Peter Morville started life as a librarian and it shows quite strongly in his work and his frequent references to librarianship. His session was largely about how we can create useful navigation and web structure in the Google world. He had a lot of interesting examples and his entire powerpoint is available for download. Some of hi s interesting points were:
- information architecture affects how credible your content is seen to be
- Visual design affects usability
- being high on google also affects credibility
- searching is a process of learning – we need to encourage thast process
- the search page is often the second most viewed page on a site but receives little design attention
- importance of having multiple paths to the same information
- sitemaps provide a birdseye view of the site’s structure and only need to indicate the main levels
- google often searches on a site better than the site’s own search engine (almost certainly true for us I suspect)
- web 2.0 is also about taking risks, launching at beta, iterative development (see notes on Kelly’s session)
- Google needs your site structure: its algorithms use it so it still is the basis of the www
Among interesting examples Peter took us through the redesign of the Proquest interface and discussed federated search.
February 15, 2008 at 1:41 am
Really enjoying your summaries Simone, looks like there is a lot of good practical information coming through from the sessions.
February 23, 2008 at 10:05 pm
It would interesting to apply this to CCL website and catalogue especially in terms of searching. Our search pages make sense to staff (well, for the most part), and perhaps to some regular users, but when the general populous is used to easy-to-use search interfaces such as google, then do we need to think about where we are headed in terms of re-design.
As for the concept of searching as a part of learning, I will be pondering on ways to encourage refinement of that process as it is an ongoing issue for all libraries.
From an Insite perspective, we have council staff contacting us to say, I can’t get this for free on the internet, can you source it for me? and lo and behold it is available through one of our databases. How do we make the search process easier for Council staff, for researchers, for students, for users in general?