Stop Blaming the User
This blog post by Jenica Rogers is a perfect example of the way more libraries ought to be thinking.
Money quote (emphasis mine):
The user is not broken in that our job is to fulfill the user’s needs, and the user’s needs are, while not always well-defined, possible to meet, or understood by either side, valid — so accusing the user of Doing It Wrong is counterproductive to our goals and needs, and should be avoided. This applies to space usage, reference inquiries, customer service, and use of our online tools.
I couldn’t have put it better myself. Libraries need to pay a lot more attention to how our patrons behave and start adapting our systems to the way our patrons expect search to behave. Our seemingly in-built desire to force patrons to search for things our way is counterproductive and ultimately damaging to our credibility and our profession.
If there’s one point that I’d like to add to hers, it’s that a big part of the problem is that very few libraries actually take real responsibility for the software that’s used to build their site. By relying on external vendors and not having in-house coders who can improve the system, many libraries pretend that any deficiencies in it are minor and/or not their responsibility. But everything that happens under your logo — whether it’s on your website, at the Reference Desk or how you organize your stacks — is ultimately your responsibility. That means that, like it or not, it’s your job to make things as easy and intuitive for your patrons as you can. As Jenica so wonderfully puts it:
We can sit back, all of us, in libraries and outside of them, and with smug self-satisfaction explain why our tools, websites, spaces, and services are just brilliantly perfect… or we can thoughtfully observe our environment, acknowledge that the user has needs and is showing us what they are, and adapt.
♦ Posted on Thursday, 15 December 2011 at 5:05 pm and filed under Customer Service • Reference • Search.
Whither Broadband?
Broadband in the US is lagging (no pun intended) behind the rest of the world, both in terms of adoption rates and in speed. According to the OECD, the percentage of American households with broadband Internet is ranked fifteenth in the world. Even worse, the OECD defines “broadband” as “256 kbps and up”, which many would probably agree is a pretty paltry speed in this day and age. The FCC even used to define it as a mere 200 kbps—which isn’t even four times as fast as an old 56K modem—although thankfully, it seems to have been bumped up to 768 kbps or higher, which is a bit better.
Now, if you follow that link and read the first two Excel spreadsheets (curse you, OECD, for not providing PDF or HTML versions of this data!) you’ll see that it isn’t quite as bad as it sounds: first, the US has the highest number of overall broadband subscribers of any country; second, most of the countries with higher adoption percentages are countries far smaller than the US (Britain, France, Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, S. Korea, etc.). Naturally, it’s a lot easier to wire up the entirety of small countries than it is a continent-spanning nation that’s quite spread out, as much of the US west of the Mississippi River is.
♦ Posted on Friday, 26 February 2010 at 3:51 pm and filed under Broadband.
The Smart Firehose
I’m an unabashed Google user. I think Google has long provided the best search results on the Web and I don’t see any sign that’s going to change any time soon. The reason I think Google has so totally eclipsed its competitors like Yahoo!, Ask and Excite (remember them?) is that Google is the search engine that follows what I like to call the “smart firehose” principle.
Google spends millions and millions of dollars every year on tweaking their search results to make them better. Engineers at Google constantly ask themselves: How can we give people the information they want in as few clicks as possible? Can we add context-relevant information such as a map, movie showtimes or images in order to make the search results more useful? In other words, Google would rather just give you the information you need if it possibly can, instead of sending you somewhere else.
When you search for something using a standard Google search (that is, at Google.com or through your browser’s search box), the search engine doesn’t separate relevant results, forcing you to click various sections of results. Instead, Google just gives you a list of the best results, depending on what you’re searching for and regardless of what type of result it is; consequently, a Google search results list will include links to web pages, maps, images, videos and more, all in one list. This “smart firehose” model works well for Google because it gives good results and then trusts people to make the right choice.
Libraries, in comparison, are woefully behind in search. Catalog searches are almost always totally separate from research information, so in order to find good information about, say, diabetes, a user will need to do multiple searches; one for the library’s catalog and at least one for the research databases. Often, users will need to go into several different research databases and perform individual searches.
Library users need a smart firehose.
♦ Posted on Friday, 20 November 2009 at 10:05 pm and filed under Search.