The power of presentation
One theme emerged loudly and clearly from Svenonius’s book: Libraries have good data. They have no notion whatever how to present it effectively to users.
Over and over again, she writes something along the lines of “As yet little innovation has taken place in the graphic representation of hierarchical relationships on computer screens…” (p. 166), to take an example more or less at random. You name it; we haven’t figured out how to put it on a screen.
It all keeps coming back to usability. We have good data. We can’t get people to use our good data because we present it so bloody unusably.
If I were to take a stab at the historical underpinnings of this problem, I think I would point to closed stacks. For the longest time (and to this day in some places), librarians created knowledge structures for other librarians. Today we’re getting downright resentful at the thought of putting others’ needs first, opening up our toyboxes. We’ve tried to fill the gap with bibliographic instruction instead, but I must say I’m not surprised it’s not working all that well.
I wish I were the right person to work on this. I don’t think I am, though I might be a good addition to a team. Real usability experts have an intuitive sense for what works that I just don’t. They can make interface leaps that would never in a million years occur to me. I would fiddle around endlessly with obvious, boring interface changes, and maybe one or two of them would help, but…
But we need to turn some real usability experts loose on our stuff. Because our stuff—even the “revolutionary” stuff like RedLightGreen and FictionFinder—is really pretty bad, for all the reasons outlined in a typical Alan Cooper or Donald Norman book. We’re thinking in terms of the data, not in terms of the user.