A post from Language Log today (shades of Donald Norman) fit in well with a recurrent theme in my work life lately: the desire to cultivate more of an awareness of usability issues in my library. Confounded by confusingly designed objects, Geoff Pullum pleads:
I appeal to young, talented people everywhere: get trained in a few relevant subjects — psycholinguistics, visual perception, writing systems, reading, electronics, industrial design, microsociology of human interaction, ergonomics — and go to work in the design of human-machine interface systems. Get out there and make stuff that can be understood by the sort of mammals we happen to be. Please. We users are desperate. We read the manuals, we look at the display panels, and we simply cannot understand what the hell we are supposed to do to make the thing go.
The director at a former workplace used to have the entire staff read and discuss a book once a year. I wish that everyone in my current library would read Don’t Make Me Think. It’s accessible to everyone and speaks to us as users, producers, and brokers of information.
I also wish that everyone could sit in on a usability test at least once.
{ 2 } Comments
amen to all that. I hear so many people say “we should do this! let’s do that! more stuff for patrons! more stuff!” … and yet, I know, I *KNOW* that patrons can’t find what we do have. We make things so darn hard that patrons go away and don’t come back. And we blame Google, when it’s at least partially also the fact that we have NO IDEA if our stuff is actually usable to the uninitiated, the un-MLS’d.
Agreed! I love Don’t Make Me Think….didn’t we see him at Simmons together?
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