Stories from my Life as a Technologist
We got a tour of the Seattle Public Library Central branch. It’s interesting that people still think of it as new because it’s been talked about a lot, especially in design classes, but it’s actually 8 years old now.
Warning: It’s 23 pictures so it may take a little time to load.
These pictures only got a rough edit. Proper edited versions will come later on my flickr account.
Once again, I didn’t take full notes on all the sessions, but some takeaways below.
Many of these sound like common sense, but not enough people do it.
See my other posts for notes on the presentations I wrote more on:
by Lisa Kurt, University of Nevada
If you can get three things down, you can get a good design:
Study the designs that you love and those that you hate. What works and what doesn’t?
On Photos: If you use clip art, don’t use clip art that looks like clip art.
Look at designs with fresh eyes. Make sure it’s balanced.
Have fun too!
Really know your audience. Beware of decorative typeface: it can become hokey, very quickly because they look more like illustrations.
Designing for Mobile: Sans serif and white background with dark text is easier to read on mobile.
While you need to be careful of branding, you can use it to link different elements together.
Design by committee does not work! Provide three design and be firm that you will not combine them, etc. Usability can help support your design.
For more, check out Lisa’s website and the presentation slides below.
by Michael Poltorak Nielsen, Statsbiblioteket/State and University Library, Aarhus, Denmark
You do a lot with your hands, everyday. Our hands are a really good tool, but currently, the handheld interaction is based on glass. That is you do functions by sliding your fingers, which means there is no feedback on what it does, i.e. it’s not intuitive.
Take a look at Pictures Under Glass: Transitional Paradigm dictated by technology, not human capabilities by Bret Victor.
The near future may mean combining something like the Wiimote and the iPhone.
The idea was to build an HTML5 app that searches library data, favourites, view own items, renew, and request. Currently in beta, but to be published soon.
The search app can be augmented with gestures, gestures combined with multi-touch interactions.
Possible interactions with focus on
Might include simple ones using accelerometer data, including
The problem is that gestures are only really supported by Firefox, and partially supported by Chrome. Thus, it was decided that development would move to the native iPhone app environment with gestures, and HTML5 web app without gestures (but possibly later when supported). Features that are implemented include:
Check out the demo:
I did not take notes on everything in part because some of it was very technical and it can be hard to do notes, but here are some takeaways from the morning:
Other than getting good ranking, we need to provide rich results, i.e. rich snippets. Some digital collection have been providing rich snippets already, such as NCSU Libraries.
For example:
<div itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/Organization” itemref=”logo”>
<a itemprop=”url” href=”http://code4lib.org/”>
<span itemprop=”name”>Code4Lib<\span>
</a>
</div>
where: scope = about something
type = type of item
prop = properties
For the user, there is no difference as display is the same. This provides a complete data model.
Schema.org is a one-stop shop for vocabulary in describing items on the web.
Apologies, I did not take extensive notes on it, but to read more, check out the slides below or the Code4lib article he wrote.