TechEssence.info

If you haven't seen the new Amazon Windowshop site, you gotta click on over right away. This is where we are going. It's a complete experience. The user has complete control plus it has audio (music and spoken word) AND it includes great CD and book cover images as well as movie clips. Using space bar to get a bigger view of the items grouped together. Click the space bar again to zoom in. It's fun, it looks great and it walks and talks and sings!

Oh, and you can click on stuff to buy it or download it. So, it's simple too.

Now, while you are there...think about this. Imagine that (as you click the right arrow key) you are scrolling through material from your catalog in Dewey order (okay, imagine something even better than Dewey). Using the up arrow key takes you to related material (e.g. "See Also").

I'm thinking this would make a very nice addition to Amazon's Web Services product offering.

The VirtualHosting.com site recently posted an article titled "Test your Website: A 57-Point Checklist for Maximum Usability" that summarizes a number of things to think about, each of which is linked to a different source that discusses that issue in depth. For anyone wanting to make sure their site is up to snuff, it's worth checking this out.

While you're there, you may also want to poke around a bit. Other articles that may be useful to you include "Microformats University" and even "Top 25 (Non-Obvious) Ways RSS Can Make Your Life Easier".

All in all, a site worth keeping your eye on.

I was just reading about the Defrag Conference and wringing my hands that not a single librarian was represented among the speakers. Here's what defrag says about their conference:

Defrag is the first conference focused solely on the tools and technologies that are leveraging the "social" aspect of software to accelerate the "aha" moment. Defrag is not a version number. Rather it’s a gathering place for the growing community of implementers, users, builders and thinkers that are working on the next wave of software innovation.

The conference is about software innovation but it is also about how we deal with the abundance of information facing us (and our users) and how best to filter, organize and interact with that information and the user. Anybody else deal with information retrieval and/or user interface design in library school?

Jessica Hupp at VirtualHosting.com has put together an amazing list of web

Many libraries may wonder whether on-staff web-design expertise is truly necessary, given the proliferation of content-management systems and WYSIWYG tools such as FrontPage and Dreamweaver.

I'm here to say—maybe.

A few days ago, Dorothea recommended some terrific books on information architecture and usable design. Usability basically means how easy and enjoyable it is to use a particular tool (which can be measured for anything from a computer to a rake to a building). If you find that your toaster oven is difficult to use, you can’t figure out which knobs do what, and you can never remember which setting makes your toast perfectly toasted, then it has poor usability. When libraries talk about usability, they are usually referring to the online interfaces our patrons utilize. Some of these interfaces are quite usable, but the majority are not. Many of our online databases and catalogs are not intuitive to use, do not contain sufficiently simple documentation to explain how to use them, and are not designed to match the user’s expectations based on the interfaces they use every day (Amazon, Google, Yahoo!, etc.). Jakob Nielsen, an expert on the subject of usability, has developed ten heuristics for evaluating user interfaces. They include a "match between system and real world," "error prevention," "recognition rather than recall," and "help users recognize, diagnose and recover from errors." If your Web site, catalog, and online databases actually satisfy these ten heuristics, then you’re in great shape. Unfortunately, most online library resources don’t.

One thing that is too often ignored in all this talk about Web usability is the terminology librarians use without even thinking about it, both in our everyday speech and on our Web sites. Librarians speak their own antiquated little language and sometimes we forget that our patrons don’t. If patrons are confronted with terms they don’t know on your Web site, how likely is it that they will be successful in completing the task they came there for. And consequently, how likely is it that they’ll ever come back?

I am not actually a very good information architect. Well, I'm not actually an information architect at all. So pontificating about information architecture would be more than a little presumptuous of me. Instead, I'll recommend you some of the books and websites I've read, liked, and used. I hope they'll get you started.

My local public library has a survey up about its website. I took it. I was, shall we say, not complimentary (though I was constructive). My local public library's website requires four clicks at the least just to get to a catalog search box.

I'm guessing your library's website isn't quite that bad. Still, one of these days you'll be reworking it, and that's a scary, scary project. How do you even get started?

Back in the "what shall we write about?" post, we were asked about large-scale website redesign, as well as research portals and pathfinder/research-guide management.

The latest issue (24:1, 2006) of Library Hi-Tech just got routed to me, and lo and behold, it's a theme issue on web content-management systems! An article of particular interest may be Goans, Leach, and Vogel, "Beyond HTML: developing and re-imagining library web guides in a content management system."

I'll be reading the whole thing—I hope the heads-up is useful to others as well!

It's hard to know whether to adopt a new web technology without kicking its tires. Which blog or wiki software works best for your library? What does a portal look like? Is a given app easy or hard to administer or redesign? How will you know, if you can't try it?

I suggest two ways of making your library a web-technology sandbox: building a test server, and signing up with a web-hosting service.