the systems where these resources reside do not smoothly fit into anyone’s research workflow. How can you get into a zone when the database you are in keeps popping up a message asking if you want to renew the session or demands two or three different authentications for access? How can you feel the sense of smooth flow of thought in your head when you have to navigate from one system to another with puzzling and unwieldy interfaces in order to achieve simple tasks such as importing a few references or finding the full-text of the citation you found in an e-book or an online journal you were reading?
Today’s research environment that libraries offers with its electronic resources is riddled with so many irritating usability failures (often represented by too many options none of whose functions are clear) that we can almost safely say that it is designed anything but for the ‘flow’ experience. The fact that these resources’ interfaces are designed by library system vendors and light years outdated compared to the interfaces available for individual consumers and that librarians have little or no control over them only exacerbate the problem. So I always associated the concept of flow with usability in the library context. And considering how un-user-friendly the research environment offered by today’s libraries is overall, asking for ‘joyous,’ ‘immersive,’ or ‘beautiful’ appeared to me to be a pretty tall order.
But more importantly, the obstacles to the ‘flow’ experience are not unique to online resources or digital libraries. Similar problems do exist in the physical collections as well. When I was a grad student, the largest library collection in North America was available to me. But I hated lugging back and forth a dozen periodicals and monographs between my apartment and the university just to get them renewed. (This was the time before the online renewal!) After the delightful moment of finding out in the online catalog that those rare scholarly books that I want are indeed available somewhere in that large library system at Harvard, I grumbled at the prospect of either navigating the claustrophobic rows and rows of stacks at Widener Library in order to locate those precious copies or running to a different library on campus that is at least a half mile away. At those times, the pleasure of browsing the dusty stacks or the joy of a potential serendipitous discovery was the last thing that I cared for. I was very much into my research and exactly for that reason, if I could, I would have gladly selected the delivery option of those books that I wanted to save time and get into my research flow as soon as possible. And I did so as soon as my university library started moving many books to an off-site storage and delivering them on-demand next day at a circulation desk. I know that many faculty at academic institutions strongly protest against moving a library’s physical collection to an off-site storage. But I confess that many times when the library catalog showed the book I wanted as located on the stacks and not at the off-site storage, I groaned instead of being delighted. I won’t even discuss what it was like to me to study in a library carrel. As an idea, it is a beautiful one to be immersed in research readings in a carrel; in reality, the chair is too hard, the space is too dark and claustrophobic, the air is stale, and the coffee supply is, well, banned near the stacks where those carrels are. Enough said.
The point I am trying to make is that we often romanticize our interaction with the physical stacks in a library. The fact that we all love the library stacks and carrels doesn’t necessarily mean that we love them for the reasons we cite. More often than not, what we really like and miss about the library stacks and carrels is not their actual practical utility to our research process but the ambiance.Strand, the used bookstore in NYC is famous for its 18 miles of books. Would you walk along the 18 miles of books even if you know in advance that you are not going to make any serendipitous discovery nor find nothing directly useful for your research topic at hand? Yes you bet. Would you walk by the stacks in Trinity College Library in Dublin, UK even though you are not doing anything related to research? A very few of us would say ‘No’ to such an invitation.
Can you resist walking between these stacks? Our desire doesn’t always correspond to its practical utility.
But the fact that library stacks and browsing them may contribute very little to the actual research output doesn’t mean that the stack-browsing is therefore not useful. To borrow the words of Saint-Exupéry, something is truly useful because it is beautiful (The Little Prince, Ch. 14). Let me explain.
