This article comparing the usability of Joomla vs. WordPress has already been linked by everybody’s uncle, but it’s still worth a look.

I find it amusing, however, that none of the comments so far on that blog post mention the commitment that the core WordPress team appears to have on making blogging fun. If you start with the goal of making something fun, then add sophistication to make it flexible without being complex, you’ll get a very different result than you would if you started with different goals.

The Usability Professionals’ Association says “a cell phone should be as easy to access as a doorknob.” And since 2005 they’ve been organizing World Usability Day to help make that happen. Locally the UPA Boston chapter is holding events at the Boston Museum of Science (in Cambridge, actually) that explore the clues we use to understand how to operate doors and the frustrations of setting an alarm clock.

This year’s theme is transportation, and they have an online transportation survey that helps us see our “transportation footprint and learn how small travel changes can make a big impact on all our lives.”

This an old one, but it just caught my atention. In A List Apart tells us Usability experts are from Mars, graphic designers are from Venus. Is this still true? Haven’t the last several years been about the triumph of good design in both the usability and graphic senses? Or are rounded corners not actually useful?

Free from Nielsen Norman Group: Beyond ALT Text, Making the Web Easy to Use for Users With Disabilities, a report on web design for users with disabilities. “Seventy-five best practices for design of websites and intranets, based on usability studies with people who use assistive technology” According to the blog post, usability is three times better for non-disabled users.

A bibliographic instruction quiz we used to use asked students how many of Dan Brown’s books could be found in our catalog. The idea was that attentive students would dutifully search by author for “brown, dan,” get redirected to “Brown, Dan 1964-,” and find three books. Indeed, the expected answer was “three.”

As it turns out, my library has all four of Dan Brown’s published books, including the missing Digital Fortress. The problem is that three books are cataloged under the more common Brown, Dan 1964-, but Fortress was cataloged under Brown, Danielle.

The problem is that cataloging is imperfect.

Yeah, it takes some marbles to say that, but the fact is that cataloging is a human endeavor. Humans make mistakes. The challenge we face is to build systems that tolerate error, and then make it easy to fix those errors when discovered.

catalog, cataloging, error, errors, findability, keyword search, libraries, library, opac, search, searching, usability

“Bagged products” is little better than “cookery.” I’m gonna bet that no customer has ever asked the sales people for “bagged products,” that nobody’s ever checked the yellow pages for “bagged products,” and without context, nobody would come close to answering a question on what the heck “bagged products” are all about.

But we do have context.

And within that context, those two words are probably meaningful enough to the potential customers driving by. “Nursery stock,” “pavers,” and “bagged products” are just a few facets of that potential customer’s search for “landscaping” or “gardening supplies.”

The challenge here isn’t to reinvent our vocabularies, but to build systems that help the user who searches for “cookbooks” find more of them without needing an MLS to know the specific terms we used to catalog them. As it turns out, that search returns facets that give the user a hint that “cookery” might also be a good search term (it’s not perfect, but I’m happy to have any examples in this subject in my academic library to point to).

Aside: can somebody explain to me why a book might be cataloged as “Cookery, Indic” rather than “Cookery — Indic”? It’s not like “United States — History — 19th Century” would ever be represented as “United States, History — 19th Century” or “United States — History, 19th Century.” Or would it?

bagged products, language, categorization, subject assignment, classification, librarianship, libraries, lcsh, usability, findability, library systems, search, facet, facets, contextualized, contextualized results

I was especially young and impressionable when I discovered Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things, but I still claim it’s required reading for anybody who’s read more than one post here at MaisonBisson. That’s self selection at work, but let me put it this way: unless you’re the only consumer of the things you create, then you need to read this. Now.

I feel foolish to have only recently discovered Norman’s website and essays. It’s there that I found he’s giving the commencement address today at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering Professional Masters Programs. He summarizes his prepared statement thusly:

If you work very hard, perhaps you too can get a silly hat like this (wearing my silly racoon-tail hat from the University of Padua). What is the moral? Take your work seriously, so someone might award you the hat (and the honorary degree that goes with it). But, as the hat illustrates, never take yourself seriously: strive to do things that matter, that make a difference, but have fun while doing so.

It’s cutesie, but I kinda like the message, and not just because today is also my birthday and I’m especially susceptible to schmaltz. Eh…

Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman, Nielsen Norman Group, Poetry of Everyday Things, commencement address, design, engineering, speech, usability

Following Edward Tufte’s advice, I’ve been wanting to offer a presentation without slides for a long time now; I finally got my chance in Portland. The downside is that now I don’t have anything to offer as a takeaway memory aid for my talk. My speaking notes are too abstract to offer for public consumption, but below are the URLs from them along with a tiny bit of context.

