Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand.
Great way to spend a Saturday afternoon.
Good & Bad
Discussion assignment for my IA grad class this week was the classic “pick a good and bad website” topic (much less interesting than last week’s focus on DTDT). I feel like as a UX person I should have a list of examples on hand at all times — maybe I’ll start a Delicious set (or Diigo…if I ever get around to totally switching over now that the Delicious extinction crisis has subsided). Anyway, this is what I slapped together the past hour. Time to go clean and cook food for my birthday potluck :)
GOOD - Mint.com (someone else beat me to Tumblr)
Mint.com is a free online personal financial management tool by Intuit. After you set it up, it automatically pulls information from bank accounts, credit cards, investments, etc. and tracks transactions to help provide a holistic picture of your financial status and trends. It’s the source of the strange look I give my mom when she asks if I balance my checkbook.
It’s pretty good at automatically categorizing vendors as the data comes in, but makes it easy to customize categories and create cross-category tags to help organize and filter transactions. These labels also help identify trends and automatically suggest a monthly budget.
Interaction throughout the site is smooth, making it easy to drill down through or bubble up information with filters, tooltips, property trays, and interactive graphs. The use of visualizations to help convey trends and budgeting effortlessly on the user end is particularly excellent.
The only thing I don’t like is the overview page is cluttered with offers for related products (Intuit is probably best known for TurboTax, and it seems like they probably get money for referring people to investment and credit card companies). But offering such a great tool for free, I guess they have to make money somehow!
BAD - Sing365.com (and lyrics sites in general)
I often search Google to find lyrics of songs, and many lyrics sites are downright awful. Sing365 is one of the worse examples, with its overwhelming amount of ads - including Google text ads placed right above the page content which forces the user to scroll down a while to get to the content. A lot of these sites also produce pseudo pop-up ads when you first enter (and I’d assume real pop-ups if you don’t have a blocker).
Links related to the specific song (print, comment/review song, submit a correction, author bio, etc) are scattered around the page rather than being organized in some sort of toolbar.
Since I often enter lyrics sites via Google looking for a specific song, I think these sites would be well served to try to engage me further when I’m there instead of scaring me off with ads — as soon as I figure out what the words are I was looking for, I’m out of there…or occasionally I’ll click on another song listed for the artist. It would be neat if the page could present songs with similar lyrics, info about allusions that songs make, and other rich content like that in addition to the standard artist bio, recording/video, and comments section.
The alphabet across the top on Sing365 seems like an extremely poor choice in primary navigation; I think it’s highly unlikely that people would spend time browsing a list of artists’ names (not sorted by genre) to get to lyrics. It would be interesting to include some sort of faceted search that made it easy to browse through artists and genres.
My tech comm e-textbook just used this graphic in talking about Tufte’s war on Powerpoint. Win.
Source: presentationzen.blogs.com
Libraries as service rather than resources
First post of the term for online class INFO 653: Digital Libraries. I wasn’t expecting much for this class, but based on the readings so far and the syllabus, it’s looking pretty exciting. Thinking about expanding on the service definition and into a discussion of service design for my term paper…
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Apologizing in advance: I feel like such a poor library student for using Wikipedia here, but in the slurry that is the internet I’m having trouble finding a similar, more authoritative definition that communicates what I’m thinking — and interestingly enough it’s a very poorly cited article. I’m sure there’s something in business literature, but “service” is such a generic term that it’s tough to search for! That’s what I get for posting right before our weekly deadline, I suppose.
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Before we define what “digital libraries” are, I believe it is essential to define first what “libraries” are — and in previous classes I’ve found this discussion often starts with what libraries are not. A common thread in defending libraries is that they’re not just repositories for books, etc. Thus, the first thing I would have I would have to say about digital libraries is that they are not just repositories for data. There is a greater level of service and deliberate organization than mere indexing and retrieval.
I would argue that at the core of libraries is service. Generally defined on WordNet, service (n) may be “work done by one person or group that benefits another” as well as “an act of help or assistance.”
In the economic sense, a service has 5 key characteristics: intangibility, perishability, inseparability, simultaneity, and variability. Libraries and librarians fulfill these characteristics in the following ways (the hairdresser example in the article makes these parallels a little more clear):
Research and practice have a symbiotic relationship. Interesting research problems often
arise from practice. Scholars attempt to isolate problems for research purposes and then
provide solutions to practitioners for implementation. Partnerships between researchers and
practitioners are fundamental to the design of current funding initiatives, encouraging such
relationships. Universities are ever more eager to establish partnerships between scholars and
industry, in hopes of cross-fertilizing ideas and acquiring new funding sources.
