My Public Schedule for Fall

In case you were wondering, there are a few places you can see me this fall, and if you can't come see me, you can read some stuff I wrote. Here are the details:

Workshops
"Live Usability Lab: See One, Do One & Take One Home."
Thursday, September 11, 2008, 9 am-noon
Middletown Library Service Center Meeting Room
Free! Class limit: 20

Description: This innovative half-day workshop will provide background on usability and define the user experience (UX). We will offer a "live usability lab" with audience assessment of one library web site and provide time and resources to create usability scenarios for YOUR web resources. Attendees will participate in interactive usability testing to evaluate web-based library resources from the user's perspective. You will also develop questions and methodology to assess usability and the UX @ your library!

"Live Web Usability Lab," co-presenting with iCONN's Steve Cauffman and ECSU's Carol Abetelli.
CASL Conference 2008 (the Connecticut Association of School Librarians)
November 10, 2008, 2 identical sessions: 10:15 - 11 and 1:15-2:15
Crowne Plaza Hotel in Cromwell, CT

Description: What do your students think about your school library’s Web site? This session provides a dynamic way to see how usability testing can help evaluate Web resources from your students’ perspective. A panel of librarians will use an innovative, interactive method to assess iCONN; to demonstrate the potential and power of user testing; and to engage the audience by illustrating the process with live data instead of canned examples. This session is for all ages, but is best for librarians who have created web sites for their students.

Articles (forthcoming)

• "Peer to Peer: UConn’s experiment with student 'ambassadors' for vendor-funded training on specialized searching." Library Journal, Sept. 15, 2008, co-authored with UConn Communication Sciences graduate student Chelsea Hammond.
• "Community Connections: The Student Ambassador Program at the University of Connecticut." Elsevier Library Connect Newsletter, October 2008.

Giving Good Airport

While on my flight home from NASIG last week, I used my iPod Touch to watch a New Yorker conference session called Deconstructing the Airport. Paco Underhill, founder of market research and consulting company Envirosell, talks about how to remake air travel for the twenty-first century. Underhill has written books on the Science of Shopping and the Call of the Mall (subtitled "the geography of shopping"), and now turns his attention to airports. If I may translate what he does into library / IT language, he talks about usability / user interaction assessments of people as they use airports.

For instance, he says that people's perception of time spent waiting while in a security or check-in line is usually longer than the reality -- up to 50%, in fact! Underhill suggests that the entire airport needs to be completely redone, in part for functionality, and in part to reduce our perception of this long wait time. He gives many examples of functionality, but here are two I liked: the "body bubble" is different in airports than it is in other areas of our lives -- we have only one hand free (if that) and we are pulling / carrying a suitcase, and possibly also a backpack. So our peripersonal space is totally different - but that is not taken into consideration when designing the airport. Another ha! moment: "the filthiest place in the first world is the bathroom in the economy section of an airplane."

As I watched all this, I started thinking that there are a lot of similarities between how Underhill describes the problems with airports and the difficulties some of our patrons face in libraries.

Underhill says: "... we live in a world that is owned by men, designed by men, managed by men, and yet we expect women to participate in it." Amen, brother! (but I digress) Except ... I'm not really digressing. What if we modify that phrase like this:

"... we create a library that is owned by librarians, designed by librarians, managed by librarians, and yet we expect novice library patrons to participate in it." (changed words italicized) It's a slight modification, but all of a sudden some of us might have a better understanding of what the library is like for our patrons. D'oh!

Underhill gives some great ideas on how airports could be "reinvented:"

• Free WiFi everywhere, among other suggestions to improve incessant travel waiting. again I say, Amen, brother! (and also: thank you! to my local airport, BDL, which does offer free WiFi)
• Offer different lines at security, for families, registered travelers, etc.
• Offer healthy food choices! halal, vegetarian ...
• Shopping (and other services) that reflect a one-handed customer. He suggests offering a wand-style checkout like the Exxon/Mobil Speedpass to reduce physical difficulties paying for items in an airport.
  
• Rocking chairs like at the Charlotte airport, and other kinds of movable seating (his demonstration of the rocking movement is charming).
  

Sounds like it could be called Airport 2.0. Let's hope airports and libraries can both redesign themselves (quickly) to be usable, and functional for real users.

For More Information

• Underhill, Paco. Deconstructing the Airport "Stories from the Near Future," the New Yorker Conference, May 23, 2008. Available through iTunes.
  
