My friend Jim would have a field day with the King County Library System roll-out of its replacement for the web site and catalog system. It's been very problematic. The project obviously lacked good test planning. For example, during the first week, self-checkout didn't function at all. The "current account" list has finally started to straighten itself out after three weeks. I still had a book showing as "overdue" when, in fact, I returned it. This morning I inquired with the librarian. She didn't even hesitate at taking it off my account because she's heard the same thing from a lot of people.
The web site, which I use a lot, needs some serious user interface lovin' from a real designer and run through usability testing. Here are some examples.
First, Search does unexpected things. For example, I was just looking for John McPhee's book Basin and Range. I typed as my search terms: Basin Range
It doesn't find the book, but lists, alphabetically, where it might be. The problem is evident: search assumes I was searching for an EXACT match. When I retyped the whole title with the "and," it shows me the selection available in cassette (so 80s) and book. I expected it to match words in the title, a la "match all terms" and not "exact match."
Second, there's a lot of wasted screen space. The Place Hold button and media format graphics (item 1) are huge. They'd benefit from seeing how Amazon.com solved the problem with smaller, media-specific glyphs to convey information more efficiently.
Third, functions aren't intuitively placed. For example, I wanted to check if any of John McPhee's books were available on CD form (to occupy my mind while I'm commuting into Seattle). Initially, it appeared I could do this with the buttons next to the search (item 2), but these don't work very well because "Book" comes before "Book on Tape" and "Book on CD." To limit search results by a particular media type, you have to click on the large button (item #3) outside of the delineated box.
Fourth, the catalog has a lot of junk in it (item #4), although this is no different from bigger companies. It rightly shows the three alternate forms of the author's name, but it's kind of silly there are three alternate forms of this well-known author.
Fifth, there are undocumented features. See the check boxes and Save buttons (item #5)? Their function isn't obvious, nor does the "Help" elaborate. After sleuthing some, these appear to be for creation of book lists, though these lists do not seem to persist between browser sessions.
Speaking of wasted screen space, here is a snapshot of the list of books I currently have out. I cropped off the top vertical portion -- it's the same as the other screen. The window's very wide because I have a large display, but notice how much excess whitespace is in the table cells and how the title is unnecessarily truncated. It's more obvious on my jacked-up resolution (1600x1200), but even if I shrink the window to 640x480, there is still a gap.
So it doesn't seem like I'm a total pessimist, there are some features I do like.
The web site, which I use a lot, needs some serious user interface lovin' from a real designer and run through usability testing. Here are some examples.
 |
| Sample search |
Second, there's a lot of wasted screen space. The Place Hold button and media format graphics (item 1) are huge. They'd benefit from seeing how Amazon.com solved the problem with smaller, media-specific glyphs to convey information more efficiently.
Third, functions aren't intuitively placed. For example, I wanted to check if any of John McPhee's books were available on CD form (to occupy my mind while I'm commuting into Seattle). Initially, it appeared I could do this with the buttons next to the search (item 2), but these don't work very well because "Book" comes before "Book on Tape" and "Book on CD." To limit search results by a particular media type, you have to click on the large button (item #3) outside of the delineated box.
Fourth, the catalog has a lot of junk in it (item #4), although this is no different from bigger companies. It rightly shows the three alternate forms of the author's name, but it's kind of silly there are three alternate forms of this well-known author.
Fifth, there are undocumented features. See the check boxes and Save buttons (item #5)? Their function isn't obvious, nor does the "Help" elaborate. After sleuthing some, these appear to be for creation of book lists, though these lists do not seem to persist between browser sessions.
 |
| Holds/Checked out Screen |
So it doesn't seem like I'm a total pessimist, there are some features I do like.
- Search on terms with funky characters now works. For example, in the previous system, I couldn't find books on "C#", the programming language.
- I can limiting titles to those not in the checkout history -- My current checkout history was deleted with the system trasnfer, but this will be very useful when my daughter wants to list the new books in the Magic Treehouse series.
- The web version of the catalog now shows items in transit. This was the primary reason we used the telnet version of the previous release. (telnet is no longer supported.)
- The site doesn't log me out after a few minutes. I hated the three minute inactivity timeout because it would often take me longer than that to read through reviews at Amazon, narrow down my selection, then check if it's in stock.
.