Category: information science

UX research: balance and iterate

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Interesting food for thought in this article published in the Weave Journal of Library UX:

The goal of user experience work, as I see it, is not a purity of methods but a balancing of these methods with a practical effectiveness of outcomes. If ethnography and service design can be understood as poles on a spectrum, with methods on one side and outcomes on the other, then user experience would be my term for the spectrum itself.  – Andy Priestner

I’m not sure I get much out of the idea of user experience as a spectrum between ethnography and service design, but I wholeheartedly agree that the goal of UX work is a balancing of methods more than a purity of methods. This view came up frequently in talks at both this year and last year’s IA Summit. FJ van Wingerde did an especially nice job of synthesizing how all the UX research tools we have are basically problematic, but we still have to use them:

Top 10 IT issues for 2012…and 2013

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2012 is almost over. Where is higher education now in regards to these issues?
educausetop10

Re-reading this EDUCAUSE report has made me wonder: what are the Top 10 IT issues for non-profits generally, and information and referral services specifically, for 2013? I’ll be writing about this in the first iteration of my InfoCommons column in the December AIRS Newsletter. This is just a teaser!

bite-size

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Interesting readings from around the web:

“Because wide-spread full text indexing abounds, the problem of find is not as acute as it used to be. In my opinion, it is time to move away from the problem of find and towards the problem of use. What does a person do with the information once they find and acquire it? Does it make sense? Is it valid? Does it have a relationship other things, and if so, then what is that relationship and how does it compare? If these relationships are explored, then what new knowledge might one uncover, or what existing problem might be solved? These are the questions of use. Find is a means to an end, not the end itself. Find is a library problem. Use the problem everybody else wants to solve.”
–Eric Lease Morgan, “Next-generation library catalogs, or ‘Are we there yet?’”

“My favorite worlds have always been natively game-like. In their basic world rules you immediately want to interact with them. When you know that Anne McCaffrey’s Pern has five types of colored dragons, you immediately want to match yourself to one. When you know that in Piers Anthony’s Xanth every person has a unique magical talent, you want to pick out a talent for yourself. These rule structures are very game-like and enhance the poetry of a world. In addition to making it accessible, they give you a framework that exposes the theme and meaning in a world much more clearly than worlds that do not have these structures. Character classes are extremely powerful things.”
–author and game designer Erin Hoffman in an interview with Clarkesworld Magazine

“It’s strange, but start talking to hard-bitten, seasoned executives about information in the enterprise and they automatically switch off their critical faculties. They’ll believe anything. Really. Like, information and how it is used in your organisation can be understood by a piece of software, out of the box. Like, you don’t need to actually understand your information environment in order to manage it. Like, the best people to ask about making your information generally accessible, are narrow subject matter specialists. Like, you can fix your information environment once, and it’ll stay fixed forever without paying any more attention to it. In this article we explore three fairy tales about taxonomies that executives seem particularly prone to believing:

1. That you don’t need taxonomies if you get a good search engine;
2. That taxonomies can look after themselves or can be delegated piecemeal to non-taxonomists;
3. That the best people to advise on taxonomy development are subject matter experts.”

-from Innotecture, citing Taxonomy Times No. 6, April 2011

We can do it

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I’ve been tracking IT and web design-related jobs in libraries for a while now, but this is the first one I’ve seen that stands out as being so focused on user experience, they even want a terminal degree in HCI or a related field. And just yesterday I was reading the most recent issue of Library Hi Tech (v.29:no.2), which focuses on usability testing. One of the articles in that volume discusses the quality of research being done on user needs in the LIS field. The author, Elke Greifeneder, concludes:

These papers show that the quality of user research in our field is rising, that researchers know how to label and use methods appropriately, and that they are using a greater variety of methods. Finally, researchers seem to acknowledge that user research requires one small step after another. Instead of painting a big picture with a single user study that has many research questions, they do multiple smaller in-depth research projects, which can be interconnected like one big picture puzzle that might, in the end, give a better impression of how our users actually behave and what they really need.

Isn’t this exciting? I hope to see more jobs like the one Purdue has posted. To me, it’s a sign that libraries are finally moving towards seriously integrating UX into all our digital products and services. Maybe one day more than 28% of the major databases we subscribe to might even be accessible to people using adaptive technology?

UX and libraries, HCI and e-readers

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This paper offers a nuanced and thought-provoking analysis of e-readers from an human-computer interaction standpoint:

Pearson,J., Buchanan,G. & Thimbleby, H. (2010). HCI Design Principles for eReaders. BooksOnline’10, October 26, 2010.

And this article in the most recent issue of College & Research Libraries News is succinct but  packed with crucial advice for managing library website redesign projects and really, actually focusing on users needs:

Fullington Ballard, A. & Teague-Rector, S. (2011). Building a library Web site. College & Research Libraries News. 72:3, 132-135.