The library book stacks as high as the walls filling up the whole floor generate the sense of awe and adventure in us because it gives us the experience of ‘physically’ surrounded by knowledge. It is magical and magnificent. It is amazing and beautiful. This is where all those emotional adjectives originate. In the library stacks, we get to ‘see’ the knowledge that is much bigger than us, taller than us, and wider than us. (Think of ‘the sublime’ in Kantian aesthetics.) When our sensory organs are engaged this way, we do not experience the boredom and tediousness that we usually feel when we scroll up and down a very long list of databases and journals on a library web page. We pause, we admire, and we look up and down. We are engrossed by the physicality of the stacks and the books on them. And suddenly all our attention is present and focused on that physicality. So much so that we even forget that we were there to find a certain book or to work on a certain research topic. It is often at these moments that we serendipitously stumble upon something relevant to what we were looking for but have forgotten to do so. Between the magnificent tall stacks filled with books, you are distracted from your original mission (of locating a particular book) but are immersed in this new setting at the same time. The silence, the high ceiling, the Gothic architectural style of an old library building, and the stacks that seems to go on forever in front of us. These are all elements that can be conducive to a serendipitous discovery but “if and only if” we allow ourselves to be influenced by them. On the other hand, if you are zooming in on a specific book, all of this visual magnificence could be a nuisance and a bother. To a scholar who can’t wait to read all of the readings after physically collecting them first, the collection process is a chore at best. To this person, neither a serendipitous discovery nor the state of ‘flow’ would be no doubt more difficult to happen in between the stacks.
If this is a relatively accurate description of a serendipitous discovery that we experience while browsing the physical collection on library book-stacks, what we really miss about the traditional library space may well be the physicality of its collection, the physical embodiment of the abstract concept of knowledge and information in abundance, and its effect on our mental state, which renders our mind more susceptible to a serendipitous discovery. And what we are most unhappy about the digital form of knowledge and information offered by today’s libraries could be that it is not presented in the space and environment where we can easily tune our mind into the content of such digital knowledge and information. It is the same Classical Greek text that you see when you pull out an old copy of Plato’s Meno in the narrow passage between tall book-stacks at Widener and when you pull up the text on your computer screen from the Perseus Digital Library. It is our state of mind influenced by the surroundings and environment that is different. That state of mind that we miss is not entirely dictated but heavily influenced by the environment we are present. We become different people at different places, as Alain de Botton says in his book, The Architecture of Happiness (Ch 1). Who can blame a library user when s/he finds it hard to transform a computer screen (which takes her to many digital collections and online resources from a library as well as all sorts of other places for entertainment and distraction) into the secluded and sacred space for thought and contemplation?
Using Perseus Digital Library is way more efficient for research and study the classical Greek texts than using the physical collection on your stacks. However, we still miss and need the experience of browsing the physical collection on the stacks.
How to facilitate the ‘flow’ and serendipity in today’s libraries
The fact that today’s libraries no longer control the physical surroundings of a library patron who is making use of their resources doesn’t mean that there are nothing libraries can do to make the research environment facilitate serendipitous discoveries and the state of ‘flow’ in a researcher’s mind, however. Today’s libraries offer many different systems for library users to access their online resources. As I have mentioned above, the interfaces of these systems can use some vast improvement in usability. When there are as few hindrances as possible for a library patron to get to what s/he is looking for either online or at the physical library space, s/he would be able to concentrate on absorbing the content more easily instead of being bogged down with procedures. The seamless interoperability between different systems would be very much desirable for researchers. So, improving the usability of library systems will take library patrons one step closer to obtaining the flow state in their research while using library resources online.
As far as the physical space of a library is concerned, libraries need to pay more attention to how the space and the environment of a library emotionally affects library patrons. Not all research and study is best performed by group-study or active discussion. Baylor University Libraries, for example, designate three different zones in their space: Silent, Quiet, and Active. While libraries transform more of their traditional stack-and-carrel space into vibrant group study rooms and conversation-welcoming open spaces, they also need to preserve the sense of the physical environment and surroundings for library patrons, because after all, all of us desire the feeling of being in a sacred and dedicated space for contemplation and deep thoughts from time to time. Such space is becoming rarer and rarer nowadays. Where else would people look for such space if not a library, which the public often equate to a building that embodies the vast amount of knowledge and resources in the physical form.
