The angry librarian: A great example of the human side of bad user experience

I was tipped off to the angry librarian when it went around the office; if you haven’t seen it please watch it below and then read the rest of this post.

I hope that was an especially painful 5 minutes and 10 seconds — I know I found it painful, and not, as many of the commenters on YouTube did, because “that spacey girl is so dumb”. This is an excellent (if spoofed) example of a bad user experience in an unusable system that involves a human being. The girl’s task is relatively straightforward, she wants to print a picture in colour for a university assignment. When she tries (and fails) to complete the task on her own, she asks the librarian on duty for assistance.

From this point, the librarian completely fails to offer a good user experience; he doesn’t provide enough information at any stage in the proceedings for the girl to know that what she wants to do is impossible, and during their conversation, the girl (a library user, the person on the customer end of the equation) makes the only attempts that are made toward solving the problem — only to have each one rebuffed in a ruder and ruder manner.

Rebuffing the girl’s attempts to print a document in colour takes five minutes, time that is wasted for the librarian and wasted and frustrating for her. There are ways to deal with this that would have taken much less time, and would have been a much better experience for both parties:

• The obvious: Make colour printing available to students.
• If colour printing is not available for students, then make this fact obvious, and provide an alternative, for example “I’m sorry, we can’t do colour printing for students, but the copy shop next door can and is open 9am to 9pm 7 days a week”.

The bad user experience in this case was caused by an interaction between an obstinate person (the librarian) and a set of rules that would be incomprehensible to the average user (and aren’t readily available for users to read). While I am sure that this scenario is not in the least bit library-specific, this video is an excellent incentive to assess how our rules and our customer service may make our users’ lives difficult.

Wikis: Not all that wiki

One of the 23 things is to put a photo of your pet on the wiki. As mentioned on some of the other 23 things blogs, there is a slight flaw in this task: Some people don’t have pets, and some don’t want them, either. I do have pets, however, and so that part of the task was easy for me (see the masters of my universe below).

The rest of the task, though, from uploading the file to putting the photo on the wiki, was absolutely painful. I’m a reasonably well skilled computer scientist. I know HTML, and I have been editing webpages for quite some time. I don’t use a wiki often enough, however, to ever remember wiki codes (especially for something like a table, which is pretty complicated).

The word wiki has its roots in the Hawaiian word wikiwiki which means fast. This is because wikis are meant to be a quicker and easier way to create collaborative web pages. Some things about wiki-ing are easier than standard HTML — creating links to pages that don’t yet exist, and writing in paragraphs for example. Nonetheless, though wiki code is awkward for those of us who do know HTML, and still significantly difficult for those who don’t — a kind of perverse worst-of-both-worlds compromise (clearly at least two of my colleagues feel the same). The compromise is made even worse by the use of obscure characters like ‘|’ — does that thing even have a name?

Of course my technocentric intuition is “let’s just use HTML, everbody knows it now anwyay”. This intuition is, of course, wrong; one quick look at MySpace (and the number of HTML customisation generators for it) will demonstrate that in fact most people still don’t know HTML, and nor should they have to. The interface I am typing in now automagically generates nice clean HTML for me — why can’t wikis do the same (especially since they are translating code anyway)? Well, it turns out some of them do, and if I were to suggest ways to invite more participation in our library wiki, investing in one of those would near the top of my list.

The video below shows how easy it should be — and too often isn’t — to contribute to a wiki.

Library 2.0: Library 1.0++

I have to say, I am a little uncomfortable commenting on library 2.0. I’m not a librarian, and I have neither the academic background nor the practical experience to know what Library 1.0 delivery really means, nor what the rationale is (was?) for doing things in a library 1.0 way.

There seems to be a lot of chaos over what library 2.0 actually means, which is no doubt adding to my discomfort posting about it; the general consensus seems to me to be that the difference between library 2.0 and library 1.0 is that library 2.0 is user centric and user driven; and a lot of it seems to be driven by new technologies (though it doesn’t have to be) Now, I’m all for a great user experience, and often that is something that will involve a certain amount of user centrism, but I’m decidedly ambivalent about what it means for libraries.

