I just finished reading Studying Students: The Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester. Anyone who provides library services to young people needs to read this. I also recommended it to our director of the writing center since much  of the research includes how students write papers and what faculty expect in a paper. One particularly apt statement on finding out what users need is “Don’t guess, just ask.” You can download it here.

http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlpubs/downloadables/downloads.cfm

One of the interesting things they learned was that students want the library web site to be a customizable portal .  A number of university libraries tried this some years back and abandoned it for lack of interest. Perhaps what’s changed since then is the availability of more interactive widgets and the request for personal customization, such as adding the student’s own classes, exam schedules and such. UR ended up sending this insight to their university IT department where they are working on such a portal.

There’s a lot of information here that can inform the work of web designers. You should read it for yourself and send the URL to others in your library or university. It’s definitely worth reading.

Since it’s October, let’s bring out the scary stuff:

Database

Say that word to a group of marketing people and watch them climb under their desks like a 1950s nuclear drill.

Around 1964 a new term appeared in the computer literature to denote a new concept. The term was ‘data base’, and it was coined by workers in military information systems to denote collections of data shared by end-users of time-sharing computer systems. The commercial data processing world..appropriated ‘data base’ to denote the data collection which results from consolidating the data requirements of individual applications. Oxford English Dictionary (new edition)

Science fiction picked up on database early on. I remember Mr. Spock querying the database on the Enterprise.  There’s more than one reference to a database in the Star Wars movies. My question is why do we still use this term? At one time they really were repositories of metadata. Now we call collections of full-text journal articles “databases.” I used a database to search the OED. Ask any general library user to define database and they’ll be hard put to come up with a concise, easy definition. Is it a collection of articles, of citations, of definitions?

A librarian at Michigan State University suggested that to better stay in tune with our students maybe we should use “search engine.” CINAHL is a search engine for nursing. Science Direct a search engine for science. Technically it’s not quite correct – a search engine doesn’t actually store the content. But conceptually, it’s understood by our younger crowd.

Another term I once pitched while working for a vendor was “collection.” The nursing collection or the science collection made sense to me as a librarian. It didn’t work for users (that’s a topic for another time – letting go of your failed ideas!).

What about calling it a library? I know that idea gets complex for libraries who are organizing lots of databases. A number of libraries use federated searching to create libraries. An example is the University of Minnesota’s Undergraduate Virtual Library. California has named the Internet an official library. At some point, and it’s closer than we think, a library will be one big database. Do we assimilate or ask Scotty to beam us up?

We all like a little visual diversity every now and then so web designers suggest we add images to our pages to sparkle them up a little. That is a good idea in moderation. We’ve seen pages with different logos from different vendors in different sizes. They weren’t meant to be on a page together and often clash in color and style. If you do want to add vendor logos, size them similarly and space them with blocks of text. For example, you can use them in a list of databases that has an image to the left and a block of text describing the database to the right. If the logos are sized the same, this will give some visual breaks to the user without distracting them from the information.

When teaching design classes, Everyl and I often see libraries that have a Google search box on their front page. Sometimes it’s larger than the library’s own logo! Our advice is to downsize Google – they aren’t paying you to advertise them. Advertise you! And if you want to bring your patrons to the library’s site to use Google, that’s fine. Just don’t give them a place of prominence above your own programming and services.

Think of the last time you went into a grocery store. You expected to find milk, butter and cheese in the Dairy section, right? Canned corn is next to canned beans, which is next to canned tomatoes. Wait, this grocery store puts canned tomatoes in an international section! You walked into the grocery store with a conceptual model  of how a grocery store works. When your model was disrupted, you found yourself slowed down and frustrated. The same is true of library patrons who come to your library web site expecting to find a catalog, databases, reference service and all of the trappings of a library. Those of us who still serve older adults (30+) need to be aware of their conceptual model of a library when we design web sites. The Library Model is a very strong one in American culture. This doesn’t mean you can’t use web 2.0 concepts or technology. It means you should make it easy for people who want to just find a book in the catalog or who need to know your hours or use your reference service (online or in person). Your library is not a store, a newspaper, or a corporation. It’s a library.

 That said, what about the conceptual model for a younger crowd?

The last successful launch of a new conceptual model was, arguably, Google. No other major shift in how the public finds information holds such a majority of users and accomplished that in such a short amount of time.  Google has become the coneptual model for finding information. So why shouldn’t we all design like Google: a nice clean single box interface? What allows Google to be so successful is not its simple design, which deserves credit on its own, but its algorithm. That’s the behind the scenes work that a computer or two perform to bring you results. If Google didn’t bring the user good results, it wouldn’t be a new conceptual model. It would have ended up in the Internet graveyard along with Gopher, Archie, and InfoSeek.

There is no library that can afford to be Google. There’s a lot of research money behind that algorithm. If we can’t deliver the same quality of results as Google, we shouldn’t be trying to use this conceptual model. We frustrate the user and shoo them away from what we can do well. That is, of course, be a library. Until federated searching lives up to its expectations the one search box ideal remains just that.

Okay, we admit, web design isn’t rocket science, but it seems so many people miss the simple, easy standards that have evolved on the web that we need to state them here.

LOGO Go Home
Every time you use your logo on the web site, it leads the user to your home page.

You May ADDRESS Me as Your Highness
Make sure you include your complete address and telephone information on every page. Very small type at the bottom as a footer is fine. You’d be surprised at the number of library pages that say “Woodland Public Library” but give the user no clue as to where in the country (or world!) the library is.

A Little LEFT of Center
Navigation bars belong on the left. Your navigation bar should always be visible no matter what page a user is on in your web site. Right hand navigation was an experiment that some trendy web sites tried a few years back. It didn’t work well. Across the top is okay, too, but most people look to the left.

Look UP in the Sky!
There’s a space across the top of a page that usually contains a banner. Don’t put important stuff up there because most people assume that’s advertising space! It’s a great place for pictures of your library or some stunning image.

The Designing Librarian is a blog for librarians who care about web design and want to make library web sites easy-to-use and intuitive for their patrons. We welcome comments, debate and discussion!

Who we are:

Sue Davidsen
An Internet pioneer who designed the first public library on the Internet (it was so long ago, she was a gophermeister!). Sue has 23 years’ experience as a professional librarian and currently is the Director of Library Services at Walden University. Previously, Sue coordinated the Michigan eLibrary, a statewide online library for Michigan residents that has its roots in Sue’s original project from 14 years ago. Sue gives presentations throughout the United States and the United Kingdom on topics ranging from web design to the future of libraries in a digital world. She was originally trained as an opera singer.

Everyl Yankee
Everyl Yankee is a usability consultant who has been involved in user interface analysis, design and evaluation since 1982. She has worked in all phases of development for both software and web based commercial applications, including ten years’ experience with accessible interfaces and extensive experience consulting on e-commerce applications. She was the Usability Product Manager at ProQuest and works with public and university libraries on usability issues. Everyl currently serves as the usability specialist at Thomson Medstat and is almost finished with her library degree from Wayne State University. She’s spent so much time working with librarians, she realized she was one, too!

Together Sue and Everyl are the Authors of Web Site Design with the Patron in Mind: a Step-by-Step Guide for Libraries.  See our Book page for ordering information.