I know I’ve searched for articles on these topics before, but I think the stuff I found must’ve gotten lost in my email. There have to be lots of articles on UX and library websites, right?  If not…I will write one.  One day.  And if I find some nuggets of gold in my email I’ll update this post with citations.  Maybe I should do some research on personal information management too.  :-/

Update: look out for this paper from the CSUN 2011 conference

Accessibility & technology news roundup

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I’ve sort of given up on blogging since I have so much homework – learning Java! It’s exciting. But here are a few interesting items I’ve accumulated over the past month:

Update: Here’s something new from Google, as well: YouTube captions uploader web app

No one cares about alumni

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One of my favorite past-times is looking up university websites on the Internet Archive and laughing at what they looked like in the beginning. Ironically, it was probably easier to find the information you needed back when things looked like this:

Pitt website from 1996

University of Michigan website in 1996

The Web Marketing Association has an award for Best University Website.  The Art Institute of Pittsburgh’s site won in 2007, but that version of the site seems to have disappeared.  I remember using it once to try to find information about their library.  I was impressed by how unconventional the site was, but I couldn’t find basic information I needed.  Now the design is different – more structured but still attractive.  This is unfortunate, though:

If you need to tell people to use your menu, you've got a problem. And why not just hyperlink all those programs on the main page if you're going to have them there?

I see university websites as portals that must also contain a lot of content themselves, in addition to making a visual statement that conveys whatever the university is trying to emphasize about itself and enhances its brand.  Ideally it should be impressive from a technological standpoint, since that in itself is (in my opinion) a statement about the quality of the institution.  So basically university websites are probably one of the most challenging type of sites to design. This article from the blog of a design consultancy in Singapore sums it up quite nicely, covering issues of web standards, information architecture, and branding.  An excerpt:

University websites tend to be more complicated than corporate websites. Here are some reasons why:

* Difficultly in defining a common vision: unlike corporate websites, it is difficult for a university to get all of its schools, divisions, centers, etc., to agree on a common vision for communicating on the web. This is a classic example of a house-of-brands or a branded-house conflict. Only the administrative offices are under the fold for obvious reasons. Thus, it is not uncommon to come across a school or a division crafting their own vision, often citing the hyper competitive education marketplace as their main reason (e.g. business schools).
* ‘Not invented here’ syndrome: because of the above, web design tends to fall into the hands of many different local webmasters who make decisions based on local directives – usually motivated by one-upmanship. This results in the hotchpotch that users finally get to see, and unfortunately, to experience.
* Lack of knowledge in user-centered design: this is crucial one. Because the needs of the user (or as Don Norman would say, people) does not take center stage, as the above two points show, design decisions are based on varying principles and random rationales leading to haphazard design outcomes. Unless there’s common understanding of user needs this is going to be a problem area for some time to come.

The xkcd comic above apparently started enough of an uproar to merit an article on Inside Higher Ed about the problems with university websites. And university websites don’t have half the problems library websites do thanks to all our different services which may require different interfaces, databases that require authentication which may have to occur on a page that isn’t the library’s, and the entirely separate (though maybe it shouldn’t be) beast that is the OPAC. But those are topics for another day.

Metadata, assistive tech, mobile-ization

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metadata standards visualization
Item 1: A visual map of 105 metadata standards used by cultural heritage organizations. Each standard was “evaluated on its strength of application to defined categories in each of four axes: community, domain, function, and purpose.” Woooow.

Item 2: The Oct. 2010 issue of American Libraries has a brief article on assistive technology, and mentions some “tipsheets” that have been produced by ASCLA (the Association of Specialized and Cooperative Library Agencies). The following publication seems especially useful since there doesn’t seem to be that much written about assessing the accessibility of databases and other online resources (not that I’ve done a thorough literature review or anything…): “Think Accessible Before You Buy” : Questions to Ask to Ensure that the Electronic Resources Your Library Plans to Purchase are Accessible.

In other accessibility news, S.3304, the Equal Access to 21st Century Communications Act was passed by the Senate and has been sent to the President.

Item 3: Apparently Wired said the Web is dead (not dying; “dead”. typical). I have been fretting about my lack of engagement with all things mobile, and this stuff is just making me feel even more like I’ve been “left behind”. I have never used the internet on a phone or any other mobile device. Eek! But then, what is one supposed to make of glossy statistics like “only 23% of the traffic on the internet is actually from the Web!” (omg get apps now) VS. “Three-quarters of the people in the world are not yet online”. I think I have more to worry about than being Twitter-illiterate. Twilliterate?

It’s interesting, though, that mobile technologies are (supposedly) the future of the internet, and “mobile cellular networks already cover close to 90 per cent of the world population” [source] So mobile phones are nearly ubiquitous, but : “Whereas, by the end of 2009, most people in the developed countries enjoyed Internet access with a high-speed connection, broadband penetration rates in the developing world stood at a meagre 3.5 per cent.” [ITU report]

If there was more broadband penetration in the developing world — and if people had mobile devices that could access the internet — what would that mean for the WWW? The Wired article claims that “Within five years, Morgan Stanley projects, the number of users accessing the Net from mobile devices will surpass the number who access it from PCs.” This prediction is echoed in articles in the Wall Street Journal and, more recently, the Economist:

In Brazil, Russia, India, China and Indonesia, there are 610m regular internet users but a staggering 1.8 billion mobile-phone connections, according to the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In a report called “The Internet’s New Billion”, BCG predicts that by 2015 there will be 1.2 billion internet users in these countries—dwarfing the total in America and Japan.

