Building on what I wrote about in yesterday’s post, “Watching the Language Parade of Our Users,” I want to add some miscellaneous thoughts I’ve had since that complicate the stance I took about the need to pay attention to what words our students and faculty use (especially the ones that relate to tasks that might bring them to the library website). One of the words that I mentioned in yesterday’s post, “loan,” is notable mostly because students sometimes use it in a way that I’d consider incorrect. When a student says that they’d like to “loan something from the library” or that they have “loaned a book and want to know how to return it,” I understand of course that they really mean “borrow.” I suspect that if I were to correct a student in person (and they weren’t too annoyed with me for doing that), they’d quickly recognize their error. Typically, when I hear a student make a mistake like that in a reference or classroom interaction, I try to gently introduce the correct usage without being overly obnoxious or direct about it (“If you’ve borrowed a book and want to return it, here is how to do it.”)
When it comes to writing for the website, there’s often (but not always) an opportunity to write in a way that discretely introduces users to jargon and usage that is essential or useful. But when you’ve got a button or link you need to add a label to, your options are more limited. You’ve got to choose just one word or phrase that fits in the allotted space, is likely to be meaningful to the least sophisticated user but still recognizable to the most advanced one, and that strikes the conversational tone that you aim for in all your writing for the site. The challenge with language, though, is that it is ever evolving, and your choice today for that button may not work too many years down the road.
The word “rent” offers a notable challenge for library websites. Increasingly, I hear students say they’d like to “rent a book,” a phrase that I still find jarring. I also find it a bit upsetting, too, because to my ear it connotes a commercial interaction even though our borrowing services are free (unless you want to get technical and figure on how tuition and taxes figure into the cost to the user of borrowing books). I think it’s safe to assume that most (if not all) of our students get that there is no cost to borrow books, and yet they increasingly use a term that carries the whiff of money being exchanged. At what point will I need to seriously consider using the word “rent” in some way on the website? How common a usage does it have to become before I give in? I don’t have an answer, but I do think I need sit with these usage questions and not forget about them.
I should note that well before I transitioned from being a reference and instruction librarian to a UX librarian in 2010, I was fascinated by “Library Terms That Users Understand,” a website maintained by a librarian, John Kupersmith, who was formerly at UC Berkeley. Kupersmith’s site reviewed usability studies that answered questions about terminology and labeling and then tried to boil down the findings to best practices. Although the site is long gone, much of the content can be found in the eScholarship repository at UC Berkeley.
I’d like to mention two other sources that notably deepened my appreciation for the importance of user-centered language. First, a classic UX book by Steve Krug has a title that says it all: Don’t Make Me Think. Users are often task-driven, and if they have to pause too long to figure out what an ambiguously worded label or link means on a site, their satisfaction with that site starts to dip, sometimes precipitously. The other source is a terrific blog post from 2013 by librarian Barbara Fister, “Tacit Knowledge and the Student Researcher,” which “identifies the tacit knowledge many of us [librarians and faculty] have about information and how it works based on experiences that our students haven’t had.” Although the post isn’t directly about language use, it speaks to a familiarity with concepts that we can’t assume all of our users have; for me, learning to recognize these mistaken assumptions about what students already know helps me keep in check my tendency to fall back on library jargon when writing for the web.
One idea I’d like to learn more about and apply to my work as a UX librarian are “mental models” and how those may guide interactions users have with our site as they work on a task. There’s a rich literature in the social sciences about mental models that I need to dip into. I’m thinking it also connects up with the research being done by librarians into the issue of “container collapse,” as a student who doesn’t even know what a scholarly source is and how it can be recognized in part by the container it comes in will have a hard time navigating our websites when they’ve got a task assigned by a professor to find scholarly sources for their research paper. As we design for our websites things like custom search boxes, research guides, help documentation, instruction videos, etc., our work can be strengthened if we have a deeper appreciation for how our students understand the information landscape and what terms they are currently using to label its landmarks.