Final Thoughts

I took this course because I strongly believe in user-centered design and wanted to learn more about it. It seems silly to me that anyone would design anything without talking to the users but it does happen. This course has expanded both my knowledge of the subject as well as the scope. It has challenged me to think about meeting user needs in different ways as well as considering users of all systems - not just electronic systems. Often non-electronic systems are actually tied into electronic systems and both systems need to function well and meet user needs in order to be effective (e.g. health care systems).

Although I find it cumbersome to type it all out, I also like the fact that Dr. Solomon refers to Users as Users, Doers, Makers and Creators. This implies that we are all Users at some level ever if we are the creators and makers in some cases. There is definitely plenty of overlap since most people wear several 'hats' in their lives. I particularly wanted to mention this since I have not used this terminology all semester simply because I didn't want to type it all out.

Overall I enjoyed this class and it has led me to an independent study next semester that should prove to be quite an experience on many levels. I'm excited to get started on it and try to put all this to good use. Not only will I use knowledge gained from this class but also Systems Analysis, Organization of Information, Human Information Interaction, and possibly International Perspectives.

On one final note, it is fairly obvious that in addition to some class overlap, I also experienced some overlap with my personal life in this class. I think this is mostly due to the scope I mentioned earlier. I think it was great that this class demonstrated how emotion and personal situations will affect user centered design and user perspectives. As information professionals I think it's often too easy for us to forget that users are thinking, feeling humans and not automatons.

More Tour Stuff

Battered Women:
Time and Timing - In response to Teri Devoe's comments

Teri brought up a good point that we did not originally discuss in our tour. Since there are phases and stages for battered women she wanted to know whether it would be useful to organize the information based on the order of the phases. My best response is: Maybe. Sometimes.

Once again, you have to remember that battered women's information needs are highly situational and personal. Some women may want to see what services are available throughout the process in order to make the first step. They may not feel comfortable making the initial decision to seek/accept help or leave the abuser without knowing roughly what they can expect to happen later. Others may feel too overwhelmed to go beyond researching their immediate needs.

Information Avoidance
I really enjoyed Alison's tour on Information Avoidance. As I've mentioned in several previous posts, I've been dealing with my father's information avoidance for the past 2 years so I was eager to learn more about it. As with battered women, emotion is intricately tied into avoiding information. It also ties into several issues that Seniors experience with information seeking and technology usage.

Seniors
I was somewhat disappointed in Trisha's tour of Seniors. It was informative and hit all the high points of the issues but I felt it was a little light. And I vehemently disagree with placing 50-somethings in the category of 'Seniors' (as would most 50-somethings I imagine). I think Seniors are better classified as 60-65+. Or even 70+. My father is almost 67 and can't work the remote or the cell phone very well but he has made great strides in using his Mac over the past 10 years. The biggest hurdle for most seniors is overcoming the fear of new technology. This is not only true of seniors but of everyone who is faced with something new they do not immediately understand. There are basically two options:
-Admit that you don't know and sit down and learn it OR
-Avoid it because you are scared of looking sill or stupid
Helping seniors to overcome that fear is often the biggest hurdle.

I have an uncle who is 64 who just recently bought his first computer. Until last year he was unaware that he could use his work email to email outside of his company. Since he works for Hospice, he does not have a traditional desk job and only rarely used the computer for work anyway. I've had to explain many basics to him recently. For example: bookmarks in browsers. Somehow he got those confused with address books. He also doesn't understand hwy his address book in Yahoo doesn't appear in the email client that came with his new computer. It takes patience to help people learn technology when they have been avoiding it all their lives. My patience sometimes wears a bit thin with his questions but I keep reminding myself that at least he is finally on email and I can send him pictures and messages whereas I used to have to actually use the phone and snail mail to communicate with him across the country. Some things are definitely worth the investment of time and patience. I would be very interested to see what Trisha finds at the Chapel Hill Senior center. I've thought of volunteering there myself but I simply don't have time to care for others' loved ones when I have my own demanding father to look after. ;)

Innovation and goal oriented learning

Another episode of 'When INLS courses Collide"....

I read an article today on Knowledge Management for my Information Retrieval class (INLS 509). In this article the author cites former Secretary of Labor and Economist Robert Reich as insisting that "the only kind of competition that the United States can successfully sustain is to produce products that are either innovative or tailor made for individual customers." This comment was made in light of of the rising industrialization of Third World countries and their ability to manufacture products more cheaply than the US. In INLS 758 (International Perspectives in Information Management) we have been discussing outsourcing in the IT industry. I believe that both of these issues, which basically amount to cheaper labor costs, corroborate Reich's statement.

My first thought on reading this was to remember that we have discussed and read articles (most notably Dr. Solomon's Discovering Information in Context) in this class regarding goal oriented learning and searching. If our society continues to place a higher value on the end goal and ignore things that may be learned or discovered along the way then I think we are stifling creativity and innovation. Creativity and innovation have no real end goal. They may eventually arrive at one, but usually there is no end goal in mind when the creative/innovative process is initiated. They are explorations of possibilities. These explorations will not occur if people are forced to only concentrate on an end goal or a profitable product. If Reich's assessment is true then we are potentially on a road to disaster.

