>
> It might be worth considering whether instead of outdoing ourselves
> innovatively redesigning and branding our OPACs, individually, whether we
> ought not to look for some common design elements that could make life
> easier for customers and bibliographic instruction easier for librarians.
One recent approach -- within HCI and some IT firms -- in dealing with this
problem of inconsistency in user experience is through UI design patterns.
A UI design pattern is simply a description of common web design problem and
good solutions for that problem -- so a breadcrumb solves the problem of a
user not knowing where they are in a large site. Yahoo! recently published
their web pattern library < http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/index.php >
and I know e-bay is working on an internal one. For my masters project at
the School of Information, our group developed a pattern library for UC
Berkeley campus developers and you can look at the description of our work
and a link to a prototype of the library here:
http://www.ui-designpatterns.org/report.html<http://www.ui-designpatterns.org/index.html>
(Please forgive the comment spam -- looks like our CAPTCHA script is broken)
Using UI design patterns as part of the development of the nextgen catalogs
would be interesting. The most obvious benefit of such a collection would be
to capture and share good design solutions among developers working on the
same class of applications. This would also help develop a common vocabulary
around both design problems and solutions that are tailor-made for the
catalog domain. For example, I could see patterns based on catalog genres
-- public and academic -- which could offer suggestions of component level
widgets or interaction patterns that appropriately fit the pattern type --
public libraries with the amazon like components, etc.
tim
--
Work: UC Berkeley -The Library
218 Doe Library 6000
ph. 642-4273
School: School of Information Management and Systems
http://dream.sims.berkeley.edu/~tdennis/
<http://dream.sims.berkeley.edu/%7Etdennis/>
Y!: jt14den; AIM: LCarrhae
ph. 510- 282-4204
Received on Tue Jun 20 2006 - 11:52:51 EDT