9 killer techniques in 167 words (89 fewer than I could manage talking about it):

• Contentious title and opening. Your first reaction when you read it? Probably Never!
• Short, active sentences and paragraphs.
• Reference to powerful, controversial brand names (the library world both admires and fears Amazon and Google).
• Judicious use of ‘we’.
• Facts and figures (£1000 million).
• A triple (politicians, council officers and library professionals).
• Emotive language (lunacy, deserves to be shut down).
• A counter example (America).
• A call to action (we should stop it).

Unsurprisingly, several people commented.

But read it again, and a few gaps appear:

• Legal tax evasion is an oxymoron that comes from the writer’s attempt to resolve several contradictory ideas. Should Google and Amazon be allowed to dodge tax – not that they did dodge tax – in order to save taxpayers money?
• The America example is intriguing but not outlined in any detail at all.
• In the same vein, how has Google provided a better information service? One sentence would do.
• Churches weren’t built for meeting in; they were built for praying in. It’s a bad example but not surprising because there simply isn’t another space that fulfils the same civic function as a library.

I love this style of writing, and it sharpens up your thinking even if you don’t agree with the opinion it expresses. But just a little detail would make it less easy to dismiss after a second reading.

It’s too easy to expose your organisation’s processes to the user and ask them to do your work.

An example:

You run a website for an organisation with 50 branches. You’ve set up a form which is sent to someone in the organisation to forward to the appropriate branch. A lot of customers use it, which saves the organisation time answering phone calls and emails.

Then you think you could make things more efficient by cutting out the middle man.

Luckily, your CMS’s form module includes a nifty little feature where it can send emails to different addresses based on the user’s choice from a dropdown list. In this case, you present a choice of 50 branches. The user selects a branch and the email gets routed appropriately.

Sounds good, apart from the fact you’ve shifted work to the user without providing anything in return.

Now, some might argue that adding a field to a form isn’t a big deal. But consider the additional work a dropdown list of 50 branches entails:

• Another field to interpret and interact with.
• Another compulsory field to complete.
• Navigating to and pressing a small target area.
• Scanning and interpreting a list of 50 branches.
• Selecting one of the branches.

Filling in forms on and offline is a joyless experience that involves interpretation, repetition and a degree of dexterity. Think of all the times you’ve had to complete an endless job application form which asks you about every job you’ve ever had.

Unless your user can see they have to fill in a field in order to make something work, adding friction simply means they’re more likely to bail out. At the very least, you’re making their experience of your website more miserable.

Your website is not as important as your catalog. This is a fact. We’ve asked many nonlibrarians about what they do on library websites, and the usual response is “Place reserves on books.” This is subtly different from how we think of our websites and catalogs (i.e., as distinct things). So, either our users see the two as the same thing, or they ignore our websites and just use our catalogs. Looking at website analytics suggests the latter. User Experience (UX) Design for Libraries

Your commonsense, analytics and visitor research will all point to this fundamental truth. And it’s an awkward truth, because chances are you have virtually no control over the public face of your catalogue. You probably didn’t even have a say in what catalogue your library chose, because that’s the concern of the stock unit.

It’s also difficult to change. The people you work with are probably responsible for all sorts of things in your library that can be done online: marketing, writing news, arranging events, running friends groups, setting up a reading group, setting up reference services. Anything but sorting out the search for the public—unless they deal with a member of that public who hasn’t been able to find a not particularly esoteric text on your site.

The first is a Library Management System (LMS) with a simple, open API, and a search that’s designed for the public. Currently, LMSs are rooted in a monolithic, local government world of design that’s about 20 years out of date. They’re clunky, closed and difficult to use.

Libraries have tons of extraordinary content. A modern LMS would give users and libraries easy access to all of it.

The second is a service for local news co–operatives, similar to the Banyan Project. It’d consist of a WordPress theme with a few easy to customise options, such as typeface, colour and logo, support and hosting, and advice on setting up a co–op. All very big society, I know, but a possibly viable model for good quality local news.