• Also possibly of interest: Airport Wireless Internet Access Guide, which lists airports which offer free WiFi. Yay!
  

Thinking About Teaching, and Other Things

I've been so busy filling up my spring dance card that I haven't been blogging. Here's what I'm up to, if you want to follow along at home.

Teaching 454, Digitial Information Services & Providers for Simmons GSLIS. Still teaching Dialog. What a great class this is! See online materials (all still under construction, but essential built):

• Course Outline
• Source List
• Reading List

... all of the above created with Google Pages. Notes maintained online using Zoho planner. Sites remembered using del.icio.us tag 454.

I'm going to be blogging periodically (monthly or so) over at ACRLBlog. The topic will be about academic librarians and faculty blogs. I've been reading quite a few lately (see some of my favorites tagged with teaching at del.icio.us), and thought a lot about what Steven Bell posted on ACRLBlog last year about the carnival of the professoriate. I've got a lot of ideas for blog posts -- themes mostly, sort of a continuation of the carnival -- but I'm open to new ideas, too. Let me know your favorite faculty blogs or faculty blog topics. I'm especially interested in finding more LIS faculty (adjunct or not) who blog.

And I'm going to give a version of a terrific presentation I saw at ASIS&T on usability at the Connecticut Library Association meeting in April. Paul Marty did a "Live Usability Lab" session in which he had members of the audience actually participate in usability testing of institutional repository sites -- he showed rather than explained how valuable usability testing is. Steve Cauffman and I will do a similar presentation using iCONN's resources as a test environment.

I promise I'm still thinking about cog sci, too -- just that my head is full of LIS for the moment ...

For More Information

• Marty, Paul F. and Michael Twidale , "Usability@90mph: Presenting and Evaluating a New, High-Speed Method for Demonstrating User Testing in Front of an Audience." FirstMonday. July, 2005.
• Varnum, Ken. Notes from Live Usability Lab @ ASIS&T 2007 on his rss4lib blog (Oct. 2007):
• Introductory thoughts from the session, calling Marty's session "so simple it's genius"
  
• Notes from the session & each usability test (note: I was a volunteer for test #2)
  

two interesting blog posts

Two great posts yesterday:

Dutch librarian Wouter Gerritsma posted about a Swedish usability research project comparing students' search behaviour for information with Google Scholar and Metalib on his blog (http://wowter.net/2007/11/14/students-expectation-of-databases/). The 156-page report is available at http://www.diva-portal.org/diva/getDocument?urn_nbn_se_su_diva-1264-2__fulltext.pdf and covers some interesting aspects of MetaLib usability, as well as comparisons to functionality to Google Scholar. They did 4 sets of studies: 2 each for MetaLib &Google Scholar, and for each database interface, they had a group of students who had had no prior training and a group who had had a 45-minute introduction to the interface.

I don't know what their MetaLib interface looks like, so it's not clear that their results translate to other MetaLib instances, but it's very interesting to see the problems / successes Swedish students had with both interfaces.

and

John Dupuis lists a few interesting articles from the most recent issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication on Social Network Sites on his Confessions of a Science Librarian blog. Articles include:

• Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship by danah m. boyd and Nicole B. Ellison
• Every Blog Has Its Day: Politically Interested Internet Users' Perceptions of Blog Credibility by Thomas J. Johnson, Barbara K. Kaye, Shannon L. Bichard, and W. Joann Wong
• and these that I think are interesting, too, esp. for UConn Communication Sciences folks ...
  
• The Impact of Language Variety and Expertise on Perceptions of Online Political Discussions.Kenny W. P. Tan, Debbie Swee, Corinne Lim, Benjamin H. Detenber, and Lubna Alsagof
• IM=Interruption Management? Instant Messaging and Disruption in the Workplace. R. Kelly Garrett and James N. Danziger

Happily, all these articles are availalbe online in full-text for free. Yay, JCMC!

Blogged with Flock

Seniors & Medical Information

Read an interesting article yesterday from JASIS&T which covered usability for seniors in two domains: first, the article talks about how seniors get information about drugs, and then it talks about how they look for information about drugs within two specific web sites.

Given, Ruecker, et al write about an study they did on Inclusive Interface Design for Seniors: Image-browsing for a Health Information Context in the Sept. 2007 issue of the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. While seniors are prescribed drugs by their doctors, they rarely call their physicians for drug-related information, even though "seniors are particularly prone to negative drug interactions, hospitalizations, addictions, etc. as a result of improperly identifying their medications" (many recent articles support this).