These new internet users will mostly log on via their mobile phones. This tends to be cheaper and easier than any other option.

Could Wired actually be right about something and not just over-hyping like usual? Of course their perspective is more focused on the “first world”, but it’s interesting to me that different factors might lead to the same end result in both developed and developing countries. I can envision web browsers and PCs going the way of the telephone landline in the US.

Problem: I know nothing about protecting my personal information when accessing the internet on a mobile device, and the daunting task of re-learning about privacy and security issues is part of what has kept me from mobile-izing. The Economist article cited above mentions the issue of literacy and how you have to be literate to benefit from mobile access to the internet. I also wonder how many people are using the internet via mobile devices without being “literate” about privacy and security. Convenience and novelty seems to triumph over worry in many cases (except for mine, of course). What are the information literacy challenges that are unique to mobile devices? For starters, how about “How to Get Through a EULA – and Actually Understand its Implications.”

Things I wish I could attend

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ASIS&T 2010‘s conference theme is “Navigating Streams in an Information
Ecosystem”. The full-day SIG CR workshop detailed below will “give participants a chance to reflect on essential questions related to information classification, representation and organization while exploring the future of the field.”

The morning session will include papers from theoreticians and practitioners
in the field, including:

Molly Tighe, Time Capsules Project Cataloguer, the Warhol Museum,
Pittsburgh, PA. Ms. Tighe will describe her work at the Warhol Museum, where
she is involved with a project to arrange and describe over 600 boxes of
items contained in the Andy Warhol Time Capsules.

Grant Campbell, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media
Studies at the University of Western Ontario. Professor Campbell will
present a paper “New Life for an Old Theory: Italo Calvino, the Future of
the Web, and the Theory of Integrative Levels” This presentation will use
Italo Calvino’s analysis of creativity and cybernetics to suggest that the
growth of sophisticated semantic networks in the Web of the future depends
on a process that Feibleman identified years ago with his theory of
integrative levels.

Joe Tennis, Assistant Professor at the School of Information at the
University of Washington. His paper “Form, Intention, and Indexing: The
Liminal and Integrated Conceptions Work in Knowledge Organization” will
propose a dual conception of “the work” in knowledge organization.

Tim Spalding, Founder of LibraryThing. In this presentation, Mr. Spalding
will discuss the intersection of traditional and social cataloging,
specifically how LibraryThing for Libraries allows librarians to harness the
“wisdom of the crowd” in unprecedented ways. Traditional library OPACs
currently lack the mechanisms for collecting the knowledge and preferences
of library patrons. Although the traditional cataloging and classification
model – where a small group of specialists describe materials for the
general public – works well enough for the job for which it was designed,
the expectations of users have changed with the advent of web 2.0
technologies like Wikipedia, flickr, and Amazon recommendation systems.
(*Note: this is a change from the original speaker from LibraryThing)

The afternoon session will build on the ideas presented in the morning
session and will be devoted to small group and general discussion regarding
the limits of classification research.

Specific questions include:

– Where is classification research headed?

– How can we best communicate our ideas and theories to researchers,
students, and practitioners?

– What are some of the strengths of our current research methods, and what
are our weaknesses?

– Are we working under any unexplored assumptions or biases?

– What are the goals of classification research?

Attendees will be asked to break into small groups in the afternoon to
discuss these questions, then return for general discussion towards the end
of the workshop.

Important Information:

EARLY REGISTRATION ENDS: September 17, 2010 (register and make hotel
reservations by this date)

( http://www.asis.org/asist2010/index.html )

For more information:

http://www.asis.org/asist2010/workshop-SIGCR.html

The thrill of human/computer/library history

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Libraries of the Future by Licklider book cover imageI’ve been reading a little about the history of the human computer interaction (HCI) field, and as always I love reading the prophetic visions of researchers from the early days. It’s really cool that Stanford has made available video clips from Douglas Engelbart’s 1968 public demonstration which featured the online system, NLS, the mouse, hypertext, object addressing, dynamic file linking, and “shared-screen collaboration involving two persons at different sites communicating over a network with audio and video interface.” No wonder the Human Computer Interaction Handbook refers to it as “sensational”. It’s always surprising how quickly some (if not many) people in the mid-twentieth century realized networked information storage and retrieval systems would be the “libraries of the future“.

This Vannevar Bush quote kinda gives me chills no matter how many times I’ve read it. 1945, people!

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client’s interest. The physician, puzzled by a patient’s reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side trails to their physical and chemical behavior.

The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people, parallels it with a skip trail which stops only on the salient items, and can follow at any time contemporary trails which lead him all over civilization at a particular epoch. There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.

–Vannevar Bush. “As We May Think.” The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945.

college student using a clunky computer for word processing in the 80s mayberock on computerz