Web Design Can’t Fix Digital Illiteracy

For some time now, I’ve argued that it should be possible to create digital interfaces that are intuitive enough for anyone to pick up and use successfully regardless of previous experience or knowledge.

As an ideal, I think this is a good one.

In practice, of course, it’s a lot more complicated.

I’ve had a couple of conversations recently that brought home to me an obvious fact about designing digital environments:

Usability isn’t just a matter of design. It’s also a matter of digital literacy. But here’s the thing—design can’t make up for a user’s lack of digital literacy.

By itself, web design is a tool insufficient for the job of teaching digital literacy. No matter how easy to use a website or interface may be, no matter how intuitively the information architecture is constructed, if a user has no experience with digital technology and doesn’t feel comfortable interacting with a digital environment, they won’t know what to do. They’re going to be lost.
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Prohibitive Library Signs

In the library world, few issues are more divisive than the use of prohibitive signs.

On the one hand, there are those librarians who see prohibitive signs in libraries as a very bad thing. This post by Michael Stephens is a good example:

Ten Signs I Hope I Never See in Libraries Again (posted on Tame the Web on July 7, 2006)

And of course, there are the obligatory “Passive Aggressive Library Signs” boards on Pinterest:

On the other side of this debate, librarians point out the necessity of having rules—we need to maintain a safe and clean environment for all our patrons and for the maintenance of our collections.

I agree that rules are necessary—but I don’t believe that explicitly prohibitive signs are a useful or healthy way to communicate those rules to our patrons.

Even worse, such unilateral prohibitions punish patrons who don’t deserve it.

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A Third Way for Net Neutrality?

Given what’s at stake in the current debate over net neutrality, it’s easy to approach the issue as either/or. The idea that there might be a third way to address the issue, one that’s less polarized and more plausible, is something to be seriously considered by parties on both sides.

AT&T’s fascinating third-way proposal on net neutrality by Brian Fung (posted by The Washington Post on September 15, 2014)

I like that this creates a case for compromise. It worries me, though, that no one seems able to envision how this would actually work. I’m very interested to see how this proposal develops or if other people present alternative “third-way” options.

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Thoughts On Automated Recommendation Services for Libraries

Librarians talk off and on about the need for us to offer Netflix / Amazon-style automated recommendations for our patrons. It seems almost self-evident that this is something patrons have come to expect. But there’s a self-evident question about this that we must ask:

Have patrons actually told us that they want this type of service from a library?

Or do we just assume that they want this?

A library doesn’t fulfill the same role in people’s lives that Netflix does, or that Amazon does. Our patrons don’t necessarily expect the same service models from us. We may be holding ourselves accountable to a false comparison here. This is a prime example of the need for us to base decisions on verifiable user data.
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Why I’m Fascinated by Ancient History

How History and Speculative Fiction Intersect

I’m fascinated by ancient history—the archaic and classical Mediterranean, ancient Egypt, Sumeria and Mesopotamia. Mostly, though, I love studying paleoanthropology and archaeology—the Paleo- and Neolithic periods, the evolution of human kind and our spread across the face of the planet.

Recent history doesn’t particularly interest me. I understand the proximal importance of the Modern Era, the World Wars, the Cold War, etc., to the present day but it doesn’t capture my imagination. I look at the world during that time and I see something very much like the world I was born into. It’s too familiar to be fascinating.

I’m fascinated by ancient and prehistory because these eras are so vastly different from the world I live in. In a review I wrote of Madeline Miller’s novel, The Song of Achilles, I refer to the “alien-ness of Bronze Age Greece”. I read articles like this one about Kennewick Man and it’s shocking to realize just how little prehistoric life resembles my own. How vastly different it was than anything I’ve ever known.

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The Death of the Library

I know that many librarians (myself included) and library-lovers have been saying this ad nauseam. We’ve been saying this long before Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited service unleashed the current flood of op-ed pieces. But this is important and it needs to be said:

Libraries are, have always been, and will always be much more than just collections of books.

What the ‘death of the library’ means for the future of books by S.E. Smith (posted on The Daily Dot on July 30, 2014)

Stop Calling It a “Bookless” Library

In his critique of the new “bookless” library in Texas, Adam Feldman states the essential value of libraries and librarians better than I’ve ever been able to:

This Librarian Is Not Impressed With Your Digital, No-Books Library (posted on Next City on August 8, 2014)

I’ve been following the development and launch of the BiblioTech Digital Library from the beginning. I have my own issues with it but there’s one thing in particular that bothers me:

Why do we keep calling it a “bookless” library?

This bothers me all the more because, as best I can tell, the people who created the BiblioTech library are the ones who first decided to call it that.

Let me make this as clear as I can:

Ebooks are books.

They’re legit. They’re not “less than” or ersatz or denigrated versions of books. Ebook collections at libraries aren’t “bookless” just because they’re digital.

It does libraries a disservice to devalue ebooks this way. Our patrons want ebooks and we devote significant time and effort to try and supply them. When we talk about ebooks as though they’re intrinsically second-class items, it demeans the wants & needs of our patrons, and it demeans our efforts & our work on this front.

If ebooks aren’t real books, then how do we justify the expense of maintaining e-collections?

We must get away from calling this thing a “bookless” library.

Amazon Unlimited

Last week, Amazon launched their new Kindle Unlimited service—$10 a month for unlimited ebook & e-audiobook loans direct through Amazon.

American Libraries Magazine wrote a reaction piece about it:

  • Amazon Unlimited by James LaRue (posted on American Libraries on July 18, 2014)

And Forbes posted this deliberately provocative op-ed piece:

A Google search turns up many more blogs and opinion pieces from librarians reacting to this. As one might expect, the Forbes post generated a tremendous hue-and-cry.
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Google’s New Material Design Philosophy

Recently, a coworker—knowing my fascination with UX and design philosophy—sent me a link to the following article:

Material world: how Google discovered what software is made of by Dieter Bohn (posted on The Verge on June 27, 2014)

Subtitled, “The next era of Google design is about software as substance,” it presents an intriguing take on where Google is heading in terms of their overarching design philosophy.

I love knowing that they’re thinking in terms of designing for how the human brain actually works—we need to be able to create mental models of our environment in order to fully function within it. That’s a psychological and neurological truth that’s been sorely neglected in the history of computer technology to date.

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