The WordPress theme would shamelessly rip off the ITV News website’s model. Their current design went live a year ago, and it’s still the best out there.

A few years back online news tried to ape its older print brother. For a while, grids were all the rage because they made home pages look like newspaper front pages, albeit with dozens more stories.

The ITV website uses a blog–like list instead of a complex grid. On a screen, this stream is easy to scan.

But what’s even more radical is the move away from the article. The ITV website does publish longish pieces, but it’ll also push tweets, photos, asides and one sentence updates to the stream.

Articles take time to write, which is fine when you’re publishing to a strict, daily schedule, but unwieldy when you can publish anything instantly online.

Combine this with the online reader’s bitty approach to consuming information, and the freedom it gives journalists to write more flexible content, and you have a news design that makes full use of the technology it’s built on.

This model would suit small scale, hyperlocal publications. You can generate a lot of content in a short amount of time with only a handful of authors.

Of course, the format isn’t new. Tumblr’s been around for years and WordPress has boasted post formats (asides, updates, images etc.) since version 2. Add a custom taxonomy that lets editors group posts into stories and you’d be pretty much there.

Apply this knowledge whenever you’re updating web pages and you’ll make your meaning clearer.

Here’s an example of a sentence I changed today. It describes a service:

Information about support and services to help you get on with your life and keep your independence, and a place to store what you have found in an account for future reference.

Not too bad, but a bit flabby. Applying our benefits, not ins and outs theory we can strip out the stuff about the account, and tighten up the grammar while we’re at it:

Support and services information to help you get on with your life and keep your independence. You can store what you find for future reference.

We’ve saved seven words and the effort required to interpret a 32 word sentence made up of two long clauses. And we’ve made it clear why you should take a look at this service.

I really like this low level work. It’s not sexy and it’ll get you very little credit from your colleagues. It’s also hard to measure its impact. But you’re probably making a reader’s life a little easier.

But in the Sudetenland, news of the Anschluss provokes an extraordinary enthusiasm. Suddenly people talk only of their ultimate fantasy: being reunited with the Reich… Beneš will write in his memoirs that he was stunned by this mystical romanticism that seemed to suddenly seize all the Germans of Bohemia.

He [Hitler] was reportedly seen throwing himself to the floor and chewing the edge of the carpet. Among people still hostile to Nazism, these demented fits quickly earned him the name Teppichfresser (Carpet Eater). Laurent Binet, HHhH.

HHhH is the story of Reinhard Heydrich‘s assassination in 1942. Or rather, it’s the story of the assassination and the story of writing the story. Depicting monstrous characters like Heydrich, Himmler and Göring is difficult. We enjoy reading grotesque scenes in the same way we enjoy reading horror, while we ignore the artifice, selection and judgement involved in writing history (or historical fiction), and the fact that something incredibly evil really happened. This is fiction that isn’t just fiction.

Reinhard Heydrich, the Hangman of Prague

While reading HHhH I came across this comprehensive review of the research into the differences between reading from paper and screens. It’s fascinating stuff, and I liked the melancholic tone.

HHhH is the first book I’ve paid for on my Kindle, apart from a volume of Emily Dickinson. Poetry takes a lot of care to set on an ereader, more than was put into my downloaded edition.

I’m perhaps old enough to feel a difference in the value of print and ereader novels. It doesn’t really matter when you’re downloading tons of free, old stuff, but when you pay six quid you miss the weight of a physical book. I also found it brings the abstract nature of an ebook to the fore. I feel a little cheated when I cough up for what’s essentially a series of 1s and 0s.

Every website will include a humble content template for when editors need to write plain, one off pages. There are lots of pages built on a content page template on the Suffolk Libraries website, including:

• A page about membership
• The about us page
• The jobs page

The editor’s job is to structure the sometimes complex information on these pages so it’s easy to understand, and he’s (ahem) done well here by using:

• headings to organise the information
• short, active sentences
• bullet point lists.

However, the website designer shares responsibility for making these pages readable as he or she controls how these headings, paragraphs and lists are displayed. Editors have no control over this area.