Foundation

Increasing use of the web is changing our expectations of information services and places greater demands of self-service on them. If “Web 2.0” has any meaning, it’s this notion that internet services are no longer the stuff of science fiction, but a part of our every day reality.

One interesting reflection of this increasing usage and comfort with the web is the development of social software like MySpace, Facebook, blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, Flickr, and also LibraryThing.

It takes a moment, sometimes, to realize what’s changed in the ten years since the first Mosaic browser opened the web to a mass audience. Kevin Kelly tried to explain that when he noted: “The accretion of tiny marvels can numb us to the arrival of the stupendous.”

Okay, now what?

We need to understand how people now search for and interact with information. Part of that means making peace with search engines and making sense of “findability.” Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability addresses this question in terms directly relevant to libraries. To that I add the notion of The Google Economy and a set of rules for participation (and findability) in it:

• Linking must be possible
• Linking must be desirable
• Linking must be measurable

I argue that libraries are rich with the stuff people would like to link to, but the architecture of our systems often fails us on the other aspects.

I’ve been exploring this with my WPopac project, and I’ve seen some interesting results in the four months that it’s been live and available to the public. One example is that a web search for “joe monninger” returns the WPopac page as the top hit. Elsewhere, WPopac content is appearing in blogs (examples: Fuzzyfruit and Angie) and as a result some of the books in WPopac are now highly ranked in web search engines (example: A Baby Sister For Frances is now the only non-commercial result in the first page of Google results).

A rather more controversial look into how the Google Economy works can be found in Google’s explanation of their search results. Interestingly, the same factors within the Google Economy that created the controversy also made possible a solution: the top search result for “Jew” is now the Wikipedia page.

How can we track our participation in the Google Economy?

Alexa might be best described as the Nielsen ratings for the web. Tracking the daily changes in reach and rank (and looking at all the variations of the graph) can be rather addictive. Alexaholic serves that fix by offering more varied views of the same data.

It should be said, however, that the results in Alexa are the slowest to reflect changes or improvement in a service’s role in the Google Economy. A more immediate pulse of things can be taken at Technorati or within Google.

Last word

As we consider ways to improve our online services — as we look to build the online library of the near future — these words echo in my mind:

Nobody cares about you or your site. Really. What visitors care about is getting their problems solved. Most people visit a web site to solve one or more of the following three problems.

• They want/need information
• They want/need to make a purchase / donation.
• They want/need to be entertained.

Too many organizations believe that a web site is about opening a new marketing channel or getting donations or to promote a brand. No. It’s about solving your customers’ problems. Have I said that phrase enough?

In short, our libraries’ web sites are the online embodiment of our libraries. Our patrons don’t want to know how to use our library, they want to find in our online services the value that libraries offer in their in-person services. They want online services that deliver answers.

findability, future libraries, google economy, lib 2.0, libraries, library, library 2.0, online libraries, opac 2.0, presentation, usability, web, web 2.0, wpopac

Brian’s comment at RemainingRelevant should resonate with many of us:

Something to consider about why libraries end up with bad interfaces (at least as far as catalogs go) is that it might be that the people who use the interface (and help the public use it) are not the people who decide which interface to use.

When it comes to demanding better from vendors [...] consortiums like mine seem to place more emphasis on “cheap and reliable” than in “useful to the patrons.”

More than identifying individual vendors, I’d like this to be a discussion about our decision making processes. Let’s look carefully at how we got here — not to point fingers (for we are all responsible), but to plot a path out and try to make sure we never find ourselves here again.

As Karen points out: it’s not enough to nod our heads in a knowing sigh, “the genius moment for you or anyone else will be figuring out what to do with it!”

It’s corny, but I’m serious. If you’ve taken the pledge, you’ll know to look skeptically at every product. You’ll ask yourself and a mix of likely users how it could be better. And you won’t buy anything or renew any contract on anything that sucks. There is no consortium, no institution that can afford to throw away money on products that can’t deliver the ease of use and quality of experience that users expect from competing (and more familiar) tools elsewhere on the internet.

The real challenge, of course, is making sure everybody involved with every decision-making process understands this.

compare, decision, decision making, market, market forces, process, software, suck, sucks, sucky, the pledge, training, usability, vendors

I was this close to posting soldierant’s Gobbledy Gook map, but, well… I guess I wanted to make a point with his user experience map, done in collaboration with the smart folks at Experience Dynamics.

Take a careful look at the role of your competitors and a user’s expectations and goals. Yeah, we’ve all got some work to do.

Too bad the free seminar schedule hasn’t been updated for 2006.

