On Fri, 9 Jun 2006, Bernhard Eversberg wrote:
> And: Software that bends over backwards to be helpful may also keep you
> from learning something...
Yes, indeed. It's all fine and good to say the user doesn't need to learn
something--but what about next time they want to search for the same term
and still misspell it and the other system they're searching doesn't have
automatic correction? What about the next time they try to search using a
small selection of terms and this other system doesn't have an automatic
system to pull synonyms making them miss the stuff most likely to be
relevant (or scholarly, or whatever)? Heck, what about when they go to
write a paper and can't think of enough synonyms to make it interesting?
Or the spell checker changes their misspelled word to something completely
different and they don't realize it's wrong? How does this play into our
new--highly vocalized even in educational institutions--goal of never
making the user learn anything?
I'm all for making systems easier to use. I'm all for offering suggestions
and corrections in the manner of Google's "did you mean to search for ..."
But I was only happy this morning when Amazon automatically corrected a
word because I knew as soon as I hit enter that I'd made a typo. If,
instead, I'd misspelled something from a lack of knowledge (which I do
more often than I'd like to admit), I'd appreciate knowing it up front.
Sure, I might notice it when I looked at what was retrieved. Just as
likely I wouldn't, though.
>From a purely searching viewpoint, make things too transparent in some
systems and the user doesn't learn what they need to know to search all
the other systems: things like how to spell or what various terms to
search for. If the end goal of the user is writing a paper, it would be
nice if they'd learn these things as they go along, especially if the
system they're using is affiliated with an educational institution.
Mary
Mary Grenci
Serials Team Leader & Metadata Librarian
University of Oregon Libraries
mgrenci_at_uoregon.edu
Received on Fri Jun 09 2006 - 13:17:53 EDT