Outside In

Inside Out

By Hand Only

My late father-in-law, Harry, built an in-ground pool all by himself in Canada’s centennial year, 1967. One spring day he just started digging a hole. All of the neighbours dropped by and asked questions and made suggestions. He wasn’t completely alone – the neighbourhood

Invite your users in.  The water's fine!

kids also moved a lot of dirt, blocks, and cement. It became a community project. When Harry was done, he inscribed the short poem you see above into the concrete and turned on the hose connected to a fire hydrant. As soon as the pool was full, he jumped in – no heater, 33^o F, water from the deepest depths of Lake Ontario. He had an unusual philosophy of life. You do what moves you, with passion, and you involve others and learn from them. The world would look after itself if everyone just did that.

I like to think of Harry’s world view as we move through our challenges in libraryland. Harry had to deal with major changes in technology over the course of a medical career. Many made the practice of medicine easier and better. Many took a bit of learning to adopt. But Harry always asked himself the basic questions:

• Will this make my patients’ lives better?
• Will it work for their families too?
• Seeing the experience from the patient’s view, what should I do?
• From their perspective, what will it be like? Is it scary?

 So, I try to ask myself this about our challenges.

• Does the OPAC primarily serve librarians or end-users?
• Whose life is made easier?
• Does it create an experience that serves the community?
• Is the right question about portals and learning and entertainment experiences – or should we continue to ground our services in the OPAC and searching?

Harry never talked about the actual construction of his pool over the 36 years I knew him. He always talked about three things:

1. The thinking he did privately about his vision for the pool and the questions he asked experts to test his ideas. (You should know he wrapped the pool from the foot of the driveway around the corner of the house – somewhat of a feat.) He kept thinking about what it needed to be to create a great family experience.
2. The experience he wanted to create and stories of the people who dropped by, made suggestions, helped a little, and basically got engaged in their neighbourhood. By the end of the project, he knew everyone in the neighbourhood.
3. The constant improvements that needed to be made to improve the experience – a cool artistic fence to attract lightning, a gas BBQ, a wild assortment of trees (never plant a plum tree over a pool!), a giant custom-made sun umbrella and table to seat 10 dryly (just in case it rained) – some were wildly successful, others humorous learning experiences.

 So I like to apply Harry’s process to the design and implementation of Web portals for libraries. You knew there was going to be a library connection here, eh? So here are my top 10 questions for building the best library portal:

1. Work from the end-user in. What are their goals? What are their primary and secondary goals? It sounds simple. It isn’t. It’s just very hard not to consider our own feelings and preferences in our analysis and use them as a filter to what we see. By acknowledging this issue, we have a way to ask ourselves – does this feature, function, process, policy, or content serve the customers’ needs or the librarians’? Can you clearly articulate the top 10 things someone wants to do when they arrive at your Web site or Intranet? (As well as you can do with your physical site?)
2. Understand your end-users in context. Are they looking for entertainment and culture? Or is it a workplace task? Are they seeking community? Are they learning or researching? From our research, these are the five primary contexts in which users seek success. Which mix are you trying to delight the customer with?
3. Understand that users have great diversity in the way they process information. Look at your current or proposed portals. Do they support the diversity of thinking and learning styles that exist in your target populations? Are they focused on text-based learners? If so, you’re aiming at a minority niche. Do they support interaction though text and reading, logic, interpersonal and intrapersonal connections, experience, or auditory learning? Are you supporting the full range of Bloom’s taxonomy of learning styles?
4. Are you ready for true interaction? Libraries are pretty good at in-person service – at circ desks, information commons, and reference desks around the world. We’re good at synchronous interactions and have developed the in-person reference interview or ILL transaction to a fine degree. As for virtual interactions, we have a way to go. Most of us are aware of the less than stellar success of email reference – asynchronous and just a weird disconnected experience. Virtual reference, co-browsing, and instant messaging are growing, but they’re being adopted more quickly by our users than our enterprises. Ask ourselves why this is.
5. Understand that learning is the way information becomes knowledge. How does your portal support learning and pedagogy? There are well researched practices in learning theory. Are we aware of and using them effectively? Learning is one of the primary reasons libraries of all stripes are used.
6. Review the information density of your portals. Ed Tufte has done a great deal of work and publishing in this area. Have you fallen into the trap of “too much white space"? Look at the most popular Web site portals on the Web and the number of tasks that the user can accomplish from a single start page. How many pages are required to do the top 10 tasks on your Web site? Is your home page a good map to your services – or an opaque window? Is there a good reason to hide so much of your value behind the home page? Check out MSN, AOL, Yahoo!, BBC, CNN, NYT, and you’ll find a simple standard that allows for greater density. It’s expressed quite well in the “rules” promulgated by Jakob Nielsen. I’m a devotee.
7. Are you focusing on end-user comfort? Comfort, in learning terms, is a necessary precondition to effective learning. Discomfort isn’t. Yes, you can learn quickly under stress, but foxhole learning is not very sustainable. Does your portal support the designs that are proven to have the least amount of friction for users? Review the SirsiDynix eye-tracking studies and see how different groups are predisposed to use a Web page. Are your pages causing discomfort or additional learning just to find the place where users can meet their goals?
8. There’s a lot to consider, but there are tests and research you can consult and should. Your Web site logs can tell you a lot. Are your customers using the pages you create, enough? Your ILS data, either raw or in advanced reporting tools like Web Reporter and Director’s Station™, can be mined for insights. And, of course, the FSU/SirsiDynix Library Normative Data Project is a treasure trove of end-user insights.
9. Are you looking at the right metaphors? Where are the majority of our virtual users? Social networking sites and search engines are near the top, we’re told from the various Internet censuses. Look at those sites and try to figure out their magic sauce. Will it work for your library? Maybe or maybe not, but if we don’t ask the question and deliberate, we’re sticking our heads in the sand. If you’re not actually signed on to the major social sites, then you’re on the outside looking in. Your opinion isn’t as informed as it could be. Sign up ASAP for your personal MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, IM, Meebo, Wiki, del.icio.us, and Digg presences and look for me. I’ll be your friend. You can always stop...grin.
10. Have we organized for success? Are we team-oriented enough? Do our teams cross departmental boundaries? Institutional? Do we invite key user groups in and lead users? Do we learn from our competition? How much of our library usage is virtual, and who’s accountable for that experience? Those customers are different. If a significant number of your users are coming in virtually, who is their branch manager; does their student portal have a staff focused on their needs?

