Sabina Pagotto

Ugh, “problematizing.” What is this, grad school?? Anyhow.

I have been thinking a lot lately about user friendliness, and specifically the question: Is it possible to be *too* user-friendly? But that question is provocative, and not exactly what I’m trying to get at. I guess to be more specific, or more accurate, I meant to say: what is user friendliness? Is there even such a thing as a universal friendliness when our users are not all the same? And how does the relative user-friendliness of different platforms and tools interact in the user’s overall experience?

(Now you see how I ended up with that title.)

This subject has come up quite a bit for me in a resource sharing context. (The question of whether “resource sharing” and “interlibrary loan” are interchangeable terms is a topic for another day.) Specifically, due to a confluence of technical capabilities, shared policies, and staffing capacity, mediated by pandemic-related library access limitations, a number of libraries ended up with a system where it was very, very easy for users to request the delivery of a print book from another library in the province (good!) and not particularly easy to request a digital file of a single article or chapter (not great!).

So, say you want chapter 5 of Dusty Academic Monograph–it’s seamlessly, almost laughably easy for you to request the physical volume, which will then be shipped across the province, and hopefully arrive at your library within 3 business days of your request, at which point you will have to take yourself down to the library hold shelf to retrieve it. But maybe you would have greatly preferred to request just chapter 5 and receive a scanned PDF the next day, a process that requires you to take several extra steps including using a separate system with a separate account to submit and track the request. Is that *really* more user-friendly, in the grand scheme of things?

(I should note that I used the present tense for this example, but in fact at this point everyone has made the change so that the individual chapter request is just as easy, or nearly as easy, as the full book request. So this is not a currently active problem so much as it is what spurred my train of thought here.)

I’ve been looking at the literature on convenience in information seeking for an unrelated project and came across this interesting article: “What prompts students to plagiarize: Google infrastructure or convenience?“, by Nicole Boubée (International Journal of Technologies in Higher Education vol 16 no 2, 2019, pp56-68, citation styles are a scam). The article itself is in French and the English version of the abstract is somewhat impenetrable, which is unfortunate because Boubée has some really interesting things to say. Some of her arguments about the deleterious effect that Google’s relevance rankings and perceived trustworthiness on information literacy will not be surprising to the savvy and search-engine skeptical. But she also contends that the search optimization of Google focuses on serving up the best article, or even just the best quick answer, in such a way that it discourages both wide reading on the subject and in-depth intellectual engagement. Without thoroughly engaging with the literature, students aren’t synthesizing and formulating their own interpretations, but rather regurgitating the ideas they gleaned from a small number of relevant, relatively simplistic papers (thus, the potential for plagiarism). This article convinced me that, at the very least, undergrads who are interested in moving on to grad school would be doing themselves a *massive* favour by starting their searches in Google Scholar rather than plain old Google. (Obviously, the library is best, but, you know, baby steps.)

Anyway. Do I have a point? No, but I don’t need one, because this is just a blog post and not a paper. If anything, this is my first declaration of an area of interest I’ll probably be exploring for the next while.