One example that comes to mind that demonstrates innovation and tailor made products is pandora.com. Pandora.com was started by Tim Westergreen mostly as a hobby. He decided to start classifying music like a musician would - song by song and listening to rhythm, melody, harmony, vocals, etc. This goes entirely against the standard of classifying music by genre which typically places an artist in one genre category which does not work very well for some bands - the Beatles for example. It was only after classifying and cataloging thousands of songs did it occur to him (and the people he had recruited along the way) that there might be a bigger use for this - and potentially a profitable one. Unfortunately, the labor intensive method required to classify every song has prevented pandora.com from making any money despite the fact that it is an extremely popular music service. It's my favorite and has convinced me that manual human classification by experts is the best way to classify even it's not a financially viable option. My point here, however, is that pandora.com is not a product of goal oriented thinking. But it's a wonderful service and I hope they manage to find a way to make enough money to continue offering the service free of charge. If you haven't used it before, I encourage you to try it. pandora.com.

Tour Stuff

Battered Women
I know Christie has continued blogging about our tour progress over the past few weeks so I'll try not to reiterate the specifics here. But I did want to comment on how working on this project has made us both very excited about continuing it next semester in Independent Study. Christie and I are both organizers by nature so it basically offends our senses to find so much useful and potentially life saving/changing information scattered about in disorganization. It also offends our practical natures to find that there is some organized information out there but you can't find it! Please see her blog/scrapbook for the story of tracking down the fvpcoc.org website. Information does nobody any good if it can't be found.

Homeless
I've been assigned to comment on Alison's Homeless Tour and in reading her presentation my interest was once again peaked regarding the user needs of fringe groups and how although they are often grouped, their needs often vary due to individual circumstances. I would venture to say that this is ultimately true of all users - no one system will work perfectly for everyone. But perhaps these fringe groups can only benefit from more personalized methods. I was disappointed that Alison did not include more statistics about about how well the outreach programs she cited performed within the community. Are there no studies that suggest new ways of meeting the needs of the homeless population? Obviously the reactive laws and rules do not actually help this population. So what should be done instead?

Meeting User Needs in Healthcare

This is a reflection on my everyday life and not on anything we've had to read for this class but I believe it is relevant. I spent last year taking care of my father while he battled cancer. He's been sick again lately (fortunately it's not cancer again) so we've been back at Rex Hospital for tests and I was reminded yet again of how hospitals are not designed for sick people. Sick people would be considered the main 'user' population of a hospital, would they not?

So why are there not more handicapped parking spaces available? Why is it that Wal-Mart has plenty of empty handicapped spaces but medical buildings have only a few which are always taken. Did no one ever take into account that medical buildings might need a larger percentage of handicapped parking spaces than shopping centers?

Why do you have to walk down narrow hallways of Rex Hospital to get to the room to have your CT or other test done? What if you don't walk too well or are even confined to a wheelchair? Maneuvering narrow hallways with a wheelchair is not easy. And that's assuming you can find a wheelchair if you didn't bring your own. In a place that requires everyone to ride in a wheelchair when they're discharged you'd think there would be more wheelchairs floating around for general use. Nope. It practically takes an act of Congress to get one.

I was astounded last year by the lack of services available for handicapped people in a hospital. I still am. Fortunately, my father's oncology practice moved from Rex Hospital to their own new building. Presumably they designed it. While not perfect, it is much better at accommodating its 'users.' When you're getting chemo, the last thing you want to worry about is how to get and and out of your doctor's office. They also now have the capability to do many common tests in their own facility rather than forcing their patients to use the Rex facilities for common tests. They have ample handicapped parking and several wheelchairs that live in an alcove by the main entrance.

So why do you have to have cancer to get someone to listen to user needs? Although this is a building design issue I think it's certainly applicable to any system design problem.

Bridging the Digital Divide

Global eSchools and Communities Initiative
I got pretty stuck on the camel and donkey library concepts and decided to look for more examples of pack-animals being used as bookmobiles. I didn't find any, probably because I abandoned the search when I started finding examples of bridging the digital divide in rural areas. The GESCI was founded by the UN ICT task force in 2003 (ICT=Information and Communications Technologies). A program called TECH/NA! was recently launched in Namibia. This program aims to:

• Equip educational institutions with hardware, software, connectivity, curriculum, content and technical support.
• Educate administrators, staff, teachers and learners in ICT literacy and ICT integration across the entire curriculum
• Empower whole communities in bridging the digital divide and meeting the goals of Vision 2030

Previous programs have found success in rural broadcasting in Ghana about agricultural, health and nutrition topics, empowering women in Nigeria, world education and connectivity in Uganda and other such success stories can be found here. One of the most interesting things about this organization is the diversity of the programs. There is no cookie cutter program that they try to install in every country. Every program is unique and meets certain specific user needs of a particular population within each country. In some cases, it's not even about technology - it's solely about communicating information to a remote population that could benefit somehow from the knowledge. Some benefits could be by improving their financial situation or their health (disease treatment and prevention, nutrition).

Meeting Unique User Needs

I just love it when I experience class-crossover. The lines become blurred and I have to stop and ask myself: Which class am I reading for? I recently came across some information in my International Perspectives class that is incredibly relevant to our User Perspectives class. We were discussing last week the article about meeting users' needs in the art world and what a practical study it was given that it was outside the university world. Christie and I have also been researching the user information needs of battered women and how to accommodate those unique needs through the library and community outreach.

Well, how do you accommodate the library needs of incredibly poor Nomads? While the bookmobile may not be a new concept, I believe using a camel and following nomads around in order to improve literacy rates in Kenya constitutes a truly creative idea. And what about using Donkeys to deliver solar powered internet terminals in rural Zimbabwe? Pure genius.

Check out these links to learn more:

http://www.knls.or.ke/camel.htm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/picture_gallery/05/africa_kenyan_camel_library/html/8.stm
http://www.bookboat.com/unusual_lib/donkey_library.htm