The Bad Design Election

[Jerry Kuntz]

Putting on our "information architect" hats, what lessons can we learn from
the Bad Design Election, where the next President of the United Utates will
be decided by the results of a local, poorly conceived menu interface?
Should we feel fortunate that it would take some tortuous HTML/CSS coding to
reproduce a web-based "butterfly" layout of alternately-aligned menu
options? Or are we guilty of producing or accepting other navigational
atrocities?
Should we be devising some methodologies for field-testing the usability of
library, catalog, and database interfaces? Should we be demanding usability
field-test evidence in our contracts with database and catalog vendors?
Should the web pages we produce ourselves be subject to some sort of peer
review for usability?
Jerry Kuntz
Ramapo Catskill Library System
jkuntz at rcls.org