Dana’s user experience blog

With thought, hard work, loads of research and not a little grim determination I have reached the end of the 23 Things program, and this is the last task — to comment on it.  Bearing in mind that I am a usability professional, and one of the things we do is critique existing systems, here is my feedback.

Things I liked:

• I saw people start talking to each other on the blogs who hadn’t necessarily known each other before.  Debates and camaraderie began, and this created inter-office links within the library staff
• Some people learned lots of new technologies, and felt that whole new worlds had opened up for them
• It encouraged me to begin this blog (which I have been meaning to do for a long time) and take a certain amount of control of my own web presence.
• People have seemed to enjoy it — I suspect this is unusual for any technology training program.

Things I would change:

•  Many people have created blogs they will never go back to, because they are dedicated to 23 Things. Had the blog task been more generic and spread over a number of weeks (create a blog; over the course of the 23 Things, write at least ten posts on things that interest you; embed a picture that is relevant to one of your posts; comment on another 23 Things blog of your choice; embed a video that is related to one of your posts) people may have found the blogging less onerous.  What’s more, the blogs would have been more interesting reading, and would have better facilitated those positive new links.
• Given the suggestion about the blogs above, a new mechanism to follow people’s progress would have been necessary.  My suggestion would be a web form where the person entered their name, the task, one thing they did like, one thing they didn’t like and an evaluation of usefulness on a 5-point likert scale.  This would have made the reporting more private, and allowed the blogs to be more useful and interesting.  It also would have made it very clear what the expectations were for “completing” a task. Futhermore, it could have been the basis for an interesting research paper about what participants think of the 23 Things, and which tasks were useful.
• Speaking of privacy, it would have been good if people had been given more information about web-presence and anonymity from the outset of the program–given that many people have never used these technologies before, many of them probably did not realise that if they created a blog with their name on it what they say on it could be attached to their name for a long time, with Google harvesting.
• The progress chart felt counterproductive to me, given that this is a personal development program, and I wouldn’t have done it.
• Given that the program is spread out over such a long time, one task per week might have been achievable.  Doing anything more than the bare minimum per task takes a considerable investment of time (whether that is because someone is learning a new technology, or because like me, they want to write a rich blog post about it, or both), and it would have been easier to keep up (and do lots of exploring) at a rate of one task per week.

While this post may seem quite negative, I have actually been quite grateful for the push to begin this blog, and the content to get it off the ground.  While I had already used many of the technologies we investigated in the 23 Things, I was forced to think more critically about them, and I did quite a lot of reading to back up my posts–so I still learned quite a lot.  The only task I really didn’t find useful (and the task I found most difficult to integrate into this blog) was the image generator task; however investigating and thinking about Digg more than made up for it.

So I have two questions remaining: At the end of this programme, we will have a library full of extremely tech-savvy  people — how do we keep this up, and where to from here?

In the past year or so, there has been a lot of hype about Second Life, both in libraries, and in general. First-life companies have been trying to figure out how to commercialise Second Life (somewhat unsuccessfully, it would appear), and some social problems that have involved Second Life (which is not to say that these problems weren’t there anyway, just that Second Life lowers the barriers to them) have emerged.

Because of the library hype surrounding Second Life, I decided I should give it a go (much like I gave LambdaMOO a go once upon a time), and like all 3D environments, I hated it. I found the graphics clunky and slow, the interface difficult to operate, and I never got off the tutorial island. Mostly I hated it, though, because I couldn’t drive my avatar, and I suspect this is because (like 8% of young people, and a significantly greater number of older people) I have reduced stereoacuity, and the 3D model presented on my screen is very little like anything I see in real life.

So, what should Swinburne Library be doing with Second Life? My answer would be “nothing” for a number of reasons, including:

• As of August 2007 (the latest statistics I found) there were 13,567 active* Second Life Avatars based in Australia, and approximately half of all users operate more than one avatar (meaning we can guess that about 9050 Australians log in regularly). Given a population of 20,434,176 Australians, this means that about 0.000443% of Australians are “active” Second Life users — even assuming that Swinburne, being a technical university, has a disproportionately high number of users, we wouldn’t be serving very many people by setting up in Second Life. Of course, we could increase the number of Second Life users by advertising our services there, but I think we would be better off evaluating and improving the services we know our users engage with outside Second Life than creating new services that rely on a commercial third party product, and which our users may not use anyway.
• Second Life requires a very high-speed internet connection and a good graphics card to be at all usable. This may put it outside the reach of many of our users — there are 17.4 broadband connections per 100 people in Australia. Even assuming that there are multiple people sharing most of these connections, and that Swinburne community members have a higher rate of broadband connections than the general population, for many of our community the only way to access to Second Life would be on campus where the video cards are not up to specification.
• If the library’s business is information, then 3D environments are not the place for us; studies have shown that users of 3D information environments perform worse in finding and management tasks than users of 2D environments.

