design for your users, not for librarians

Some thoughts about design of websites and services for library patrons.

Note for non-librarians: "finding" is what I would refer to as browsing.  Another way of putting it that that people like to GET information immediately.  Librarians like to spend time to look around everywhere for information.  Also to a librarian, "database" appears to mean any online resource.

Variations on a theme:

TechnoBiblio - But Finding Information Is Fun

The final panelist came forth with a statement that seemed to take the audience by surprise, but it really shouldn't have... "Users don't care." They don't care that the subject specific databases will bring back more relevant hits. They don't care that Scholar brings back more duplicate hits and incomplete citation information. To quote the third panelist, "They want quick, they want cheap, they want easy." That plain white box on the Scholar front page is all those. He brought it home when he said "As much as we want them to enjoy finding information, they don't." To us it's fun, to them it isn't and we need to get over it.

next LibrarianInBlack: Library Sites for Librarians, not Users

Too many sites these days are being designed by librarians who think they're designing them for patrons, but in actuality are only designing them for other librarians.  [Instead, we need to design] for the Googlers.

and I leave the last word to Librarian Avengers: Designing for hyper-attentive cyborg children

We need to run everything we do through a filter that asks: "If I click on this without an MLS, will it piss me off?" We need to acknowledge that design matters. We need to remove ourselves from our collections. We need to design websites that don't mock the resources they contain. We need to do these things because otherwise all of our efforts are worthless. We need to design websites that don't suck