There are loads of 2.0 and 1.0 ways to build an experience on your portal. Here are some sound bite ideas to consider:

• Music on the library Web site – what tunes define your library.
• YouTube trailers tied to your DVD collection.
• Think outside the book – talking books, e-books, walk in books…
• Blog the library, directors, teen librarians, kiddy librarians…
• Rock the shelves – be event oriented.
• Tie brick, clicks, and tricks together.
• Search for useful podcasts and collect them in the OPAC.
• Build podliographies (Am I the first to use this term? Probably not.)
• Does your Web site promote the physical as much as the physical library promotes the Web site?
• Are you collecting email, text messaging, IM, MySpace, Facebook addresses as part of your user’s library registration?
• Moving images on your Web site – YouTube style.
• Pimp your Web site with colour, animation, etc.
• Flickr up the Web site.
• Allow for community-created content on the library portal, provide the tools.
• Share your reference wiki, your genealogy wiki, etc.
• Go wild for pictures that solicit an emotional response.
• Keep up the good work with text-based resources – just make it more.

SirsiDynix is here to help you. We have published some ground-breaking research. As the leading ILS vendor in libraries, we see it as our duty to sponsor or do this type of research and empower the community with these studies. In January we published the “Report on the Usability and Effectiveness of SirsiDynix SchoolRooms for K-12 Students,” performed by the Kent State University School of Library and Information Science. This is a leading edge study of the K-12 users, and it’s full of insights that everyone can use to inform their portal decisions. Also in January, SirsiDynix published the “EPS/Rooms Usability Study.” This is a report on a wide range of public library end users. We learned a lot from it. You can too. In spring 2007, we will publish our major report on personas in the public library. This report will include advice on how to implement a persona-based Web site and study in your library. I am also trying to point to any free or low cost studies that help with the understanding of end user desires, behaviours, or needs on my blog, “Stephen’s Lighthouse.”

Harry, my father-in-law, was an amazing man. He did quite a few things differently from other people. When he established his medical practice, he just left a box on the wall by the door. You paid him what you could or what you thought the visit was worth. Some days the family had steak; sometimes he had bus fare. The Canadian Medical Association wasn’t too happy with that. My mother-in-law tells wonderful stories of the great friendship she had with the private detective the CMA had hired to stake out their home for months. It was a risk for her to meet the guy. She took him a coffee and they chatted every day. She learned a lot.

Are we moving outside our comfort zones? I think so. Buy a customer a coffee today. Ask them what they want. It’s a big step, but an essential one to bring the user out of the cold.

Stephen Abram, MLS, is vice president, Innovation, for SirsiDynix. He is the Chief Strategist for the SirsiDynix Institute (http://www.sirsidynixinstitute.com/). He is an SLA Fellow, president-elect of SLA, and the past president of the Ontario Library Association and the Canadian Library Association. Stephen would love to hear from you at stephen.abram@sirsidynix.com.