Facilitating the serendipitous discovery in browsing a library collection in the digital environment is more tricky because of the limitation of the current display mechanisms for digital information. In emulating the experience of browsing books in the physical form on a computer screen, the Google WebGL Bookcase has made some progress. But it would be much more efficient combined with a large display mechanism that allows a user to control and manipulate information and resources with gestures and bodily movements, perhaps something similar to what we have seen in the movie, Minority Report. However, note that information does not have to be bound in the form of books in the digital environment and that digital books do not have to be represented as a book with pages to thumb through and the spine where its title is shown . If we set aside the psychological factors that contribute to the occurrence of a serendipitous discovery, what is essential to efficient browsing boils down to how easily (i) we can scan through many different books (or information units such as a report or an article) quickly and effectively and (ii) zoom in/out and switch between the macro level (subjects, data types, databases, journals, etc) and the micro level (individual books, articles, photographs, etc. and their content). If libraries can succeed in designing and offering such interfaces for digital information consumption and manipulation, the serendipitous discovery and the efficient browsing in the digital library environment can not only match but even exceed that in the physical library book-stacks.
** This blog post has been originally published in ACRL TechConnect 0n May 30, 2012. **
The Big Type
Jeffrey Zeldman published a post that explains his choice of big type in his website/blog last week. If you are curious about how huge the type is in his site, see below my screenshot (or visit his site: http://zeldman.com). It is pretty big. Compare it to any Web site or this current site of mine. Yea, the type is huge.
zeldman.com
He says people either hate or love the big type and the simplistic/minimalist layout of his site or just spends time processing them. I found myself loving it because hey, it was so fr**king easy to read without any other distraction in the site. As Zeldman himself says, “It’s over the top but not unusable nor, in my opinion, unbeautiful.”And in my opinion, being fully functional counts to a great degree in favor of beauty.
Readability
The strange satisfaction that I felt while reading the articles in his site set in the big type has led me to realize how hard it is to read the main content of any common web page. It is usually so hard that the first thing I do before reading any Web page is to increase the font size inside a Web browser (thereby also removing the top navigation and all other things on both sides except the main content out of my sight). Sometimes, I also use the ‘Print’ preview, just to read, not to print anything (since this removes all ads and images etc.). Also handy is a plugin like Readability. Zeldman’s site was the first site where none of these actions was necessary.
The Web design convention with must-have items such as a top navigation, header image, navigation on the left, ads and numerous links on the right forces us to take out those very items by manually manipulating the browser in order to make the main content simply readable! This is an irony that is more than fully appreciated by those who build and manage Web sites in particular. We (the universal we as Web workers) follow the convention as something canonical because we want to build a Web site that is usable and pleasant to interact with. But while interacting with any such conventional site, our own behavior reveals that we try to eliminate those very canonical elements.
It’s not that we can or should eliminate right away all those conventional items. They are useful for various purposes. But the point is that no matter how useful they are, those things are also great distractions in reading. In a Web site or a page where reading is the primary activity, the readability of its content is a greater problem than other sites or pages. Zeldman’s Big Type experiment would be simply bizarre if it is applied without any modification to, say, the WSJ homepage. But it probably is not a bad idea to apply it to an individual article page in the WSJ Web site.
Zeldman’s experimental design with the big type reminds me of what the application, Flipboard, does. (See below the demo video if you are not familiar with the Flipboard app.) It strips off elements that are distracting to reading and re-formats the page in a way that is attractive and functional. Where the design fails to help one to read a Web page, an app comes to rescue.
Now you may ask how all these relate to libraries. My question is: (a) how much of the main function of a library Web site is reading, and how much is not, (b) what parts of a library Web site is to be read and not, and (c) how we can balance and facilitate those different uses of a library Web site. Rarely a Web site is designed solely for reading, but reading is an important part of almost always a certain section of any Web site. So this is an issue that is worth thinking about and matters to not only library Web sites but also any other Web site. Just asking these questions could be a good step towards making your Web pages more usable.
In the next post, I will discuss how we read on the Web and how to design and serve the content for the Web in a user-friendly manner.
***** This blog post has been originally published in ACRL TechConnect 0n May 7, 2012. *****
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During the usability testing I ran a while ago, there was one task that quite baffled at least one participant. I will share the case with you in this post. The task given to the usability testing participant was this: “You would like to find out if the library has a journal named New England Journal of Medicine online.”
The testing begins at the Florida International University Medical library website, which has a search box with multiple tabs. As you can see below, one of the tabs is E-Journals. Most of the users selected the E-Journals tab and typed in the journal title. This gave them a satisfactory answer right away. But a few took a different path, and this approach revealed something interesting about browsing the library’s e-journals in the E-Journal portal site which is a system separate from the library’s website.