Instead, seniors are more likely to get drug & drug interaction information from their pharmacist, followed by contacting "personal contacts" (friends and family, "especially those working in the health care field." Note that libraries don't show up on this list of trusted information sources.

Seniors like using the Internet for find health / drug information, but they are aware of the potential accuracy / bias problems that exist on the Web, including the "difficulties sorting out drug 'ads' from truly informational Web sites."

The authors tested a couple of interfaces with a group of 12 seniors to see how different sites met their needs with respect to identifying specific pills. A major problem that seniors have using the Web is physiological: difficulty reading small font, trouble distinguishing colors and even small shapes -- which is especially important when trying to find "their" medication on a Web site. And as frequently happens when doing usability testing, the participants often didn't see the "affordances" on the page, such as a "zoom" feature, while others didn't see the "sort" button.

The study itself was an interesting insight into how older folks use Web sites, especially one that is geared to them, and to addressing one of their serious information needs.

I read it thinking ,"how can libraries market their services to seniors?" Here are a couple of ideas: provide local pharmacists with information about the public library -- hours / phone number / contact information, maybe a handout with selected health resources available through the library -- telling the seniors, via a trusted resource -- how we in the library can help them. Perhaps we could put this in emergency rooms also? I don't know what the protocols are, but ... that's where seniors are, and when they need health information. And aren't we good at providing information to people, when they need it?


For More Information
Given, Lisa, Stan Ruecker et al. Inclusive Interface Design for Seniors: Image-browsing for a Health Information Context Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. Volume 58, Issue 11 (September 2007), pp: 1610 - 1617. Link to abstract; full-text available only with subscription, or check out Interlibrary Loan.

LIS Books

Over on facebook, some librarians are having a discussion of favorite LIS books. I can't think of a dedicated LIS book that I like, but here are two that have shaped my view of design and users:

* Krug, Steve. Don't Make Me Think! : A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. 2d ed. Indianapolis, Ind.: Que, 2006.
Explains in very clear language how to design for users in a way that they will understand. Emphasizes the value of simplicity. My favorite graphic is in the chapter "Street Signs and Breadcrumbs", in which he shows a street sign in Los Angeles and another in Boston. The LA street sign spans the entire street and is easy to read while you're driving around, possibly lost. The Boston street sign, when it exists (speaking as an infrequent Boston driver), is tiny and very difficult to read. Essential, and easy, reading for any web designer.


* Norman, Donald A. The Psychology of Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books, 1988.
Norman's classic is not specifically written for web site design, but it can easily be applied to web design, and Norman's engaging style makes for another easy read. I think about this book EVERY TIME I open a door that is not clearly marked. Essentially, he says "if I have to think when I open a door, the door is badly designed." (I'm looking at you, entrance to Hampshire College Library Center). I also think of this book when I try to turn off my iHome radio in the morning; Norman talks about how difficult it is to design something complex and keep it simple. Highly recommended.

Great explanation of usability / design

SFX / programmer / librarian whiz David Walker has created a simplified "SFX menu" (OpenURL resolver / thingie that gets you from citation to full-text) for Cal State. You can see the simplified menu (note that links aren't live) or ...

watch David's flash presentation about how he came to create the simplified interface. Here's what David says about it: "Do library users find the SFX menu confusing? Here I dissect some problems with the SFX menu and show a simpler interface developed at Cal State. Includes audio (no transcription) and slides. Time: 20 minutes. Also includes files to download." (takes a while to load, but it's worth every second of wait time, and worth the 20 minutes to watch)

It's great to see the default SFX menu morph into the simplified menu -- and it's a wonderful demonstration of usability / design principles.

Usability: Worth the Effort?

Today I'm speaking at Simmons GSLIS West about usability.

You can see the useful links I've gathered over the years on my Simmons wiki, which lists my favorite usability articles. It's also got a copy of my PowerPoint presentation, in case you want to follow along at home.

Bottom line: yes, usability is worth the effort.

Code4Lib thoughts (secondhand)

One of my favorite programmers (ProgrammerGuy) went to the Code4Lib conference & gave us an update on some of the interesting things he saw / heard / thought about while there.

Here are three of the things that most interested me from his talk.

1. LibraryFind Open source front end to all the various data "silos" which exist in library. Searches the library catalog, some (all?) library databases using Z39.50, and their image collection housed in ContentDM.