To go any further with this post, I have to define what I think libraries are (or should be), and this will no doubt get me in a world of trouble with my librarian co-workers: I think libraries are free access point of information of many kinds, with value added in spaces to get that information, and librarians themselves. I think the defining point of libraries is actually librarians; they select targeted authoritative collections, and can help unsure users sort the wheat from the chaff online.

Back to library 2.0, though. Some library blogs refer to library 2.0 in terms of teen gaming nights and library blogs, others talk about user control of information.  I question what any of these things have to do with librarianship — the difference between a library and the internet, as I expounded in my masters thesis, is that a library is a carefully collected information set (and the internet is not).  The internet is always going to have more choices than the library (some of which would never make it in to a library) and users are also going to be far more in control of the likes of Google than they are of EBSCO (unless EBSCO buys PageRank from Google).  Library blogs are notoriously silent, and I can’t really understand what teen gaming has to do with libraries at all.  If these things are the best library 2.0 can offer us, I’m with the Annoyed Librarian. Not only do these things not gel with what I want in a library (and after all, I am a library user too), they seem to dilute what it even means to be a library.

Kathryn Greenhill, however, has a post that makes many aspects of library 2.0 something I could get behind.  It paints library 2.0 as a move away from the purported days-gone-by librarian shusher model (did anyone ever really get shushed?  I never did and I’m not a particularly quiet soul) and toward an era where librarians have control of their catalogue software (thus creating scope for things like user tagging, which are long overdue), library spaces accomodate collaborative and individual work, librarians seek feedback and listen to their users, and library services are available on the internet. Library usability, particularly in terms of online services, has a big part to play in this version of library 2.0 — and I am all for it — and apparently so is Swinburne, because we are doing many of these things already.

The big risk of library 2.0 is throwing the baby out with the bathwater; trying so hard to be everything to everyone that libraries are no longer libraries.  The big opportunity is providing increasingly relevant, increasingly user-friendly and increasingly useful spaces and services.  I think the way forward is to get off the bandwagon — the term library 2.0 is so overused as to be meaningless — and at least in Swinburne’s case, to keep doing what we are doing — listening to our users, and providing the best responses we can in a library context.

Del.icio.us: Merely tasty

Del.icio.us is one of the 23 Things I sort of don’t get. It’s not that I can’t see a lot of use for an online bookmark storage site, it’s the social part that I find a bit confusing. Sure, I can share my bookmarks (and check out the links in the sidebar for some more focused resources), and there is hype and hotlists and I can even look at the bookmarks of people who have bookmarked the same thing as me, but it doesn’t seem especially social.

I’m going to use some fools rhetoric here, and provide the Dictionary.com definition of social:

pertaining to, devoted to, or characterized by friendly companionship or relation

and

living or disposed to live in companionship with others or in a community, rather than in isolation

These are the only two out of approximately 8 definitions that could conceivably have anything to do with del.icio.us, but really, the links are pretty tenuous. There is no scope on del.icio.us, as it exists at present, for any real interaction — I can’t comment on others’ bookmarks, I can’t find and contact people with similar bookmarks to me, I can only add my own bookmarks, and look at others’ bookmarks. And really, those two things are both pretty useful, especially when using del.icio.us for a project or a teaching aid–but they aren’t social. Del.icio.us isn’t about community building or support, and it certainly isn’t about companionship — it’s about knowledge sharing, as far as I can see (though I am willing to be corrected on this point).

There are things Del.icio.us has right, notably the tags and being able to save and share bookmarks online. It’s pretty useful to be able to subscribe to a feed of someone’s bookmarks, especially if you’re working closely with them. And with the browser plugins, it’s really easy to ’save’ a site to your bookmarks.

There are things (besides touting itself as social bookmarking service) that Del.icio.us has wrong, though. First and foremost is the name — besides it not having anything to do with the service Del.icio.us provides, who can remember where the dots go? (They also make it a hard name to type). Another failing is that Del.icio.us uses a different tagging convention to every other piece of software I have ever used: Del.icio.us tages are space separated, where most are comma separated. Not only does this break a convention that users are accustomed to, thereby making things harder, it also makes my tags less likely to match the tags of others when talking about the same thing simply because we are likely to use different conventions for replacing the space (while I might use hyphens, they might simply run the words together). Causing a tag mismatch also seems to defeat the purpose of the site, somewhat, because finding other interesting links is dependent on sharing tags.