Browsing for a Specific E-Journal
1. In the case I observed, a student selected the link ‘Medical E-journals’ in the library homepage above instead of using the search box. The student was taken to the E-Journal Portal site, which also presents a search box where one can type in a journal title. But the student opted to browse and clicked ‘N.’
2. The student was given the following screen after clicking ‘N.’ He realized that that there are lots of e-journals whose title begins with ‘N’ and clicked ‘Next.’
3. The site presented him with the following screen. At this point, he expressed puzzlement at what happened after the click. The screen appeared to him the same as before. He could not tell what his click did to the screen. So he clicked ‘Next’ again.
4. He was still baffled at first and then gave up browsing. The student typed in a journal title in the search box instead and got the match.
Lessons Learned
A couple of things were learned from observing this case.
First, this case shows that some people prefer browsing to searching even when the search could be much faster and the search box is clearly visible.
Second, a click needs to create a visible change to prevent a user’s frustration.
Third, what is a visible and discernible change may well be different to different people.
The first is nothing new. We know that some users prefer to search while some prefer to browse. So both features – search and browse – in a Web site should work intuitively. In this example, the E-Journal portal has a good search feature but shows some confusing aspect in browsing. I found the change from step 2 to 3 and step 3 to 4 somewhat baffling just as the student who participated in the usability testing did. I could not discern the difference from step 2 to 3 and step 3 to 4 right away. Although I was familiar with the E-Journal portal, I was not aware of this issue at all until I saw a person actually attempting to get to New England Journal of Medicine by browsing only because I myself have always used the search feature in the past.
But, when I showed this case to one of my colleagues, she said the change of the screens shown above was clear to her. She did not share the same level of confusion that the student experienced. Also, once I had figured out what the difference in each step, I could no longer experience the same confusion either. So how confusing this browsing experience can vary. I will go over the process one more time below and point out why this browsing process could be confusing to some people.
The student had difficulty in perceiving the change from step 2 to 3. The screen in step 3 appeared to him to have unchanged from step 2. The same for the screen in step 3. from step 4. Actually, there was a change. It was just hard to notice to the student and was something different from what he expected. What the system does when a user clicks ‘Next,’ is to move from the first item on the sub-list under N to the second item (N&H-Nai -> NAJ-Nan) and then again from the second item to the third item (NAJ-Nan -> Nat-Nat). This, however, did not match what the student expected. He thought the ‘Next’ link would bring up the sub-list beginning with the next of the last entry, ‘Nat-Nat,’ not the next of the currently selected entry. The fact that the sub-list shows many ‘Nat-Nat’s also confused him. (This is likely to be because the system is bundling 50 e-journals and then extract the first three letters of the first and last journal in the bundle to create items on the sub-list.) A user sees the last item on the sub-list in step 3 and 4. stay the same ‘Nat-Nat’ and wonders whether his clicking ‘Next’ had any effect.
Making browsing a large number of items user-friendly is a challenge. The more items there are to browse, the more items the system should allow a user to skip at once. This will help a user to get to the item s/he is looking for more quickly. Also, when there are many items to browse, a user is likely to look for the second and third category to zoom in on the item s/he is looking for. Faceted browsing/search is an effective way to organize a large number of items so that people can quickly drill down to a sub-category of things which they are interested in. Many libraries now use a discovery system over an OPAC (online public access catalog) to provide such faceted browsing/search. In this case, for example, allowing a user to select the second letter of the item after selecting the first instead of trudging through each bundle of fifty journal titles would expedite the browsing significantly.
What other things can you think of to improve the browsing experience in this E-Journal portal? Do you have any Web site where you can easily and quickly browse a large number of items?
** Below are the screens with the changes marked in red for your review:
Browsing Experience in the Virtual vs. the Physical Space
However entangled our lives are in virtual spaces, it is in the physical space that we exist. For this reason, human attention is most easily directed at where visual and other sensory stimuli are. The resulting sensory feedback from interacting with the source of these stimuli further enriches the experience we have in the physical space. Libraries can take advantage of this fact in order to bring users’ fleeting attention to their often-invisible online collections. So far, our experience on the Internet, where we spend so much time, is still mostly limited to one or two sensory stimuli and provides little or no sensory feedback. A library’s online resources, often touted for its 24/7 accessibility anywhere, are no exception to this limitation.
