Our profession has known for a long time that the traditional reference model is flawed. Constance Mellon coined the term library anxiety in 1986, reporting that students literally felt shame when approaching librarians for help. Yikes. That’s a strong feeling, one we don’t want librarians to evoke. Nonetheless, the typical effort to improve the reference [...]
A Site Divided | The User Experience
April 1, 2011 By
Library nerd that I am, I ask a lot of people about how they use libraries. When I come across a library enthusiast—basically, someone who doesn’t ask, “Do they still use the Dewey Decimal System?”—I follow up with questions about how that person uses library websites. Almost without fail, people say they use our sites [...]
Signs of Good Design | The User Experience
February 1, 2011 By
There’s more to design than appearances, but the way an object looks is often the most immediate and apparent aspect of how it has been designed. The power of this immediacy allows some designers to think only about aesthetics, and that leads to attractive but unusable stuff. This happens quite often with websites created using [...]
The Benefits of Less | The User Experience
January 15, 2011 By
Antoine de Saint-Exupery, a daring pilot and talented author, also weighed in on user experience: “In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.” In some ways, libraries have been taking the opposite approach. We’ve gotten in [...]
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