[VuFind-General] UI Design (was Single catalog / multiple libraries)

[Wayne G. <ws...@wm...>]

Here are some very generic mockups:

http://swem.wm.edu/temp/graham/vufind/

I don't think providing the sub-tabs for a large consortia would work 
very well. It could be worth looking at alternatives for returning the 
simple result sets. I've been messing with Treemaps in Vufind to provide 
a way to visualize larger result sets. I can get into more detail on the 
tech list, but basically it looks like a bunch of squares, the bigger 
the square, the more results there are.

http://swem.wm.edu/temp/graham/vufind/treemap.html

It still doesn't solve the issue of getting people to the actual 
expanded results.

Maybe an Amberjack (http://amberjack.org) tutorial somewhere might catch 
some of them, but I don't think there's a good answer for this. I think 
people are trained to have limiting facets with things like iTunes and 
Amazon and there's just a large population that doesn't think of 
expanded searches.

Anyone have other thoughts on this?

Wayne

Jon Gorman wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 12:57 PM, Wayne Graham <ws...@wm...> wrote:
>   
>> Interesting...so folks are missing the "[show all Libraries]" in red? There
>> has to be a UI designer out there with a clever solution. I wonder if the
>> use of some unobtrusive info bubbles (a la
>> http://jqueryfordesigners.com/demo/coda-bubble.html) would help any? Or, if
>> integrating some type of expanding Expand Search functionality above the
>> narrow search section. Like on the results page under the "Showing n - m of
>> o results for parameter" have another line:
>>
>> Not finding what results? Expand your search to all libraries.
>>
>>     
> The final suggestion is the one the committee I'm on that is looking
> at this made.   Similar text already appears if the search fails.
>
> People seemed to miss the facets because they simply didn't look for
> it.  It may be we've trained our intermediate users to look for a
> "I-Share" button in our WebVoyage instance and they're transferring
> this behavior. I do suspect though there is a natural confusion due to
> "preset" facets since they never knowingly narrowed down the search.
> It makes me wonder if consortiums  might be better off always linking
> to the "universal catalog", even if it means individual libraries
> might be annoyed...
>
> (one warning, I'm extrapolating a little bit from very rough
> tests/interviews I've done myself and a handful done by other
> libraries in our system.)
>
>   
>> I wonder if an additional tab may help out. The default tab shows the
>> results for a given library facet, and a second tab could then do a search
>> of all the libraries in the consortia.
>>
>> This is definitely something I'm looking into as we're a small consortia (5
>> libraries). I'm not sure if these solutions would scale quite as well to
>> something as large as CARLI. If I get a few minutes this afternoon I'll try
>> to mock up something since it's difficult to actually describe a UI design
>> via email :)
>>     
>
> Understood ;).  I think there's definitely a chance to make it a bit
> easier to understand through the interface.  I'll look forward to
> seeing what you can come up with. (I'm also still interested in what
> other libraries have experienced in this regard.  It could be we've
> just trained our users into these behaviors.)
>
>
> Jon Gorman
>
>   

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