That's a point well-taken and I totally agree. The amount of decisions and
back-and-forth with design is truly huge.
My thinking was that we would develop something like a primer for wide
circulation with the large volume of nitty-gritty best practices available
at a central location (in addition to all that extra stuff I mentioned
regarding library products.)
On Fri, Oct 3, 2014 at 5:43 AM, Alex Armstrong <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> TMI?
>
> Sweating the details IS how you get good user experience design.
>
> I am sometimes reminded of the Oscar Wilde quote:"I was working on the
> proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the
> afternoon I put it back again."
>
> If you replace "poem" with "site" and "comma" with ".button
> {text-transform: uppercase; }", then I considerthat a day well-spent :)
>
> Alex
>
>
>
>
> On 2014-10-02 22:04, Brad Coffield wrote:
>
>> So many responses to address! ah!
>>
>> The LITA support to this idea is lovely to see. Thank you very much.
>>
>> I agree that code4lib is awesome and that we could potentially create a
>> document which would gain traction in the wider community BUT I really do
>> think official support/integration is the best case scenario.
>>
>>
>> Shaun, http://guidelines.usability.gov/ is a neat site and I'll have to
>> explore it more, even just for myself. How does this differ from my vision
>> of what we're discussing (to say nothing of Josh's vision or anyone
>> else's):
>>
>> 1. I think that it makes best sense as far as official
>> validation/circulation (and for ease of use by all librarian's regardless
>> of experience) to have a much abbreviated document listing best practices.
>> And works cited. And maybe an appendix with more information. A sort of
>> list that the group could agree upon that "Well, if a library does these
>> things they are well along the way to great usability." It wouldn't
>> address
>> a lot of the nitty gritty details that guidelines.usability.gov does, for
>> example "13:9 Use Radio Buttons for Mutually Exclusive Selections." That
>> is
>> an excellent point but TMI for the document I'm describing.
>>
>> 1a. This document would be succinct enough that managing it would be easy.
>> We need to have something easy to update or it risks becoming old and
>> useless.
>>
>> 1b. I really like the point made by Christina about not re-inventing the
>> wheel. And this is exactly where I'm coming from. Yes, there's a ton of
>> great UX stuff out on the web but what would be a great service to
>> libraryland would be for a group of knowledgeable librarians to come
>> together and do all that research work and present everyone with a
>> simplified 'wheel' for general use.
>>
>> 2. But I'm picturing a lot beyond this. Some sort of website (wiki,
>> whatever) where library people are able to pool knowledge and resources.
>> Best practices with libguides. Libguides customizations. I recently did a
>> complete makeover on our Illiad site - I could share info/steps on how I
>> did that, for example. People could share useful scripts etc. etc.
>>
>> The first document would primarily/exclusively be general web best
>> practices but the second thing - that would go beyond.
>>
>> Just my thinking. I'm game to help whatever ends up taking shape :)
>>
>>
>>
--
Brad Coffield, MLIS
Assistant Information and Web Services Librarian
Saint Francis University
814-472-3315
[log in to unmask]
