[Web4lib] OPAC user interface - design trends?

[Mike Rylander]

On 1/27/06, Alexander Johannesen <alexander.johannesen at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/27/06, Mike Rylander <mrylander at gmail.com> wrote:
> > http://dev.gapines.org .  They whole scoop is available from
> > http://open-ils.org .
>
> Heh, I just tried it with my search-killer ; "monteverdi in venice",
> and the result was ;
>
>    Zero hits were returned for your search.
>    Did you mean Monteverdi in Venice ?
>
> And clicking the link for the upper-cased version of my search yielded
> nothing as well. :)

I'm not surprised by that.  We haven't created our authority based
dictionary yet (it's a standard English aspell dictionary), and only
about 1/4 of our data is loaded into the development server.

[...looks in current PINES catalog...]

And it seems we don't have any copies of that in all of PINES,
according to the current catalog.  ;-)

>
> To talk about the subject though, I think that this service is good
> technically (albeit perhaps a bit slow? This was the devel version,
> which probably explains it) but still has a few snags to work out in
> terms of usability and UI design, such as the heavy librarian and
> technical jargon, the tree-structures that implies that we're in MS
> Explorer :) and some confusion about what happens when I hit the back
> button (for example, after 'choose a library to search').
>

All good points, most of which are on our to-do list.  We are actually
trying to use a familiar tree metaphor for both the consortial
hierarchy, and the related, authority derived search shortcuts in the
sidebar.  The consortial tree allows you to search at any level of
organization, instead of the all-or-one choice that is common in many
opacs today.

I'm most interested in what confusion there was about the back button.
 Had you expected the chosen library to stay, er, chosen after
"back"ing past it?

Thanks for taking a look, and thanks for the input!

>
> Regards,
>
> Alex
> --
> "Ultimately, all things are known because you want to believe you know."
>                                                          - Frank Herbert
> __ http://shelter.nu/ __________________________________________________
>


--
Mike Rylander
mrylander at gmail.com
GPLS -- PINES Development
Database Developer
http://open-ils.org