Richard Writes:
> "The first one I spoke to, who was pointing at the shelf-mark code on a
> result said 'what's that gobbledegook for?' I explained it is supposed
> to help her find the shelf the book is on. 'Why can't I have a little
> map showing me?' came the response"
>
> "The second simply said 'why does this thing keep telling me about the
> things I can't have!' and wandered off"
- Sometimes I feel that problems like these have just become part of our everyday job. I can't recall how often I've actually explained our own "gobbledegook" to help guide people to right shelves.
Richard Also Writes:
> "In an ideal world we would have built the student User Interface; the
> researcher UI, the high school UI;
......
> all supported by variations of a catalogue each tuned
> to deliver results most relevant for each target user group."
This is an important point to make: Most libraries don't have just one "usergroup". It's also important to note that People don't want to use our catalog for just one reason. A student might use it to discover subject material, look up books in his collection to get proper quotes, etc. Teachers might be verifying that they are teaching by books which students can find their library. The list of usecases is quite large.
Your OPAC is different tool in different situations: Sometimes a hammer, sometimes a saw. Currently our approach is usually a "Swiss Army Knife" OPAC: It does everything, but just not very well. Perhaps we should look more into what people actually 'Want to Do' and then offer them the best tool for the situation.
I saw a great quote once on the intertubes that kinda nails it down: "Sometimes you don't just need a better hammer, but a different tool altogether."
Regards,
- Bernd Wunsch.
-----Oprindelig meddelelse-----
Fra: Next generation catalogs for libraries på vegne af Richard Wallis
Sendt: lø 05-05-2007 10:07
Til: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
Emne: Re: [NGC4LIB] Vendor management support for user-centered design
I was about to dive in to replying with a view from a 'vendor' when a
programmer colleague (not a librarian bone in his body) related the
following tale to me, after a visit to one of our customers.
"I was in the library talking to some OPAC users" - well that's an
excellent start!
"The first one I spoke to, who was pointing at the shelf-mark code on a
result said 'what's that gobbledegook for?' I explained it is supposed
to help her find the shelf the book is on. 'Why can't I have a little
map showing me?' came the response"
"The second simply said 'why does this thing keep telling me about the
things I can't have!' and wandered off"
Well that may not be user-centred design but it's definitely
user-centred feedback.
I can cast my mind back more years than I care to calculate and remember
my introduction to the library software world. Just like any other
industry [and I've been involved with a few] I was greeted with the "but
our problems are very different to what you will find elsewhere" message
- but all industries say that. After a couple of years I realised it
was true, we 'are' different. Firstly we have a stock control system
where the customers insist on giving the stuff back most of the time.
Secondly, we have enormously rich structured metadata about that stock
which seems to preoccupy us more than the stock itself.
So have we vendors added value to what libraries do? Yes.
Have we got it right? No.
Has anyone, vendor or not, got it right? No. - If they had, we would
all be too busy copying them to be having these discussions.
So back to the question in hand - User-centred design is important, very
important, but first define your user. The problem we have had and
still do, as the recent flurry of activity on this list testifies, is
that there are many potential user types for what we historically
envisage as a single system.
In an ideal world we would have built the student User Interface; the
researcher UI, the high school UI; the reference librarian UI; the
enquiry desk UI; the library science UI; the children's UI; the general
public UI; the plugged-in to my citation management software UI; my
Google-gadget UI - all supported by variations of a catalogue each tuned
to deliver results most relevant for each target user group.
Pie in the sky? If you separate the user interface from the underlying
cataloguing, indexing and searching capabilities of a solution I think
not. If you design the 'catalogue' to flexibly support the searching,
indexing, and relevance ranking needs of all these user groups you will
be able to lay many different [cheap to produce for a library, a vendor,
or even a user] UI skins on top of it.
These thin UI skins, on top of a flexible powerful platform, are much
simpler and quicker to develop - in days/weeks as against the
months/years of our traditional monolithic systems. Because of this we
can consider not only user-centred design, but also user centred
development. In the future I want my programmer colleague to be sat in
the corner of a reading room for a few days constructing the user
interface that the users want/need with their direct input, help,
criticisms, and instant feedback.
This is the premise that is behind much of the development work around
the Talis Platform which is proving that this sort of thing is possible.
www.talis.com/platform is the place to go to find out more about it. We
are looking for people to work with us as we start to roll these
services out, but also just as importantly I believe that our
experiences in this area will be valuable to the community in general.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
> [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Casey Bisson
> Sent: 04 May 2007 15:50
> To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
> Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Vendor management support for
> user-centered design (was "[NGC4LIB] Our Workflow Works
> against us Was: [NGC4LIB] user-centered design")
>
> Mark,
>
> your question gets to the center of the very problem we face.
>
> To vendors, the customer is the user, and the customer
> generally gets what s/he pays for. But that doesn't mean we
> get what we want or need.
>
> Our purchasing processes, limited R&D investments, and
> stagnant marketplace are among the real problems perturbing
> us today, but we have to remember that we're living with a
> beast that we created.
> Fortunately, I think _we_ can solve it (and this list is rich
> with people rushing to do just that).
>
> Related: two blog posts about a purchasing process here that
> led to big ticket spending on a software suite that still has
> yet to serve the users we bought it for:
>
> http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/11291/
> http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/11298/
>
>
> Casey Bisson
> __________________________________________
>
> Information Architect
> Plymouth State University
> Plymouth, New Hampshire
> http://oz.plymouth.edu/~cbisson/
> ph: 603-535-2256
>
>
>
> On May 4, 2007, at 9:57 AM, Andrews, Mark J. wrote:
>
> > I wonder if some of the software developers working for our vendor
> > partners, lurking on this list, could share some of their
> experiences
> > with user-centered design on the list?
> >
> > I am particularly interested in how much support developers
> get from
> > management in supporting (with people, time and money)
> user-centered
> > design. I understand that this is a difficult question to answer
> > frankly - if that is not possible, that is okay.
> >
> > Mark Andrews, Creighton University
>
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Received on Sat May 05 2007 - 03:43:03 EDT