Silence is Golden
By Joseph Janes
American Libraries Columnist
Assistant Professor, Information School, University of Washington.
intlib@ischool.washington.edu
Column for December 2006
I love to talk. (I know, big shock; smelling salts will be available at the door for those who feel a bit lightheaded at this revelation.) In fact, one of my great privileges over the last few years has been the opportunity to visit and speak at a great many conferences and libraries all over the country and abroad. I’ve met fascinating people, been everywhere from Barrow to Barbados to Helsinki, and seen and learned a great deal during it all.
Now and then, though, it does me good to shut up and listen, which I did this week and profited greatly from it. First was a session I did with a great friend, Peter Morville, the author of Ambient Findability (O’Reilly Media, 2005), a must-read book that talks less about searching than how things get found.
Rather than consolidate Peter’s nuanced messages into a few words, I’ll send you to his blog at findability.org. I was, though, particularly taken with the “user experience honeycomb”: adjacent hexagons that represent important aspects of what users want, which he uses to move people or institutions beyond a single focus on, say, usability.
The facets in the seven cells—useful, desirable, accessible, credible, findable, usable and, in the Paul Lynde center square, valuable—are largely familiar and recognized by the library community, but within each of them lie further depths, especially when viewed from the user perspective. Google this and explore.
The second talk I attended was also on user experience and design. I won’t tell you who gave it yet; suspense can be useful at times. The speakers first laid out a handful of principles that guide their design work, which included innovation, building for scale, speed and reliability, and keeping it simple. Nothing earth-shattering there. These were preludes, though, to the main feature of the talk, where they laid out their five “user experience challenges”:
��� Understand users. The speakers’ service population is large and diverse, so they use a wide variety of methods to study their users, through experimentation and the analysis of user logs and customer service questions.
��� Language and culture. A significant proportion of their population speaks languages other than English, and cultural references (using ice cubes to measure how “cool” something is) don’t always translate either.
��� Consistency. They work hard to reinforce their identity, providing a family of services, each of which is distinctive, yet kept consistent by use of design, layout, color, and display, reducing the user’s learning curve. (A handy trick, pardon the pun, is to cover the institutional name on a web page with your thumb; can you still tell its provenance?)
��� Integration. They look for opportunities to integrate their services in an unnoticed, seamless way to support what people want to do, not what the services are meant to do individually.
��� Anytime, anywhere. Self-explanatory. Their overall design philosophy is to focus on the user and all else will follow.
I’d love to report to you that this talk was from a major library or an ILS vendor or licensed database provider (if only). No, as some of you may have guessed, it was Google.
About halfway through the talk I began to wonder why this wasn’t coming from our world. There’s nothing in their list, or Peter’s for that matter, that isn’t comparatively obvious and yet it seems so damnedly difficult to implement these fairly basic and fundamental ideas.
Library websites almost always tell visitors what tools are available (catalog, databases, resources, services), which isn’t much help if people don’t know what those things are or what they can do. People want to learn, to read, to create, to solve problems, to take actions; shouldn’t our Web presences (and buildings, for that matter) speak to those desires directly, in language people can understand?
Even though the term “user experience” leaves me a bit cold, it captures an important, often-overlooked notion. Stand in the shoes of users, think how they think, and design from that perspective. No matter who your clientele may be, that strategy will almost always stand you in good stead.
In the year to come, I hope I get even more chances to meet people and speak (and even listen) and learn more about what we can and should do next. (Nothing brightens my day quite like getting an invitation to an exotic locale to shoot my mouth off.) And of course, we’re looking forward to welcoming everyone to Seattle for Midwinter . . . but that’s another story.
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