Christine L. Borgman, p.229 of “What are digital libraries? Competing visions” in Information Processing and Management, 35 (1999)
Moderately random paragraph in the article that speaks to the disconnect and potential complementary nature of UX practice v. academia. Looking forward to some rumored PhillyCHI events this winter around that topic!
And as much as I will complain and stress out for the next 11 weeks, I have to admit it feels good to read grad class articles again…Even though I’m jittery on caffeine and banging my head against the weekly Sunday 11:59pm deadline as usual.
One of my discussion prompts this week for a class deals with the nature of “Libraries 2.0,” a topic I’ve been bludgeoned over the head with in many classes before. At least this time it’s a design research class, so we’ll actually get to approach the problem/solutions rather than just prattling on.
The materials for the new Philadelphia Free Library Parkway Central design are the best PR I’ve seen for libraries…maybe ever. We need more videos like this one to educate people about what libraries are (striving) to be, rather than the musty old stereotype most people have.
New design itself looks amazing, hopefully they can scrape up the donations to make it happen…though I have mixed feelings, given they almost closed a bunch of branches last year. Hopefully this spearheads a larger movement to improve the branch libraries, because they’re what’s more important to the neighborhoods across the city.
I think Casey & Savastinuk sum it up the best: “The heart of Library 2.0 is user-centered change” (2006). It’s not about digitization or web 2.0 itself — it’s about the paradigm shift we’ve experienced that has opened organizations and companies up and made them respect their customers’ opinions more than ever before. By getting direct input from library users and studying their needs and behaviors, we can design the best possible experience for a variety of patrons. A design research company called MAYA did this project for the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh a couple years ago, which I think is a model example of the right way to approach modernizing libraries.
I agree with Michael Stephens general description of “Library 2.0” - “a meeting place, online or in the physical world, where [library users’] needs will be fulfilled through entertainment, information, and the ability to create [their] own stuff to contribute to the ocean of content out there” (Casey & Savastinuk, 2006).
So, from experience and discussing this in various other classes, I believe a library should be:
Above all, useful. Libraries’ content and services must keep up with the needs of modern patrons. Be ready for tech-savvy users, but mind the digital divide. Expect younger people to be comfortable with technology, and find ways to shape their research habits to value authoritative sources.
A beautiful public space. The architecture of modern libraries must attract and inspire patrons, seething with modernity while paying homage to the hallowed halls of knowledge of the past. The Seattle Central Library set the bar for modernity, but personally I think it’s a hideous structure, and agree with the Project for Public Spaces in that public library buildings must promote a sense of openness by allowing patrons to flow in and out at convenient points. Edgy architecture may look exciting, but if it’s not functional patrons will be frustrated.
A hub of activity. Maintaining quiet space, but opening areas up for energetic social exchange. The library should be a bastion of communication, creativity, and innovation for people of all walks of life — hosting public events, classes, and children’s programs. Fostering new business development. Connecting people to information, as well as people to people.
Seamlessly connected. High-speed wireless throughout. Interact with librarians through whatever your preferred channel — face-to-face, web, phone, text message, IM, Skype, Twitter, Facebook…you name it. Searching the web on Google brings up library-recommended sources. You can download content at home, have resources delivered to you, go pick them up when they’re available, or enjoy them while visiting the library.
Finally, libraries must continue to value the analog. My favorite “Library 2.0” thing about Hagerty at Drexel is the board where comments from the suggestion box are posted and feedback is provided. It’s not digital, but it’s all about “user-centered change.” There are plenty of old school solutions that are just as valuable as digital ones, especially if you want to maintain the library as a physical place.
Portfolio site, at last
Finally a somewhat presentable portfolio/resume site. Not all the work I want is up there yet, but it’s on its way. Have any suggestions? Let me know.
Yeah, it’s kinda boxy. That’s because there’s tables in the code. For some reason it was a requirement to do the layout in tables rather than with styled divs. That’s the second half of the course. That’s what I get for taking Intro to Web Design for librarians. D’oh! But seriously, it offends me that my university, which usually likes to stay ahead of (or at least on) the curve is allowing this. I doth protest.
Still need to update my PDF resume…will get around to that after I catch up on all the other homework that’s been piling up while I’ve been working on this thing.
