Usability in Libraries

[Brian Cockburn]

In order to play devil’s advocate to some extent and to learn more of the
ideas swirling about, I would like to say


Some of you, in your replies to me regarding usability in library sites
indicated a feeling that usability is more an art than a science.  That what
is usable in my library would unlikely be applicable in another.

I would like to respectfully disagree.
1.	The “science” of usability has settled on some pretty objective criteria,
methods, and models.
2.	E-commerce usability has become quite uniform.  That has happened because
a number of people have performed enough studies and tests that have been
reproduced with similar results to become at least very strong principles.
What are our library sites but e-commerce sites that offer products
(information, resources, etc) for free.  Comparison shopping among
resources, information and annotations about, and help all are part of what
we do.
3.	At least for academic libraries, our users are a very homogenous
demographic whether we like to admit it or not.  We can easily find
significant information about how they behave AND how they expect web sites
to behave
4.	Expectations of how the web works are driven to a great extent by
e-commerce and other profit making sites.  To ignore those expectations is
to create non-intuitive web sites that must be learned (which is against at
least one of the 10 basic heuristic usability principles)
5.	It doesn’t seem to be a stretch to think that if the library community
were to perform the same number and kind of studies that have been applied
to e-commerce we would find many common usability “principles” that would
guide us in making intuitive easily navigable and very understandable web
sites that provided information, or access to that information, as readily
and intuitively as amazon provides products for sale.

In closing, I would like to state that I do understand the argument that we
should be focusing on our users.  I plan to in my study.  I am certain
however, that what I said above, in no. 6 will be true if we put as much
effort into it as has been put into profit making ventures.  Additionally, I
think that we can take advantage of almost all the specifically e-commerce
usability research, because our users (I know we hate to admit it) spend
more time at those “other” sites than the library’s site and will expect our
site to function similar to those other sites.

Look forward to any conversation that occurs.

BAC

Brian Cockburn
Digital Services Librarian
James Madison University
VMail:  540.568.6978  EMail:  cockbuba at jmu.edu
Public Calendar:  http://calendar.yahoo.com/cockbuba