Library Revolution

OK, so I’m lumping two sessions together here. But they were back-to-back sessions in the “Industries Using Hot Tech” track, so I don’t feel too bad.

I’m glad to have attended these two programs, as I am a huge believer of looking outside of LibraryLand for inspiration.

The first, “Learning From Newspaper Publishing,” featured a look at changes to the New York Observer’s online presence (check out their “head cloud!”). David Free wrote up a great rundown of the basic points from the presentation.

My take:

Libraries can learn so much by looking at what other industries have done, the challenges they have faced, and the concerns they are thinking about when building these online community interfaces.

Especially helpful here was the notion of examining your users in terms of basic “types” and examining ways the site could address the habits and needs of those kinds of customers. For example, “Loyal Readers” tend to go straight to the home page and browse… so they need content on the home page to cater to those habits in much different ways from “Accidental readers” who find the content based on a search and have a single article focus… and therefore need different features to engage them.

Libraries: How often do we really aggressively study the habits of our users when it comes to our online resources? Do we have good data to back up the assumptions we make about how patrons use our services? Are we providing use options aimed at different kinds of users with different goals and habits?

Also, the idea of pulling in third party apps to meet users needs is something libraries need to pay attention to. If somebody else does it better, why do we always seem to want to re-invent the wheel?

Third, I was glad the presenter talked about aggressively marketing the services once they were built. And he wasn’t just talking about ads, but an entire marketing strategy for attracting users and encouraging use. This includes complimentary services and features to further engage potential users, and seems integrated with the whole community atmosphere now created by the site.

After the Newspaper session, I stayed on for the “Learning from Politics” session featuring Justine Lam, the eCampaign Director from the Ron Paul campaign.

This fascinating session looked primarily at the fundraising initiatives of the campaign, and definitely had a few interesting ideas for libraries.

For one, I was intrigued by what the speaker referred to as the “hub and spoke” model for the online campaign. She stressed that what they created was not a new social network, but a means by which existing social networking tools were connected for a common cause. YouTube, Meetup.com, Facebook, etc. already exist and are a part of users lives. So the strategy was to reach out and use these existing networks to spread the word in an efficient, low-cost way.

She also spoke a lot about transparency and the way that the campaign used graphics using real time fundraising figures to (very successfully) encourage fundraising efforts. This was one of the real community building features that helped the campaign site become a collaborative effort between the campaign and its supporters.

The campaign also used a strategy of helping teach supporters to create, collaborate and share – giving them the tools to spread the campaign message and then letting them more or less do the work for them. Giving the supporters ownership and letting them go was the thing that really made this campaign revolutionary and successful.

Of course, the speaker did mention that once you put the campaign in the public’s hands, you can no longer control the message… and she pointed out that while it is great to let the users solve your problems, that of course means that you then need to let them know what your problems are. How many libraries are ready to deal with this???

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Great post today from Pimp My Library about Perfection. Great post, Mary! From one reformed perfectionist to another!

Perfection has been on my mind lately, and I feel like it’s definitely not a concept we can effectively apply to all things library. This is not to say that we should not be detail oriented, or even exacting in many of the things we do as librarians. Please. You won’t find a more detail-oriented person than me!

But it’s time to stop obsessing about making things perfect before considering them usable for our libraries. (Because I am who I am and I do what I do, in my mind this has a lot to do with the way we develop, promote, use, and change Web-based library services. But I don’t see why this all couldn’t apply just as well to other areas of library service, too.)

Too often I see library services get nitpicked to death by people trying to make them perfect before bringing the service out to patrons. Too often the life of the project gets sucked out of it, and the timing gets all off… we tend to miss the boat a little, I think, when it comes to getting something started while people are still excited about it.

And most of all, building a library service in the back room, making it perfect, and then presenting it users for use and feedback after it has been more or less perfected… this model of development makes it so hard to make any real changes to the service based on user feedback. Sure, we can try to address user complaints, but the framework by that time is more or less set in stone, and all tweaks need to be done within that framework. And major changes down the road are hindered, since you’ve set up a development model that is a real bear, meaning any changes require a huge project and time commitment.

What’s so wrong with letting your users in on a new service (or an old service, revised!) that isn’t really “done” yet? As long as you put that service out with the goal of getting feedback that can be used in refining the service, and then really do it, then what’s the big deal?