Del.icio.us is an example of a site that fulfills a need (online storage of bookmarks) with a few added features (tagging, sharing), but that doesn’t quite live up to its own press. It’s good at what it does, but it isn’t great, and it certainly isn’t social.

iGoogle: Not habit forming

My apologies, I am behind and I have had some lovely comments from those of you who read regularly. My other work has gotten somewhat on top of me over the past couple of weeks, but I think the worst of the storm is past now.

I tried to use iGoogle for a week so I could make some educated comment on it, and the most educated comment I can actually make is that I didn’t actually manage to see the week out. The premise is good, but the execution just wasn’t there to keep me going back.

Part of the problem is that I can get most of the online services I use regularly into it, but not all of them; gmail, my rss feeder, a calendar and weather I could have, but I couldn’t get the metlink timetable, nor an online community I’m a part of nor Facebook in any meaningful way. Given that iGoogle is supposed to be my “one-stop shop”, the inability to access so many things that I use regularly is a substantial failing (and while I am aware that this is not Google’s fault, and someone needs to write a plugin for each of these things, knowing that doesn’t help me any).

The integration with Google’s own services is relatively poor; instead of Google content opening in a new tab the way content from all other applications did, Google content opened in the same tab, obliterating iGoogle (this was actually one of my most common paths out of iGoogle — I would do a search or read a blog post in my RSS feed and simply move on, forgetting I had ever been in iGoogle). Not only did it open in the same tab, but in the cases of gmail and Google reader it presented me with just the content of the email or feed, and none of the usual functionalities of moving to other emails or feeds.

Having failed in the useful stakes, I tried to make iGoogle fun by creating a ‘fun’ tab and adding some dingbats and crosswords and such; I also kept the original funny cat picture that it came with. I set the background to be the solar system (though I did think the one that had the sun rise and set in tune with local time was kind of fun) and tried really hard to be engaged. The only thing out of the whole lot that I liked was the funny cat picture, and I actually get my fill of those by subscribing to ICanHasCheezburger. Again, it isn’t iGoogle’s fault that I couldn’t find a cryptic crossword, but when you have to work too hard to have fun, well, it isn’t fun anymore.

One of the fundamental principles of usability is that if there is a conventional way to do something (like the top right-hand search box, for example), then you better be making a usability improvement if you break that convention, and it better be a significant improvement, or the convention being broken just overshadows whatever you are trying to do. I think it is the same with people — if you want people to change their usual habits, you need to have a compelling incentive for them to do so. If iGoogle really did create a one-stop-shop for all my web things, if it had a good interface, or even just if it was fun it could have formed a new habit for me. However, it fails on all these counts, and I have to say if I go back, it will only be to look at the cat pictures.

Google Maps: A classic case of value added

Google maps as maps just aren’t that great. They don’t include a scale, and lifestyle leandmarks like schools and gyms are not marked. For Melbourne, the local knowledge that goes into streetdirectory.com.au makes that a much better map, and whereis gives better directions with more options.

However, Google Maps is something special for four reasons:

1. In the bad old days, many map publishers (for example Wises in New Zealand) required you to pay to look at their online maps. Once Google Maps was launched, that business model no longer worked for them because people are unlikely to pay for what they can get for free. So now, not only can you look at Google Maps for free, but many other maps as well.
2. The integration into search results, while it is cross-promotion for Google, is also really useful when you’re looking up a business. For me, living in Melbourne without a car, it is important to know a business I select is near the transport network, and the recent integration of maps into search results lets me do that.
3. It’s everywhere. It might not be so easy to find a really good maps site in another country, especially if that country has a different national language or uses another character encoding. Tony points out that it is even good in Japan’s notoriously complex address system.
4. The thing that really makes Google Maps stand out is the photographs. While I agree with Sara that they are a little bit scary, I also really enjoyed looking at the places I have lived, and worked, and the places that are important to me. I also like all the weird and wonderful artworks that have come out of Google looking down from the sky at us, like the man shaped lake in Brazil. Some things seen by Google’s eyes in the sky are beautiful, and some of them are odd, surprising, and ultimately controversial, but it certainly has brought a different view of earth to the average internet-connected human being.

