> Janet Swan Hill said:
>
> "Repeat after me: There is no typical user. There is no typical
user.
> There is no typical user... Persuade us with actual data, carefully
> collected, clearly defined, and thoughtfully considered."
>
> Eric Lease Morgan said:
>
> "This is is why usability testing is so important."
>
> Over the years I bet there have been hundreds of instances of usage
data
> analysis, and hundreds of instances of usability studies. And I'd bet
that
> in many cases the resulting catalogs still suck.
It comes back to the whole "lipstick on a pig" thing. Usability testing
helps you refine an existing design, but it doesn't help you invent
something new. If your underlying design is inherently flawed--based on
incorrect assumptions, for example--then all the usability testing in
the world won't fix it.
> If we know what it takes to get the job done right, why haven't we
done
> so successfully already? Why are we talking about NGCs? Why don't the
> current catalogs work if we know what it takes to do it right?
I'm beginning to think that it would be very difficult for the solution
actually to come from a library. Not only are we change/risk averse, but
we're also too close to the problem. We continue to come up with
statistics and analyses and all sorts of things, but I'm really starting
to think all of this is just giving us a bad case of information
overload. Left-brained analyses and "solutions" arrived at by committee
aren't going to help us. What we need is some creativity; some
imagination. Invention doesn't come from careful study of a bunch of
data. Invention comes from a creative solution to a particular
problem--a task that needs to be done that no other tool does well
enough. The concern about incorporating all user needs into our tools is
well-intentioned, but honestly if a tool is useful for solving a
particular problem then it's going to be useful for everyone that needs
to solve that same problem. Later you can do usability testing and user
studies to refine it and make it even more useful if you need to help
particular user groups make use of that tool (such as non-English
speakers or whatever).
It's easy to say--the hard part is actually doing it. As others have
said, I think open source has a better chance than anything else of
producing good stuff. I haven't had a chance yet to really explore the
current open source offerings, so I can't really say much more about it
than that.
One thing that may help--and I know it's been discussed before--is
opening up our data in a consistent way (via web-servicey type APIs) and
allowing our users to play with our data. I'm sure there are some
imaginative, talented, techie library patrons that would love to take a
crack at creating some tools to help them navigate our data. If a user
invents something brilliant and useful, then chances are that would be
useful to a large swath of library users.
Jason Thomale
Metadata Librarian
Texas Tech University Libraries
Received on Wed Feb 06 2008 - 09:52:21 EST