I searched for "cats" and found "items" in Academic Search Premier, Business Source Premier, the Oregonian (newspaper), and the Oregon State University Catalog. I could click on the "images" tab to see photos from their archive (tho oddly, there were NO RESULTS FOUND for my "cats" search). It may not be ready for prime time, but conceptually, it's very interesting.

2. Villanova's Search MyResearch Portal provides opportunities to search multiple data types from one screen -- a tab to search their catalog, another tab to search their MetaLib (federated search), and a third tab to search their Digital Library.

What's cool about this is the lightning-quick speed at which it searches the catalog. ProgrammerGuy said, I think ..., that they are using cached data to search the opac and/or some nifty new search algorithm-thingie called Solr to search text. I wasn't clear on the technology -- but I am SOLD on the speed at which it searched the opac (for a popular term like cats) and faceted results. The display is pretty nifty, too. Again, not ready for prime time, but the implications are fascinating.

3. ILS Vendor Talis. This is a bit harder to describe, but basically Talis is transforming how libraries share information within a union catalog. ProgrammerGuy said that "libraries share item level data." On the Talis Panlibus blog is a link to the presentation by Richard Wallis: "My presentation "'Library APIs Abound!' can be found here [wmv]. With a copy of the slides, in which the live demo has been replaced by screen captures is also available [pps]."

The gist of it is that Talis is using RSS to iteratively search your union catalog and pull out relevant metadata and plop it into YOUR catalog record. Look at the Harry Potter book jacket example in the pps -- a cataloger person searches the catalog, and the behind-the-scenes technology uses RSS to search & retrieve the book jacket, and then the image gets plopped into your catalog.

The neat thing is that you can use the RSS data for all kinds of things, not just to populate your catalog. Towards the end of the pps are examples of how you can plop their RSS for your Harry Potter holdings into any WordPress template you like.

NB: Since I'm not a programmer, or even really a techie, I may have mangled some of the tech aspects, but the front-end, user implications remain valid.

Congratulations Leslie!

One of my former students has just published an article that may interest my readers:

Leslie Porter: Library applications of business usability testing strategies
Library Hi Tech, Volume 25 Issue 1 (2007): pp. 126-135. (a subscription is required for access)

This is a great review of articles from the business & computer science literature on usability testing, suggesting what we in library-land can learn from those in other disciplines. I'm a little biased, but I think it's an important article.

Congratulations Leslie!

Hindering Tech-savvy Users

Guy Kawasaki’s blog, How to Change the World: A practical blog for impractical people, lists The Top Ten Stupid Ways to Hinder Market Adoption.

His comments are aimed at commercial web sites, but many are valid for libraries and our vendors as well. They’re mostly things that would annoy tech-savvy users / customers, but we in libraries don’t want to alienate our tech-savvy patrons, do we?

These include:

• Long URLs (LexisNexis? Hello?)


• Windows that don’t generate URLs (I’m looking at you, SFX)


• Lack of feeds and email lists (RSS feeds for new books & other new library resources?)


• User names cannot contain the @ character (or, in the case of Scopus / Elsevier, THEY generate the user names – who can remember stephaniebrown18? Who wants to?)


• Supporting only Windows Internet Explorer (‘nuff said)

Also check out the lengthy comments from other readers of Guy’s post; there are even more good pet peeves!)

Usability Talk

I'm going to do a short presentation on usability for Simmons GSLIS (West) on March 24. I'll talk about good usability principles and show some examples from some recent testing I helped do at work. If you're part of the GSLIS community, I hope you'll attend!

Here are some basic readings to get you thinking about usability:

• Cobus, Laura, Valeda Frances Dent, and Anita Ondrusek. "How Twenty-Eight Users Helped Redesign an Academic Library Web Site." Information Technology & Libraries 44.3 (2005): 232-46. Academic Search Premier.


• Krug, Steve. Don't make me think : a common sense approach to web usabiliity. Que, 2006.


• Nielsen, Jakob. Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design. Alertbox: Current Issues in Web Usability, 1996, updated 2007.


• ---. Usability 101. Alertbox: Current Issues in Web Usability, 2003.


• Nielsen, Jakob, and Marie Tahir. Homepage Usability : 50 Websites Deconstructed. New Riders, 2002.

Usability Results Very Promising!

I spent the past year working with some colleagues on a redesign for our Research Database Locator. That's the database mechanism we use to maintain & deliver the Libraries' electronic resources to our end users.