Each of those four things is value added over a traditional map, and even over many other online maps — they give the user that little something extra that makes it worthwhile coming back. For me, the real selling point is the photos, though: they take something that is a tool, and essentially boring, and make it fun.

Google books: A great reference tool and nothing more.

As a reference tool, Google Books is pretty good. You can do a normal search, and get as results any matching books that Google has indexed. With the recent burgeoning of Google deals with large and well known libraries (for example The NYPL, Oxford University Library, and Harvard Library), Google Books looks set to include the full text of a decent chunk of published works. This means it is now possible to effectively run a Google search on the content of a very large library, and have the results returned in a relevance ranked order with little snippets of text for context. It’s also possible to add the things you read to a “personal library”, assuming that you have a Google account, meaning that when you just have to find the poem you read in a book that includes the line ‘the stars carried the helpless one ribbed moon away’, you can search specifically in the books you have read.

There are a few implications of this technology, though, that are problematic. The first is that under the current law, Google is being sued for copyright infringement because they have to make a copy of the works they make searchable to create the search index. Normally I would think this was a reasonable use (even though technically it’s legal), but there is a loophole that I discovered yesterday that does make me slightly uneasy on behalf of all poets: The context that Google provides around the search terms in the results allows you to search for the next line of the poem, and for a short poem, it is relatively easy to read the whole thing. Admittedly this is a somewhat cumbersome process, and admittedly it is not likely that any poet will lose a sale out of it, but you see these snippets without direct attribution to the poet, if your search results come from an anthology, and this is a sad loss of a moral right for the poet involved.

The second problem is that this knowledge is tied up in a commercial corporation who by law has first responsibility to their shareholders, but by popular cachet is the source of information on the internet. Libraries are nervous about a monopoly on information, and while some may view this as just one more twist in the historical antipathy between libraries and Google, I think it is in line with the freedom of information principle that it should be available from more than one source, if possible.

The third issue is one that is close to my heart, and one that Sara and some of these comments got me thinking about. Google books are great if you already know what you are looking for, but if you don’t have some search terms already, it’s hopeless. More than that, though, there is no serendipity: you go, you type in some words, you find the book and either read it online, buy it, or reserve it at your local library, and you leave. You never get to see the book on the shelf next to it might also have been useful, or just walked past a display that might have had something interesting for other reasons. Now, chances are that some people wouldn’t have bothered to go find a book if they didn’t have Google books, but some of them would have. Improving serendipitous information encounters (i.e. online browsing of information sources) is something that attracts a lot of research attention (including my own, for a year), and some novel approaches. And to me it is this that is the real user experience failing of Google books — not that I don’t want to actually read online, not the copyright issues, but that their browsing experience is boring and cumbersome and smacks of an afterthought. Until Google can provide me the same rich browsing experience that an actual library or bookstore does, it will only be a reference tool.

Google Docs: Online and free, but limited.

Google docs is a service that allows those with a Google account to edit, store, and share Microsoft-like documents online (or export them to a Microsoft format and use them as usual offline). Now, I am all for anything that can reasonably save me from the torture that was the write-up of my masters, when MS word redefined some of my pictures as millions of page breaks when I put page numbers into my thesis (I suspect the character combination used to represent a page break is something that could conceivably appear in a jpeg file), but I don’t think Google’s word processor is it — and I suspect this holds true for the other document editors as well (certainly I have recently read one report of a catastrophic crash of the presentation-making software).

I’m going to speak about the word processor in Google Docs rather than the rest of the suite, because I have the most experience with it. At first glance it appears very much to be a stripped down word processor, not unlike the blog editor I am using right now. On the face of it, this should be enough for the majority of users, based on the 80/20 rule. Sadly, though, this is not the case. There are some areas where Google’s word processor has missed the opportunity to improve over Word, such as picture placement, which is horrible in Word and merely average in Google Docs. There are some areas where Google Docs is limited by what HTML can offer, for example the limited customisability of lists, and the inability to add drawings (for diagrams for example). There are other ways in which Google Docs could have capitalised on its HTML capabilities and hasn’t, for example not opening hyperlinks when you click on them (ideally in another window or another tab). I don’t know what kind of a limitation it is that forces Google Docs to open everything in a new tab, but that is also fairly seriously irksome (and would be even more so if using an un-tabbed browser). And for me, the lack of integration with bibliographic software is a real problem (though I am aware that this is a specialised usage).

