Via The Librarian in Black I’ve discovered tht the Library Journal now has a new column on User Experience. As a librarian who has moved into user experience work this makes me rather pleased.
User experience is incredibly important and I think even more so in libraries. Especially when you think about the standard OPAC available at many libraries. So many of them are awful to use, clunky and badly designed and really need a good looking at. And often this carries across to the physical space itself. As the author, Aaron Schmidt, points out in the first post, even something as simple as moving the location of a stapler to make it more accessible to patrons can result in a huge improvement to the users experience of a space.
I’m of the opinion that more librarians need to have a basic awareness of user experience principles, so I’m pleased that someone is tackling this. I hope it gets widely read and leads to an increase in fantastic experiences at libraries everywhere.
Related posts:
January 21st, 2010 at 3:31 pm
Oh, indeed re: OPACs. I’ve been working with the front end/design of mine since we moved systems and while I have a set of (frustrating) limitations/things I had to take into consideration, the ability to immeasurably improve the user experience of our OPAC is fantastic.
Almost as fantastic as the fact that I can actually change things on the OPAC, rather than fudging or doing workarounds because of non-standard or proprietary code!