Basic heading typography is crucial

The humble content template occupies a somewhat unglamorous place in the template hierarchy. After all, an events template takes a lot of flashy work with time and repetition. It’s more sexy.

Unfortunately, the designer often fails to give basic typography the same amount of thought. Take headings. The designer should be considering lots of things when it comes to styling headings. Is he or she:

• styling the full range of headings (h1–h6) and definition terms? Most CMSs don’t allow editors to use the section element.
• scaling headings to reinforce the heading hierarchy?
• using colour properly?
• considering proximity?

Proximity is especially important. Take another look at the page about membership and you’ll see that the second level headings are equidistant to the preceding and following paragraphs. This means the reader has to work to pair headings with their correct content.

Readers will find it even more difficult to interpret pages with lots of headings and short content sections. Take the page about Ipswich County Library. The event titles are correctly marked up in h4 tags, but because they’re only succeeded by a single line it becomes difficult for readers to attach the correct time to the correct event.

A heading’s top margin should be bigger than its bottom margin to achieve meaning through proximity.

The Suffolk Libraries website is built on an attempt to maintain a strict vertical rhythm of 21 pixels, which goes to show that even apparently ‘correct’ approaches require some flexibility and subtelty.

Help editors and readers

Typography is all about aiding meaning. Designers should help editors who take the time to mark up content correctly by supplying appropriate styles. Don’t neglect the humble content template and its paragraphs, lists and headings.

It’s worth auditing your existing web content whether you think a big redesign is in order or not. Of course, there’s rarely a time when a new web manager starts their job without thinking the site needs some improvement, but even if you’ve decided on an evolution not revolution approach, an audit still serves as a starting point for your work.

It’s worth referring you to The Content Strategist’s Bible at this point. It goes into this stuff in great detail.

What is a content audit?

A content audit is a list (normally a spreadsheet) of all the things your organisation publishes online. In practice this mostly means the content you publish on your website, including the HTML pages, images and assets like PDFs. There are always lots of PDFs to discover.

Once you’ve listed everything you assign each item an owner. The owner isn’t the person who edits, creates or deletes content; it’s whoever is responsible for providing the content. So while I might write the page for Ipswich County Library, it’s the library manager who is responsible for providing the details, such as contact number and regular events.

You’ll also add other details to each content item, depending on the size of the site and your team. If your CMS doesn’t have a review date feature, you could start adding dates here.

The audit is useful for lots of reasons:

• It gives you an insight into what your organisation does and who’s responsible for what.
• No matter how dire a website’s navigation and design seem, it’ll still contain content the public finds useful. An audit will reveal this important content.
• You get a ‘big picture’ of the website. This will give you some immediate ideas for improvements.
• It gives you someone to go to when you want to change content.
• You know who to ask when you want to remove content. Getting agreement when you want to make big changes makes your job a lot easier.
• It reveals obvious problems in the site’s IA that can be corrected quite quickly.
• It makes the job of updating and managing content a lot easier. Once you’ve listed all your content you can easily schedule content reviews.
• Once you’ve got a handle on your existing content it’s a lot easier to migrate it to a different platform.
• It’s a major part of your top task research.

Carrying out the audit

Suprisingly enough, content management systems (CMSs) don’t perform basic content management functions particularly well. For example, it’d be handy if your CMS could output a list of every page on your website, and make it available for export to a spreadsheet. Many CMSs don’t even have a review date feature, let alone a page owner field for each piece of content.

The best way round this is to hunt out your site’s sitemap.xml file, assuming it has one. This will normally live at yoursite.com/sitemap.xml. If you don’t have a sitemap you’re going to be doing a lot of clicking and listing pages.

The sitemap will list every page on your site. Converting it to a spreadsheet is simple (I uploaded it to an online XML to Excel converter). Getting a list of assets is a bit more difficult—you might have to add them manually by searching through the CMS. Failing that, you can perform a Google site search for *.pdf and other relevant extensions. Like I say, this will reveal all sorts of goodies.