The thing that concerns me most about Google Docs, though, is writing any kind of work-related document under Google’s privacy umbrella. I have Google email, and Google pictures, I write a couple of Google blogs, and I have lists of books I want to read and movies I want to see in Google documents. I actually don’t think there is any such thing as total privacy on the web, and I don’t mind Google sucking up my personal information — I am the only person that can affect. I am less comfortable, though uploading documents related to my work (which is not even all that confidentail but which affects people other than me) to a site with this in the Terms Of Use (TOU):

“You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Service. By submitting, posting or displaying the Content you give Google a worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through the Service for the sole purpose of enabling Google to provide you with the Service in accordance with its Privacy Policy.” (link).

Given that the Google Docs privacy policy incorporates the Google privacy policy, and the Google Privacy policy is subject to change — with your consent, if your privacy is reduced, though I am guessing it would be Hobson’s choice (accept the new terms or go elsewhere) — and given that it takes three weeks to expunge account details if you terminate your account…I am simply not comfortable storing work-related material on the servers of a commercial company whose interests could run counter to that of my employer. Maybe this makes me a paranoid luddite who should be wearing a tinfoil cap, but when it comes to information about my employer I am finicky (even though I doubt they would care).

This is not to say that there aren’t some wonderful features of Google Docs, however. The autosave is excellent and functional, and I wish MS had done this well with their autosave (saving to avoid lost work is a mechanical, repetitive task and should be done by a machine). This autosave is coupled with excellent versioning, so if it autosaves something you later decide you don’t want, you can go back to the earlier version. I haven’t tried the sharing features, but it would be hard for them to be worse than Microsoft Word (and with the versioning, it is likely that they are better). There are two big drawcards for Google Docs, though: It’s free, and it’s online. For me, these are the reasons I use Google Docs at all. I can access it from anywhere just by clicking on a link in my email, and I keep lists of books I want to read and movies I want to see that I can add to from anywhere.

Google Docs is great for information you want to keep online, but if you’re looking for a more fully functional free document package, or one that isn’t online, I recommend OpenOffice.

Why the travel agent will survive — because airline websites are so painful

Recently I had the displeasure of doing something that should have been very pleasant — booking my flights back to New Zealand for my wedding. A friend of my gave me the heads up that there was an especially cheap flight with Emirates around the time I wanted to go, so I duly went ahead and attempted to book the flight.

The process of booking this flight — a simple flight, only a single leg — took over an hour and a half. Partly this was because the Emirates website was painfully slow, but partly it was user interface issues. When I made an error entering the dates I wanted to travel (and I discovered this near the end of the process) I had to go back and completely start the process over — there was no way to change the travel date. When I made an error with the seats I selected I was kicked back to the personal information screen, where some of the information had reverted to the default. And when I made an error entering my credit card details, the booking failed irrevocably (while saving the incorrect details to a customer profile that could not be accessed because the server was down). When I tried to start the booking afresh, I was trapped with the bad credit card details, and was offered the choice of collecting the tickets from an Emirates office, or having them mailed to me — no e-ticket for me. In the end, we logged in with my partner’s account and booked the tickets that way, but as I said, at this point it was 90 minutes later.

I tell you this story not to deride Emirates, who are, after all, flying me to NZ for an absolute pittance, but because whenever I book with an airline, the user experience is near-universally bad. I haven’t yet found an Australian website that searches as many airlines as House of Travel in New Zealand, but when I do, I won’t be booking directly with the airlines again — travel agents know their websites have to actually offer a service if they want people to come back, and so the user experience is much, much better.

The point of social networks: Perhaps there isn’t one for everyone

I’m a member of nearly every site dedicated specifically to social networking and available in the English language (but apart from Facebook and LinkedIn, don’t bother looking because I use a pseudonym). I have Bebo, MySpace, Orkut, Facebook, LinkedIn…I used to have Friendster I think, but I have long since forgotten my log in, and at one point I was a member of the now-defunct SixDegrees. I am or have been a member of special interest communities too — I’m in three book-based communities, I was a member of 43 Things and 43 People (I had to close my account because I kept being mistaken for someone else), I’m a member of Flickr, last.fm and Youtube.