Flickr - "augmented reality game bibliotheek deventer"
Think about new library books, for example. The print ones are usually prominently displayed at a library lobby area attracting library visitors to walk up and browse them in the physical space. By thumbing through a new book and moving back and forth from the table of contents to different chapters, we can quickly get a sense of what kind of a book it is and decide whether we want to further read the book or not. The tactile, olfactory, visual, and auditory sensory input that we get from thumbing through a newly printed book with fresh ink contributes to making this experience enjoyable and memorable at the same time.
Now compare this experience with reading a library Web page with the list of new online library books on a computer screen. Each book is reduced to a string of words and a hyperlink. It is hard to provide any engaging experience with a string of words and a hyperlink.
The Invisibility Problem of Library e-Books
Like many libraries, Florida International University (FIU) Library started an e-book reader lending program that circulates e-book readers. Each reader comes with more than one hundred titles that have been selected by subject librarians. But how can a library make these library e-books on e-book readers noticed by library users? How can a library help a user to quickly figure out what books are available on, say, a library Kindle device when those are specifically what the user is looking for?
Well, if a user runs a keyword search in the library’s online catalog, say, with ‘Kindle,’ s/he will find more than sufficient information since the library has already neatly cataloged all titles available on the Kindle device there. But many users may fail to try this or even be unaware of the new e-book reader lending program in the first place. The e-book reader lending program offers a great service to library users. However, the library e-books offered on the e-book readers can be largely invisible to users who tend to think that what they can see in a library is all a library has.
Giving Physical Presence to Library e-Books on e-Book Readers
The problem can be solved by giving some physical presence to e-books on the library’s e-book readers using a dummy bookmark on the stacks. This is particularly effective as it quickly captures users’ attention while they are already browsing the library stacks looking for something to read.
Users are familiar with a dummy book on physical shelves that marks a print title that is often looked for under different names or the recent change of the location of a title. Applied to Kindle e-books, a dummy bookmark is just as effective. A user can walk around the space where stacks are located and physically identify those e-books that the library makes available on a e-book reader in each subject section. By a visible cue, a dummy bookmarks create a direct sensory association between an e-book and something physical (that provides a visible and tactile feedback) in a user’s mind, thereby effectively expanding a users’ idea of what is available at a library.
When you pull out the bookmark, it looks like this. The bookmark includes the book’s cover image, title, author, and call number, which help a user to locate the title record in the library’s online catalog. But in reality, users are more likely to just walk down to the Course Reserves area to check out an e-book reader after reading this sign.
I tweeted this photo a while ago when I accidentally found out the idea was implemented while looking for some book in the stacks. (See the disclaimer below.) I was quite surprised by many positive comments that I received in Twitter. Many librarians also suggested adding a QR code to the dummy bookmark next to the Call Number. The addition of the QR code would be an excellent bonus on the bookmark. It will allow users to check the availability of the title on their mobile devices, so that they can avoid the situation in which the e-book and the e-book reader device have been already checked out.
If you are running a pricy e-book reader lending program at your library, a dummy bookmark might be an inexpensive but highly effective way to make those e-books stand out to users on the library stacks. What other things do you do at your library to make your online resources and e-books more visible to users?
Disclaimer: I have suggested this idea at the E-resources group meeting where all FIU libraries (including Medical Library where I work) are represented. But the implementation was done solely by the FIU main Library for their Kindle e-book collection on their stacks. For those who are curious, I was unable to find the exact number of dummy bookmarks on the stacks.
What to place and where to place the many elements of a website’s homepage is often the result of a delicate negotiation and compromise between what users want and what the site owner wants. While the most ideal case is surely when these two things completely match, this doesn’t happen often for reasons you can easily guess.
I have recently worked with a vendor of a database called UpToDate to implement their new feature of automatic CME (Continuing Medical Education) Credit tracking through the EZproxy of my institution. This new feature brought some interesting changes to their database homepage, which I thought would be a great example to discuss in the context of Web usability.