Before I get howled down as a complete luddite, I do believe there is scope for Second Life to be used in educational environments; design schools (like the one at Swinburne) could make (and are making) excellent use of the 3D properties in teaching interior design (and I have heard of at least one example of a student fashion show in Second Life). Also, like LambdaMoo, there is scope for sociological study in Second Life, which may be interesting to Swinburne’s Institute for Social Research. Until there is evidence that research like this is happening at Swinburne, though (and that the researchers want our help in Second Life), or until large numbers of our student population “lives” there, there is little scope for the library to do anything useful there — interesting, maybe but useful definitely not. Given that we have loads of scope to do interesting and useful things in our first lives, for now, I’m going to stick with that.

*Active according to some Linden Labs (the people responsible for Second Life) definition.

This post is another of the reasons why I have been ignoring this blog: I struggled to get into podcasts at all. According to this “learning styles” test (which may or may not mean anything), I should not be averse to receiving my information in an auditory/verbal format — I fall right in the middle of the verbal/visual scale (and indeed, I often listen to the TV while I am surfing the net, cook while talking on the phone, and listen to music at work). And yet, somehow, podcasts feel cumbersome and inconvenient. Nonetheless, I managed to find this podcast describing usability testing methods and when to use them (mp3, time unknown — less than 10 minutes, size unknown), and this one about folksonomies, taxonomies and metadata (an interview with Karen Loasby from the BBC — mp3, 18 minutes and 20 seconds, 8.6MB), both from the User Experience Podcast.

So why did I find podcasts so hard? For me, I think the problem is affordances (the properties of an object that dictate what you might do with it). Podcasts are hard to search for, and it is almost impossible to tell before you listen to a podcast from an unknown creator whether you will find it interesting or not (partly because the blurbs written about podcasts are near-universally unhelpful). Of course, if I were using podcasts “correctly” (i.e. finding ones I liked and subscribing to them) this would not be such a problem but I don’t have time to listen to podcasts — and this is another affordance problem: I can read very, very quickly, and I would absorb most of the information in a podcast much faster from reading it than listening to it. What’s more, if I am listening while I sit in front of a computer, I am inclined to attempt to do other work while listening, and then I lose the thread of the podcast.

Away from the computer, though, I could believe that podcasts might come into their own; in theory I could download interesting radio shows or documentary podcasts onto my shuffle and listen to them at a time of my choosing — even away from the internet (for me, the example that springs to mind is while travelling in a car — I get very carsick if I read as a passenger). Podcasts are also useful where they contain information that users already know exists — podcasts of lectures would make a great alternative to lecture notes for visually impaired students, or those with reading difficulties, or those who simply learn better from auditory material. They could also be a lightweight way for me to catch up on the things I necessarily miss at conferences because something I want is going on in another room — these “known item” uses sidestep the search problem.

So in terms of user experience, when are podcasts a good idea?

• When your users generally have a high speed internet connection, because podcasts are much larger than text files and users hate waiting for content to download
• Only if you are prepared to label each with a good blurb, length, and file size
• When the content is something that natively appears in an auditory format, such as lectures, radio broadcasts, conference presentations, concerts, etc.
• When you know you have users who find text hard to access, and you want to offer an alternative to a screen reader
• When your users already know your content exists so they don’t have to search for it using a non-google search interface (while iTunes’ podcast search is fairly effective it also means downloading and installing 3rd party software, which your users may not be able to do at work, or in the lab, for example).
• When you are doing it purely for your own enjoyment, and (like so many bloggers) don’t really mind what audience you have, if any.

Used well, podcasts can almost certainly make for better user experiences for students, conference-goers, radio-listeners and the like, however for vital information, they should be an alternative way to get information, not the only way. And me? I think I prefer to read my blogs, thanks anyway.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.