Put out your library blog without forming a committee to discuss (for months!) the exact content, layout, structure, etc. Just get some basic guidelines and go! Then see how your public reacts (by asking them and listening to their answers!) and make changes accordingly!

Start your new literacy/homebound/outreach/whatever service without a giant to-do (there is a lot to be said for the so-called “soft roll-out”). Then have some meaningful conversations with the first users, and see where that leads!

Skip the focus groups and committee meetings with your new OPAC design… put something together, and do a little usability testing in your library. Nothing fancy, just communicating with your customers. Then you don’t feel like you’re limited to  “the plan” whensomethign pops up that just doesn’t work.

Businesses, especially Web-based ones, are moving towards this sort of a “throw it out there and be ready to be flexible” model, and it’s really working for them. And no, their products aren’t perfect. But by skipping initial perfection, I think we can more effectively work towards the eventual goal of creating more perfect library services.

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But who cares if nobody goes there?

Since the Web usability seminar last week, I’ve found myself engaged in a lot of conversations about how public libraries can make their Web sites more usable. Lots of great ideas have been flying around, and I’m really excited to see what kinds of changes will be coming down the road for the sites of public libraries in my area.

But there was one thing that wasn’t discussed at the seminar, and thus hasn’t gotten much attention around here. That’s the issue of findability.

OK, maybe this wasn’t 100% within the purview of the seminar, and maybe we have to tackle one problem at a time. There was limited time for the session, and we all have enough on our plates in trying to make our sites more usable.

But I think that while we try to create a more perfect Web presence for our libraries, we always have to have findability in the back of our minds. You can have the greatest site in the world, but if nobody is finding it, going to it, and actually using it, what’s the point? We need to keep this issue in mind while we’re embarking on redesigns - making our sites findable via searching, browsing, and completely by accident.

I’ve come to really like using Google Analytics. This was mentioned in the Web usability seminar, but in terms of the site overlay that you can use to see what parts of your site people clicking on. But it goes so much farther than that. I personally prefer the parts that tell you how people found your site to the parts that tell you what they did there. Armed with the knowledge of the sites they were referred from, the keywords they searched, and so on, it’s much easier to improve your site’s findability among your target audience. “How are they finding us?” Quickly turns into “How can we make finding us easier?”

That’s just an easy first step… I’d be interested to know what kinds of strategies libraries use to ensure that their sites are reaching their users??

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This week I attended an extremely interesting all-day Web Usability workshop given by Steve Krug. It was one of those programs where everything he says is really common sense, and you spend the whole time saying, “well, of course!” But sometimes the common sense stuff – the stuff right there under our noses – needs to be pointed out to us so that we really see it.

There was a ton to take away from the session, but here are some of the important points I took with me.

• Test. With real people. Get some real users (and not just librarians!!!) to use your site in front of you and really watch and analyze what they do. There’s more to it than that (outlines in his book, Don’t Make Me Think), but that’s the gist. You’d be surprised what you can learn… and how incorporating the feedback can improve the experience of your site for your users.

• Spot jargon… and start speaking English. This is so important for librarians! We all assume that everyone knows what “Virtual Reference” or “eAudiobooks” are… but if you’re not a librarian, it might a well be gibberish. Sure, with some thought users might decode what the jargon on your page means, but the whole point is that they shouldn’t have to. Because they won’t. Web users don’t read- they scan. And if the links on your page aren’t obviously meaningful, they’ll get skipped.

• If something doesn’t work, fix it. When things are difficult to use, I find that Librarians love to write a brochure to explain it. Why not just make it easier to use? Duh.

• Do as little as possible to fix it. Yes, yes, yes. It’s like Occam’s razor of Web design and usability. Little tweaks are often all that is necessary to make a big difference in the usability of a site. If someone can’t find your catalog, don’t throw in the towel on the whole site design – just make the button bigger. Or move it a little to the left. Or make it red. Couldn’t that also apply to “fixing” a lot of other library services?

• Accessibility is necessary – and doable. It can seem daunting to tackle the issue of creating a site that is accessible to patrons with disabilities. But it’s the ethical thing to do…. and the legal thing to do. And there are resources out there that make accessibility achievable. So use them!!

Oh, and did I mention listening to the input of real people, not just librarians???

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