Their homepage used to look like this. Very clean and to-the-point. Their Googole-like homepage offered exactly what users want most, searching their database for the information they need often at the point of (medical) care.
Previous Homepage
After the introduction of the automatic CME tracking feature, however, their homepage has changed as shown below. To be exact, they show the new homepage first-time when a user enters the site and then every 15 days or so to prompt users to register.
New Homepage
There are some pretty obvious usability issues in this new homepage due to the prominent Log in box and Register box as well as the big heading that reads “Earn CME with UpToDate.”
To a new users, the whole purpose of this database appears to be Earning CME. (I am pretty sure this is not the first impression this database wants to give to its first-time visitors no matter how well known the database is! The most important role of a homepage is to answer the question for a user: “What does this site do for me?”)
To a user who just got to this database, seeing another Log-in vs. Register box makes them doubt if their initial authentication was successful. (If you run a website, you do not want to make your user worry if their first action to get into the site was a failure!)
To experienced users, it is confusing where to do what they used to do, which is what they really want from this site. That is, running a search for clinical information. (You don’t want your user to “THINK about” how and where to do the most primary action in your site, ever! It should be obvious.)
In designing a homepage, try to provide satisfying answers to these three questions. Then you are on the right track. If you need to add additional information, do so without making the homepage fail to answer these questions first.
What does this site do for me?
What first action should I take to try what this site promises?
Where and how do I do that action (at this second without a need to think)?
Now that you have given a thought about the usability of this example, how would you re-design this page while providing information about the new feature that requires log-in and registration? I will leave that as something for you to think about!
Many assume that adding more information would automatically increase the usability of a website. While there are cases in which this would be true, often a better option is to make that needed information not necessary at all for a user to make the right choice in the first place.
I found a good example recently at work. All state university libraries in Florida started allowing students in any state university to borrow from other state university library. This service was launched with the name, U-Borrow. It’s faster than the traditional ILL (interlibrary loan). It also offers a longer borrowing period. It’s a great service for library user
In order to advertise this service and make it easier for users to discover, the search result screen in the library catalog now shows the U-Borrow option as a link (as shown below).
Search Result Screen from the Library Catalog
If the user clicks the U-Borrow link, the computer presents the search search result done in the union catalog. This allows the user to see what state university library may have the item s/he is looking for that is not available in her or his own university library, and to request the item from the closest library from his or her own.
But there is one problem. Since the original search in the user’s own library catalog was not restricted to a particular format, the U-borrow link also presents items in all formats that match including online resources(see below). But(!) the U-borrow service does ‘not’ apply to online resources.
The Search Result from the Union Catalog
So the current solution is to bring this information to a user’s attention when the user actually clicks any record for an online resource in the search result list. See below the screenshot where it says “this item is not available through the UBorrow Service.”
Catalog Record with a Note about U-Borrow Restriction
This is a solution. But not the best solution. If a user gets to this page, s/he is likely to just click the link on top and get frustrated instead of examining the record fully by scrolling down and recognize the note at the bottom.
So in this case, the best solution would be to make the U-Borrow link in the first screenshot result in only the items available through the U-Borrow service. This will obviate the need for the user to heed later the note about certain items are not available. By removing irrelevant options in the first place, we can allow users to make the right choice without making a conscious choice.
Can you think of similar examples like this? Guiding people to make the right choice by providing information is good. But all the better if the right choice can be automatically selected based upon the previous option.
Despite the popularity of an e-book reader, I was never really tempted to purchase a Nook or a Kindle. I figured since I have an iPad, it would be completely pointless to own and use a e-book reader, which I understood mostly as a single-purpose device. (But to confess, I didn’t use my iPad much for reading… )
This conviction, however, was completely swept away since I had taken out a library Kindle a few days ago. I never thought that someone like me, who is a firm believer in the superiority of a multi-purpose device (like a smartphone) to a single-purpose device, would become a fan of a single-purpose e-reader.
Kindle I took out from the library
The university library (which is separate from the library where I work which belongs to the same university but to its medical school) has recently started lending Kindle devices loaded with a number of e-books. As soon as I heard the news, I ran down to the circulation desk to check it out for curiosity. Sure, I had seen an e-book reader before. But there is a world of difference between just looking at a device and tinkering with it for a few minutes and actually using it for oneself for days and weeks. So, I was eager to test it out myself.