You can see the existing product (we call it the ERM, for "electronic resource manager") -- it can be a bit overwhelming, even to those in the know.

And here is the redesigned Research Database Locator, now in beta.

It looks nothing like I thought it would, but early usabilty results indicate that it is wildly usable!

Hollywood's Usability Bloopers

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for December 18 is called Usability in the Movies -- Top 10 Bloopers, and it pokes fun at computer user interfaces as depicted in the movies.

Kind of funny, esp. the line from Jurassic Park in which a 12-year old says "This is UNIX, it's easy" -- and proceeds to save the day.

But does funny mean anything? Nielsen asserts that it does have a negative effect, and user interface design aficionados would appreciate his conclusion:

"Users blame themselves when they can't use technology. This phenomenon is bad enough already; it's made worse by the prevalence of scenes in which people walk up to random computers and start using them immediately. "

Is Simplicity Overrated?

Fascinating column by Donald Norman about simplicity, design, and marketing. In Simplicity Is Highly Overrated, Norman argues that while people may say they want "simplicity" in their products (cars, washing machines, etc.), how they feel about products and what they're willing to pay for is a different story. He describes a Korean toaster: "It had complex controls, a motor to lower the untoasted bread and to lift it when finished, and an LCD panel with many cryptic icons, graphs, and numbers" for $250! Why? "Make it simple and people won’t buy. Given a choice, they will take the item that does more. Features win over simplicity, even when people realize that it is accompanied by more complexity."

Found this article via the Dec. 2006 issue of Current Cites, where reviewer Leo Robert Klein argues that "it's hard to say what impact this approach should have on design decisions, particularly on the Web. We're not buying products for ourselves after all but making them for others. If features in this context were so attractive, then 'Advanced Search' would be the first stop of even our most neophyte users."

Hmmm.

Duh

Great post over on the Creating Passionate Users blog.

We need to think like our users! We need to figure out a way. This chart will help me keep them in mind. Hopefully you too, and then we can start changing the world, one tiny web page at a time.

be provocative is pretty good too -- the sketches are terrific.

thanks to Stephen's Lighthouse for the referral!

Signage in libraries

The great Stephen Abram, in his Stephen's Lighthouse blog points to a Flickr site on Library Signage. There are some good ones & some bad ones. I'm going to use this in my reference class as a discussion point for how the reference area should look, and how it *does* look to patrons.

Web 2.0 sure is good for teaching library school!

User Interface & Search Screen Design, from JASIST

Finally! I'm recovered enough from teaching to start reading the journals that have piled up patiently awaiting my attention.

The Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology recently had a special section entitled "Perspectives on Search User Interfaces: Best Practices and Future Visions". There are some fascinating and short (i.e., easily readable) articles on various aspects of screen design and the user interface.

I'm working on a project to redesign the public interface of a (confusing) database, and I found several nuggets very useful:

Regarding the ability to match a user's search term to "what the database calls it" (as I explain it to my students), Resnick and Vaughan say, "Jefferson and Nagy ([2002]) report that the probability that both a searcher and search system will apply the same term for a given concept is only 10-20%." WOW!!! Only a 10-20% chance that the user and the database will be using the same term?!

Resnick & Vaughan continue with these best practice suggestions for the search user interface:

• "Simple ideas such as increasing the size of the text input box to encourage users to input longer queries have shown some promise." and


• A recent study by Bandos and Resnick ([2004]) found that users generate more effective queries and are more satisfied with interfaces that contain brief guidance on search syntax and semantics. These were provided in the form of search hints, located adjacent to the search query input box.

Peter Gremett, who does UI Design at AOL, reported on a usability evaluation of Amazon, and said: "The majority of the time users browsed first and then searched when necessary. Search was typically used when browsing areas became too busy, ambiguous, or lacked visibly relevant content."

And finally, in a nice summary of the user search experience, Barbara Wildemuth summarized Shneiderman, et al's research suggesting that "the search process consists of four phases:

• formulation of the search strategy,
  
• the action of submitting the search,
  
• the review of the search results, and
  
• the refinement of the search strategy (indicating that the entire process is iterative)."

(bullets mine)

It's a great, easy-to-read series of articles and if you're doing any kind of search design, I highly recommend them. You can read the abstracts for free at the Wiley / JASIST site, and you can get the articles you want via your library or Interlibrary Loan.