I wrote:
> People must be
> willing to learn and apply SOMETHING to the process.
And Alexander Johannesen responded:
Learn and apply *something*, for sure, like new knowledge that's
actually valuable would be a good start. But to have them learn what a
title statement is as compared to just a title is *stupid*.
I answer:
I see that I failed to get my point across (not the first time, won't be the
last). The message that inspired my initial message seemed to me to be
insisting that all interfaces must be designed in a way that demands
essentially nothing of the user (beyond knowing such things as how to read
and type at some level), and that an interface that utilized functions that
worked better if a user knew a little something more was a failure.
Well, such an interface might be considered a failure in certain contexts.
But in others, not. I completely agree that making interfaces either
intuitive or extremely easy to learn is a worthwhile goal. But if there are
some kinds of queries or needs that are not satisfied by the simplest
approaches, or if a query might be answered more quickly (or more completely
or accurately) by means of an alternate approach, then asking the user to
learn a little more about how to search (which might be thought of as
learning shortcuts) is not unreasonable and is often welcomed.
Further, I agree that arbitrary use in a discovery layer of library-ese, or
of distinctions that make sense only to librarians, is usually neither
helpful nor necessary. An interface that gleefully/thoughtlessly imposes
such stuff on searchers is misguided. But there's a distinction between
what the interface does and the data that's available for the interface to
use, find, and display. And just because most end users don't have any need
for a bit of data doesn't mean that some other group of users (the internal
ones, for instance) don't have a need for it. And just because there's a
distinction that makes no difference to end users, doesn't mean that that
distinction isn't critical for some internal function.
(as a kind-of-aside, what seems intuitive to some is not intuitive to
others. Figuring out how to load photos onto my ITouch is an example of
that. You have to have an understanding of how programs tend to work to
know where to look and what to do once you get there. You get that
understanding through stumbling along through this program and that website
and that application and this function. In other words, you get it through
learning. Personally, I would have preferred not to have to wander around
and deduce/guess/intuit how to manage the operation)
Janet Swan Hill, Professor
Associate Director for Technical Services
University of Colorado Libraries, CB184
Boulder, CO 80309
janet.hill_at_colorado.edu
*****
Tradition is the handing-on of Fire, and not the worship of Ashes.
- Gustav Mahler
Received on Tue Mar 17 2009 - 11:43:14 EDT