xinoxano

1€ of usability

I fell in love with public Finnish library system a long time ago. Our affair, with ups and downs, still lasts Today. Despite the channel, offline or online, the user experience is always satisfactory.

I haven’t had much time lately to hang around any of the libraries in Helsinki, but when possible I love to visit the “misfits self”. There is always one in every library and it is full of books the library has decided to sell for the amount of 1 euro or less. The criteria why a book ends its days in the misfits self is unknown to me, but I guess issues such as outdated, low number of borrows and little damages are part of the game. You can guess the titles you may find and not surprisingly most of them are about technology: “Learn Macromedia Director 5 in 24 hours”, “Windows 3.1 for dummies”, “Frontpage Unleashed” and similar.

The reasons I always take a look to this self are also a bit misterous to me. I guess I always keep the hope to find a hidden treasure. Most of the times that hope vanishes but a couple of times I have found little photography jewels that keep me trying.

So what a surprise when I saw this cover among the misfits. The book is in good condition, so I assume the reason for this book to be discarded is an error or a lack of interested readers. If we discard the error, what could be the reason for the lack of readers?. I haven’t done any serious web design for a long time, so I wonder: are the contents completely outdated?, have its principles been absorbed by web design in general?, have they been discarded completely? or is it simply because web usability does not sound sexy anymore?.

oh, man.

positioning disclaimer: that was one of the first books i read on the topic, and it influenced me a lot. i was always a mediator between the web usability crowd and the web design crowd, which, remember when that was a for real feud back in the day? like east vs west coast type bullshit, only even nerdier? man was that absurd. also as it happens i’m writing this from an observation room as a user test session is going on, which is apt

i’ve given this a lot of thought, and my personal self has sort of coagulated into this stance: respect the contributions made by the people who made the web what it is now, jakob being one of a huge number of people, and scrap it. on the broad topic of What Digital Should Be About, forget everything that was written more than a couple of years ago, and move on. (by which i mean the fundamental basics still apply of course, but you should get them too from fresh material, not outdated sources.)

let’s face it: the web itSELF is, in many ways, is replacing books, for much better and much worse. i’ll rather have my live wikipedia shortcut than a room full of aging dead-tree tomes: a lot of information likes to be digital. in 2008, you will find more relevant, pointed, specific, broad, accessible, up to date, varied and socially open to critique information about that topic by a single google search than that book gives you. it’s still a great book, but it’s also been a tool of its own obsolescence.

and here, in a reversal-kicker-type rhetoric gimmick, i’m going to *apparently* reverse what i just said, and state: still, having said that, the one place where that book should stay, be stored, and respected as an historical artefact, is the library.

thanks for pointing this out bonebreaker, i’m (as always) a big fan of your knack for and style of observing, well, stuff.

1€ of usability

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