User Interface - User types?

[Philip Rutledge]

Most of the usability assessments I've been part of start off the exercises discussing typical users, user cases etc.  I think everyone agrees that the UI is on of the biggest areas for improvement so I thought I'd start by thinking a bit about the users.  Also site navigation was part of my "homework"

I tend to think of the following users groups:

• Casual browsers - the user has stumbled across the site and is either at the home page or is looking a specific series, cover or index page since it was linked from another site.  They want to do some basic exploring
• Researcher - the user knows about the site and wants to find some specific information
• Indexer - the user is a regular user of the site and has contributed a number of indexes
• Editor - GCD editor
• Administrator - site administrator
  

So I can't comment on the Editor functions since I'm not an editor, I've just played around a bit with some of the approval aspects on my local dev installation.

I think there are a number of additional features that can be considered to assist the casual browser.  

• The current home page presents a lot of information that can be some what overwhelming, once your there the question is what do you do.  A possible re-design might simply focus on having a single search box front and center rather than up at the top of the page (a la google) with site news, stats etc being smaller panels with links to more information.    
• The "uber-search" function would allow a single text field to capture any data and then auto categorize the results based on which fields matched (I know search is an active investigation)
• More discovery based search/browse opportunities, eg: cover browse by company or by calendar or by character etc
• The existing "what's new" type of info helps the casual browser as well

I would think the intent of the site towards the casual browser would be to make it easy for the browser to be engaged by the content and hence to want to regularly interact with the site.  (Hey, the www.coverbrowser.com exists and that's a small subset of what we have).  Get people hooked and then try to convert them into indexers.

The "researcher" is going to want advanced search functions plus more.  

• Allow people to have accounts even if they are not indexers to allow them to save searches or mark favorite items (covers, series, issues etc).  
• Have user preferences to automatically select certain options (eg: typically searching for english books from the US, or single issues not collections)
• I think alternate ways of presenting the advanced search feature have been discussed but allowing more complex boolean conditions with pull down field selection would make it easier to refine searches
• Once the search result is available to be able to sort based on fields, to be able to add to the list of fields presented and to be able to filter on those fields

Again the goal to engage the user and hopefully convert them to an indexer in the future

For the Indexer you now get into a whole host of use cases related to finding their active work, how to enhance the online indexing capability, batch updates etc which probably needs it's own detailed discussion which is likely out of scope for this committee.  

One specific item I do want to mention related to the indexer role, however, is that it should be easier to point indexers to items that need work.  I know you can search for "stories" to find issues needing indexing but this isn't obvious at first.  The "index completeness" status discussion is one aspect, to make it apparent while browsing what is missing.  Another idea (related to my separate karma point related post) would be to have ambassadors for certain genres, series, countries etc that could maintain hit lists of items that need indexing that indexers could browse to find areas that they can contribute to.

From a roadmap point of view I think this committee should set some expectations about who the site is really targeted at and use that as a way of helping to prioritize the features.  

• Do we want to focus on the existing user base and fix their pain points and make them more productive or is it already "good enough" (for now) for them and we need to focus on pulling in more new folks and getting them to contribute at a basic level?  
• Do we want the main GCD site to be the "advanced site" and focus on web apis to allow others to develop sites to take on the "casual browser" user group?
• etc

Anyway, these are just some of my initial thoughts (and I'm sure many of these points have been discussed before), I know UI design is a big and complex topic and I thought I'd just start the ball rolling.

Phil