2017-09-21 Discussion Group
- Cynthia Schwarz (Unlicensed)
Date
Goals
- The assigned article was Humanities Approaches to Interface Theory by Joanna Drucker
Discussion
Article selection
The article was selected in the hopes of having a larger discussion about the overarching interface of the library web presence. How do people interact with the library in an online environment? I don't want to just think of this project as a website redesign, but a wholistic web experience redesign.
Comparison with graphic novels and comic books
The author spent some time looking at graphic novels and comic books when discussing interface theory. The author looked at concepts from game theory to explain how the online environment goes beyond the visual to the interactive. With regards to comic books, your brain eventually grows accustomed to seeing the same structures over and over again. But the web is full of incongruous structures that are hard for the brain to make sense of, even after extended exposure.
We’re planning how people navigate and traverse our online environment. Author is talking about interacting with one scholarly item that might include multimedia. She touched on the idea that we need to figure out what we’re looking out. This happens in our catalog as people try to figure out what they’re looking at in the catalog. In everything that we do, we need to consider how are we going to convey information and content in a way that makes sense to a patron.
User conventions and expectations
Generational considerations can come into play when thinking about user behavior. Some people are used to things being online or on smart phones. Whereas some people might have trouble understanding the metadata organization in a card catalog. In a university, we’re going to have a lot of generations among both the faculty and the students.
What conventions to patrons expect when they go to a university website? There should be an internal consistency in our website and web environment. But we also need to be aware of what format or convention fits a specific medium. There might be some internal differentiation depending on content.
But at the time, we are a large library with a number of different types of materials and serve a large and diverse audience. When we talk about physical items, they are not all textual, they may be musical notation or videos or in different languages. We need a system/website that is flexible enough to accommodate the diversity of resource that we have available.
What is a collection?
Consider the idea of collections. How do we convey the difference between branch campus libraries or different libraries? How do we raise the visibility of things that are curated at the collection level? What is considered an official "collection"? Patrons coming to the website may want to see prominent details about the collections that they work with, but not care about the others. How do we balance that? One important distinctions about collections is whether or not they circulate.
This article takes things to a higher theoretical level. Author is using her background in reading theory to see how the changing structure can impact our interaction with interfaces. A collection is an artifact that is neither interesting or not interesting but is dependent on the person who is viewing the content. Meaningful framing must take place at the moment of use.
Reading is too passive a description of what is actually happening. Reading is interactive. our role as a library is to not just provide information, but also to teach skills. Can our entire interface help people learn skills and develop literacy?
A lot of this is cultural literacy. Access to information is a privilege because many people outside of academia don’t have access to high level databases and can only retrieve information from Google. But the users that do have a familiarity with higher level information research have been habituated from other higher ed websites, not necessarily Google. What design principles that we can extract from this? Is the whole notion of the persona enough? is there something we need to do beyond that?
More on user conventions and expectations
How can we help our users understand what they’ve found. How many stratifications are we going to design for our system for users? Can we create a pedagogical website for the unexperienced undergraduate but also have an advanced search for faculty
But before we can even talk about the interface design and developing personas, we need to review the data model and identify relationships between content types. This is somewhat boring and tedius work, but if the data model and metadata don't work, then we can't yet begin talking about the interface.
What feedback have we gotten so far about Primo? A lot of feedback we’ve gotten has been for known issues, but we do have people who ask why when they search something in Google, they get their item as a first hit, but when they search in Library Search, the item isn’t there. Most people attribute this to the interface, but it’s really an issue of underlying metadata, article index, migration to Alma, etc. It’s not a problem that’s limited to the interface itself or necessarily something that we have control over. Yes, we can provide a google-like search, but we should also educate patrons about available collections and other resources
What is the user's expectation when searching? For example, within the article index, we can provide access to only things that we hold or all things. What is the expectation on the patron side?
We don’t have very good mental models or maps of how people think about the stuff that shows up on the screens. We know there’s stuff we hold and stuff we don’t hold in our index. But our users probably don’t ever consider this or even care. But part of the challenge of a system is to remodel their understanding of the system as they’re using it.