Once you’ve got your list you’ll have to go through each item and assign it an owner. You might add a comments column and, depending on the size of the site and your team, information such as item editor. It’s also useful to record the content’s format.

Most sites publish lots of repetitive content such as events and news entries. If the owner is the same for all of these items, there’s no need to list every single one. Just include an example.

The comments you add at this stage are important. It’s here you’ll think about the content’s value, its label and its place within the site structure. At this point you’re in an interesting situation as you’re looking at the website with an outsider’s eyes, just as a customer might.

What to do with the audit

The audit is a goldmine. I found it reveals IA problems that are quite easy to fix straight away. Tell the relevant content owner(s) what you plan to do, get their agreement and go ahead and do it. This is a good time to establish some content editing/creation/deletion processes with the organisation as a whole and any other content editors.

While you’re at it, you can identify redundant content and start deleting it. You don’t need to publish events that took place two years ago.

This will keep you occupied during the first few weeks of your job. Once you’ve completed the audit you can use it to start another big piece of work—top task research.

Libraries and the internet seem to share an uncomfortable relationship. I can see a few reasons for this. The main one is that Online Public Access Catalogues (OPACs) are not designed to slot into existing websites. They live as separate entities.

That’s why you’re shunted off to a subdomain or even a different website whenever you search for a title, whichever library website you try:

• Manchester Central Library
• Birmingham Libraries
• New York Public Library

This strikes me as exceptionally poor UX. If I go to find a book on a library website I expect to be able to find it on that site. Navigating across websites is confusing. And isn’t a library essentially a collection of texts? Why aren’t they actually housed in the library?

Libraries have tackled this problem in two ways:

• Some attempt to make the OPAC seem a part of the main site. This is what we’ve done in the past, and it’s my least favourite option. The pages are styled in the same way as the rest of the website, and the navigation is replicated. This strikes me as fundamentally dishonest. It also makes it a PITA to make simple changes to the website IA, especially when your OPAC isn’t a CMS.
• Others apply some light branding to the subdomain, perhaps through adding a logo. I prefer this approach as it doesn’t try and hide what’s happening to the user. But hopping between websites is a confusing experience.

In an ideal world users would tap in their query and the website would display a list of search results. You’d expect this to be easy enough to implement even if the website itself didn’t store the database records. That’s what APIs are for.

But here we run into a second problem. Suffolk Libraries is unique in that it is a completely separate entity from its council. But its OPAC still feels like something from the world of local government—it looks dated and is difficult to talk to. If you were able to come up with a library management system with an easy, open API you’d make a killing (there’s a business idea for you.)

It seems that providing services across disparate domains and services has become a habit. That’s why you’ll see yet more subsites popping up, such as ebook provider Overdrive.

I suspect this will pose the main challenge in my website redesign. Is there anyone out there with experience of dealing with OPACs? I guess screen scraping is an option. Or is there actually a way to do subdomains and separate websites well?

We did our internet research and decided on a Samsung. It was cheap and had lots of good reviews but it had one problem. It was too big. A 32 inch screened seemed, well, obtrusive for a television.

After some very earnest discussion we thought we’d give it a go. The TV arrived and it was huge. It sat there, dominating the living room like a screaming child. We moved the sofa back. We nearly returned the TV; in fact, we would have taken it back the same day if we could have been bothered.

Instead, we thought we’d give it a day or two. Just to get used to it.

And we did. Now, whenever I see a smaller TV it feels miniature, like something you’d find in a doll’s house. I even ask people if their usual TV has broken.

It’s exactly the same with font sizes. Just a few years ago most websites used 12 pixel body copy. If you see 12 pixels today it looks cramped and dated. And yet we were able to read articles back then.

Conversely, when Zeldman started using 24 pixels it was like getting a new TV. It felt aggressive. We wanted the old size for a bit. But as more sites use a 20+ pixel font we get used to it.

I think web readers are resilient. Although font size is no doubt related to readability, using 12 pixels won’t stop anyone from understanding your text. However, use 20+ pixels and you’ll make reading more comfortable. Less work for readers results in a better experience.