Update: I forgot to properly credit Ryan Eby for pointing this out to me.

design, design success, diagram, experience dynamics, map, soliderant, usability, user centered design, user experience

Ryan Eby speaks with tongue firmly in cheek in this blog post, but his point is well taken. Privacy is serious to us, but we nonetheless make decisions that trade bits of our patrons’ privacy as an operational cost. While we argue about the appropriate time keep backups of our circulation records, we largely accept them — and the way they connect our patrons with the books they read — without question.

The problem here is that it’s a decision we make on behalf our patrons, often without bothering to inform our patrons of the risks we take with their privacy. And the problem there is that it violates users’ expectations of transparency and self determination — some of the same expectations you’ll find in Jenny Levine’s Online Library User Manifesto.

So here’s the trick: how do we deliver targeted and customized services online, without unhinging our patrons’ privacy? The answer so far is that we allow patrons to choose, giving patrons the tools and knowledge they need to make their own decisions about how much they reveal. But that answer depends on the notion that library services must be self-contained, that the only way our patrons can manage reading lists and the like is if libraries offer those services.

One only need look at LibraryThing to see an alternative. It’s not that I think LibraryThing or Listal or any other service will make better privacy decisions than we will. My point is that our attempts to build out customized services will likely draw resources away from efforts to improve the way our existing services interoperate with the rest of the internet. Listal and LibraryThing work because Amazon built an outstanding API and made it freely available to all. If libraries offered an API like that, those services could easily integrate our holdings, and LibraryThing users could match their interests against materials available at their local libraries without revealing themselves to us. Patrons could run desktop applications like Delicious Library and (mostly) avoid revealing themselves over the network. Libraries are in the awkward position of having identifying information about their patrons, but online-only services might not need any more identification than an anonymous username and password.

But even more simply than that, it’s worth asking how easily our online services work with basic expectations of web sites. Can users bookmark an item in your catalog in their browsers? Can they send the catalog URL of their new favorite book in an email to a friend? Can Google or other search engines index your catalog and help your patrons find materials even when they don’t know to search your site specifically?

Circulation records can be subpoenaed, but getting at the reading list I’ve been keeping as bookmarks in my browser is more likely to require officials to serve me with a search warrant. Building systems that work with the internet puts users in charge of their own privacy decisions.

library, libraries, privacy, transparency, web 2.0, internet, bookmarkability, durable links, web20, web architecture, usability, privacy, privacy and libraries, future libraries

Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability sold out at Amazon today on the first day of release. There’s a reason: it’s good.

Morville’s work is the most appropriate follow-on to the usability concepts so well promoted by Steven Krug in his Don’t Make Me Think and Jakob Nielsen in Designing Web Usability. Findability, Morville argues, is a necessary component in the success and propagation of an idea or detail or fact. Business and non-profits alike will benefit from understanding the value of findability.

I noted this gem about why non-profits need to pay attention to their search engine placement and web traffic previously, but it’s worth noting again:

At [the National Cancer Institute], the [web development] team had to look beyond the narrow goals of web site design, to see their role in advancing the broader mission of disseminating cancer information to people in need.

The National Cancer Institute, it turns out, was poorly ranked in many relevant searches. Though it may seem obvious now, it doesn’t matter how authoritative their information is, it has no value until it’s found. Nach: findability.

My copy has has notes scribbled in the margin and a bunch of dog-eared pages marking things I need to revisit. No, you can’t borrow it when I’m done with it, go get your own.

tags: ambient, ambient findability, designing web usability, don’t make me think, find, findability, finding, global marketplace, google, google economy, googling, hidden web, jakob nielsen, new books, peter morville, search, search engines, search results, seo, steve krug, steven krug, the effects of findability, the hidden web, the search, top rank, usability, web usability

I’ve been slowly struggling with the question of how to replace pMachine, my CMS engine here. I haven’t really liked any of the alternatives that others I know are using (link link link link), though I’ve been hard pressed to identify exactly what my complaints are. Among the points in Making A Better Open Source CMS, Jeffrey Veen names a few of the most frustrating for me: hard-coding of site layout in the CMS, mixing of content with site administration in the interface, and, sometimes, lax security.

He had spent some time at OpenSourceCMS, which allows anybody to fiddle with a variety of CMS installations without the time and trouble of figuring out how to install and configure them.

What I experienced was obtuse and complex software that was packed with gratuitous features at the expense of usability and user experience. It was software written by geeks, for geeks. This whole category of software desperately needs to be redesigned with writers, editors, designers, and site owners in mind.

…which is about exactly what my complaint against PHPNuke is. While he doesn’t actually identify anything that he’d recommend, I’m glad to know I’m not alone.

Update: of the four sites offered as examples above, three have switched to WordPress.

tags: cms, complex software, geeks, hard coding, http, lax security, open source, phpnuke, pmachine, switched, usability, wordpress