Finding Your Way with Wayfinding
Wayfinding is a subject that planners and signage designers love, but nobody else understands. The word isn’t even in the Merriam-Webster dictionary.
Wayfinding is a subject that planners and signage designers love, but nobody else understands. The word isn’t even in the Merriam-Webster dictionary.
The five previous posts in this series have all been mostly concerned with physical spaces. Now let’s take a quick look at basic service design.
We’ve been throwing the term “user experience” around, but we haven’t taken a look at exactly who the ‘U’ in UX is.
The OCLC Library in the Life of the User meeting last fall explored research and case studies about user expectations. Needs have shifted radically. It is no longer enough to design library services on what librarians think their users should be interested in. The time has come to “shift from looking at user in life of library to library in life of the user.”
The web always has its eye on the future, but online culture is not immune to nostalgia. The last few months have seen several attempts to revive a fascination for the dial-up age. A pair of French artists launched windows93.net, a tongue-in-cheek homage to early browsers filtered through a seriously absurdist sense of humor. Writer Paul Ford launched tilde.club, an ASCII-laden throwback to spalces like GeoCities and the communal webring culture that eventually became the blogging world we know today. Sprinkle in a generous dose of animated GIFs, and it’s like we’re on AOL all over again.