Stephen Bell at Designing Better Libraries recently wrote about UX strategy flow and affordance. What a great post, Stephen! One line stood out for me in the post that I’m now calling my new mantra: “A design with good flow creates an experience that is painless even when it involves complexity.” I’ve been thinking about and advocating something along these lines since I started in academic libraries. I often bemoan the complexity of our web site and strive daily to reduce the clutter. I’ve been told by many colleagues that as academic libraries, we’re just complex – that’s the way it is – that it’s too challenging to simplify our online services/systems/offerings. It was nice to see someone write that design is so important to influencing the user experience, and that there’s hope in academic libraries for reducing the amount of complexity we present to the end-user.
Susan’s Normal Form (SNF)
“the values have no relation to the keys, which have no relation to the tables, which have no relation to the schema”
