Helping Your Users

Today is Veterans’ Day in the US, and as a result many government offices are closed. This includes the Miami-Dade Public Library System (MDPLS). All 47 library branches in the Miami area were closed today. Nonetheless, a line of people formed in front of the South Miami branch this afternoon at 12:30, the normal opening time of that branch. I know this because I was there with them, waiting for the library to open.

You may be asking yourself “wait… if you knew it was Veterans’ Day, why did you go to the library?” Well, quite simply I forgot. The only reason I knew it was Veterans’ Day was because of Google’s special logo drawing (even then, I had to hover over the graphic to find out what it was for). Plus, Veterans’ Day is not a holiday on the order of Thanksgiving or even Labor Day; for 99% of businesses, it’s just another day, or at most an excuse to hold a sale. I forgot that the library might be closed, and so did everyone else waiting in front of the building this afternoon.

How the library could have helped

Public libraries face a crisis in the modern era; fewer and fewer adults in the US read books, and research that might have required a library’s collected knowledge in the past can now usually happen on the Internet, without even saying “hello” to a librarian. Smart libraries are doing everything in their power to be convenient and helpful for their users – lending music and DVD’s in addition to books, teaching classes, and offering activities for children. Many libraries, however, still treat the Web as a second-class citizen. MDPLS could have avoided that line of people if it had just put a simple notice on its home page that all library branches would be closed today. I actually went to the library’s website this morning to see if items I had requested were available for pick-up, and I never once saw a notice that the library was closed. (They also could have avoided the line by taping a sign to the front door with the same information, but that’s another matter.)

To be fair, the MDPLS site did contain the information that the library was closed. That information was placed, though, in an out-of-the-way corner that no user would ever reach unless they were specifically searching for what days the library closed for – exactly the opposite approach that most users like myself would take. Clicking “Find a library” gave me a list of all branches, and I clicked the branch closest to me and clicked “Hours.” I found that the library opened at 12:30 on Wednesdays, and failed to see the note saying “Closed Sunday and holidays,” in which “holidays” was a link to a page listing which holidays they would be closed for. Instead, a note on the home page would have stopped me from even looking at hours and saved me a lot of time and frustration.

The general problem

Walking to a library that isn’t open is certainly not catastrophic; if anything it gave me some exercise. But there are many examples of systems that could help users, but choose not to. When was the last time you visited a health-related website (doctor, dentist, etc.) where the office hours listed were actually correct, or where the appointment time you were given was actually met when you got there? How many times have you visited a government office to do something simple, like renewing your driver’s license, only to find out that the forms you filled out from their website are not the right forms? All of us encounter “afterthought” systems in our daily lives, especially on the web – sites that were thrown together in an effort to “have an online presence” but which have been left to rot in the basement. Is this the fault of the site designer, or of the site owner, or both?

I would argue that the problem in general is the entire attitude of the web design industry. Too often, web design is sold as a commodity, an impersonal service that results in a deliverable of average quality for a set price. We, as designers, have taught our clients that designers are interchangeable and that “design” itself is just cranking a lever on some fancy web design machinery. Clients, in turn, generally want nothing to do with the process of design, feeling that design is what they hired the designer for in the first place. The end result is a site that works and (hopefully) has the designer’s best intentions, but which the client has no connection to and no inclination to maintain. It’s like giving someone a beautiful potted plant, only to have them keep it in the closet “until they really need it.” By the time they want to make updates, the site is already dead.

Instead, designers need to promote the idea that design is something a client and designer do together. Clients have to know that they have responsibility for the site just as much as the designer. Clients need to fully present their message to the designer – what exactly their company offers, who would be helped by it, what the company’s attitude is like – and the designer has to take all of that information and craft it into a design that gets that message across. (The designer can, of course, help the client find the answers to those questions, but he/she can’t just make up the answers out of whole cloth.) We, as designers, cannot afford to have clients think that hiring a designer is the extent of their responsibilities. The end results will not be our best work, and the clients will only have us to blame.

Back to the library

To return to today’s situation, MDPLS most likely built its website for the same reason that so many companies do – because everyone else has one. But that seems to be about as far as they are willing to go; everything beyond having a website that exists and lets people manage their library card accounts is “not my job.” Companies and organizations with this attitude should know that yes, it most certainly is your job. And if you are not willing to make it your job, there are plenty of others who are more than happy to take your place. Granted, I’m sure no one is itching to replace MDPLS, but even among public libraries there are strong examples of websites that do more than just exist.