I decided to read the e-book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which I have been meaning to read for a while but never found time to. To my surprise, I found myself enjoying the library e-reader way more than I expected.
I loved the much lighter weight and the much less eye-straining screen of a Kindle (compared to my first-generation iPad). But what I loved most about this e-reader was actually its limitation. The fact that I can do nothing but reading.
The greatest problem I had with an iPad ‘as an e-reader’ was that aside from its weight and the eye-straining screen, I could not really concentrate on reading for a long time. I don’t know if this is a non-issue for others with stronger willpower. But for me, this was certainly a big problem. While reading, I would get easily distracted into web surfing, checking e-mails, and reading tweets and Facebook updates. On the other hand, on this single-purpose device, it was easy to continue reading for a much longer time. Sometimes, I would have an urge to go online and do something else. But often I would just ignore the urge as I simply didn’t feel like moving.
Of course, I am not sure if this virtue of a single-purpose device would apply beyond reading, and for that matter, beyond leisure reading. If I were reading for research, I would prefer more robust annotation options as well as easy importing and exporting of documents, which would be much easier on a multi-purpose device. I may well also prefer to be able to easily surf the Internet to search and download whatever document I find useful and start reading it right then and there.
Nevertheless, I found it interesting to think about the merit of a single-purpose device in the times in which multi-purpose devices are more and more prevalent. Maybe we will always have a multi-purpose device and a single-purpose device no matter how advanced technology becomes just like a Swiss Army Knife and a normal knife. Or would more and more devices converge into a few?
*** An additional bonus of a library Kindle is that it comes with more than one book. The borrowing period for this Kindle is two weeks, but I am done with the book already. So after browsing +90 library books that I did not know about, I decided on reading another book. As a librarian, I like the fact that a library e-reader preloaded with multiple library books offer an opportunity for a user to discover more than the one title s/he selected. But also as a librarian, I disliked the fact that the copies of +90 e-books are sitting idly in the device while a user is only using one title. Would there be a possible compromise between these two options?
If you ever had the feeling that your library space might look somewhat dull and unexciting, there might be some relatively simpler ways to change that. The university I work at has two separate campuses and I work at one of them. But this week, because of some committee work, I spent time at the other (BBC) campus. This was actually the first time that I had time to look around the library there. And I immediately noticed these colorful chairs on the first floor.
Colorful Chairs at Florida International University BBC Campus Library
The library building at the BBC campus has a pretty traditional look. The building is clean and neatly kept, but the colors of the wall and the carpet are neutral and conservative. While this might induce the sentiments suitable for serious study and concentration, the uniformly neutral colors may also create an impression that the library is dull and boring.
I was quite impressed by how these several colorful chairs do a great deal in counteracting such an impression. Considering that re-painting or re-carpeting is quite expensive, adding some color chairs like this can be a simple and effective way to create a more positive impression about library space to users.
While I was hanging out at the first floor, I was looking for a power outlet to plug in my laptop. The BBC campus library has power outlets on the floor in addition to some on the walls. This is a great feature because often users would be studying in the middle of the library space where they would be too far away from the walls.
Hard-to Notice Power Outlets
However, the power outlets are not very visible in its white color. Considering that a lot of library users look for power outlets, it would be great if they are made visually more prominent.
To come to think of it, hard-to notice power outlets are a problem in other places. At any coffee shop, the tables near the wall where power outlets appear are often the first ones to be taken. The same goes for the chairs near power outlets at an airport. I would be delighted if I can easily locate a free power outlet at a coffee shop or an airport. This means that easy-to-notice power outlets are one sure way for coffee shops and airports to win me over as their client.
Granted power outlets are not the major function of a coffee shop or an airport. But if it is an amenity that is highly sought-after by users, then why not make it easy for them to find and use it?
I wonder what other secondary functions or non-major amenities of a library are frequently used by library patrons and how we can make them stand out more. Perhaps, libraries can match those features with services or resources that they want to promote for a better marketing effect.