Before you write me off as a slave to every next big thing, I’m a member of most of these things for research-related reasons — investigating how people share media and opinions, or share interests in special-interest communities. I was going to write about my thoughts on the differences between two of the major online services — namely Facebook and MySpace (thoughts that were crystallized by reading an essay by the guru of social networking research, danah boyd).

Instead of unpacking the differences between MySpace and Facebook from a non-US perspective, however, I decided to think aloud here about the point of social networks. I was inspired in this endeavour by fellow 23 things bloggers JWA, who finds it hard to go back to Facebook after blogging, Sara, who is engaging in social networking with some trepidation, and Trees, who finds the only thing worse than Facebook is the staff professional development software.

Of all those social networking things I am a member of, I only look at four of them with any regularity, and I use those four for completely different reasons:

• LinkedIn: I believe being a member of LinkedIn, and being associated with some of the prominent names in my business could possibly be good for my career. It also forces me to keep an online CV up-to-date, which (despite never being headhunted in my life) I am told is a good thing.
• Bebo: My step-sister and one of my favourite bands are on Bebo. The band I do keep up with in other ways (see below), but when my step-sister’s cat died earlier this month, the easiest way to get in touch with her and let her know how sorry I was was Bebo.
• MySpace: MySpace is ugly, and has a reputation for being full of predators (though danah boyd wonders if this s a social kneejerk), and is absolutely ridden with advertising, but it is a way to keep up with the absolute latest on some bands that I like — some of these bands don’t actually have any other websites. Because Myspace is so interactive, bands often post more updates here than on their own websites (where else could I learn that on Thursday my favourite band is ‘at home’ and feeling ‘calm’). Most of the time that is the real hook MySpace has for me, but there are times when it is also nice to be able to talk back to the band — like when one of the bandmembers quit a band I love, I could leave them a message of condolence. The band probably doesn’t read it, but it made me feel better. MySpace has also been a venue for music discovery — some bands have sought mer out because of my friends list, and a very few of them have even been interesting to listen to.
• Facebook: Facebook is the social networking site I use most regularly, and the one that I have the most friends on — and they are all people I know in real life (which is a big drawcard for Facebook). It is also one of the only sites where I use my real name, largely because of the hugely flexible privacy settings. Now, Facebook has a lot going for it; the applications are especially interesting — one of the ways I spend most time on Facebook is playing Scrabble with Scrabulous — feel free to track me down and challenge me to a game). What keeps me on Facebook though is being able to get in touch with friends and familywithot remembering phone numbers or email addresses, and without even really having anything to say — I can “poke” them to let them know I am thinking of them, I can post a news item some of them might find interesting, or I can change my status (which will appear in their “home” page).

So, what is the point of all these social network things? Well, in the US, social networking sites are used by teens much the same way mobile phones are here in Australia (at least according to the teens at a recent social networking symposium) — for private inter-teen communication below the parental radar. There’s all the old stuff that is trotted out about all Web 2.0 things, you know, that “they’re interactive, they allow users to create, share and discuss content”. They’re actually the only web 2.0 styled site where (by their very nature) everyone must be a producer — at a bare minimum everyone must produce a profile. Certainly they are making scads of money for their owners and creators by selling the platforms and selling eyeballs to advertisers.

So, in answer to Trees’ question “what’s the big deal about Facebook?“, well, frankly, there isn’t one — unless you find one (and like all social networking sites, it will die a death if it can’t find a way to keep you coming back after you find one). For JWA, a social network is not as interesting as her blog, maybe because she gets more discussion on her blog, or maybe because she enjoys the process of writing. For Susan, social networking has become a way to connect with her children and is therefore a good thing. Teens (and maybe adults, too) use social networking to try on identities to see if they fit. I use social networking sites to connect, and to pass the time. While the basic driving “point” of social networking centres around connection for most people, social networking is postmodern (much to my surprise and no small amount of embarrassment at liking it) . There is no point without context, and the context is what wants, preconceptions, and social norms individuals and their groups bring from experience. So if you’re worrying about not knowing the point, you can stop worrying now, because there isn’t one (at least for you). On the flip side, if you social networking so much that you want to set a social network up, you better make sure your user experience is really good, because the experience is the whole point for the early adopters (who will drive the later success or failure of your social network as “cool” or not).