Library websites are notoriously hard to use. Librarians and library staff spend much of their time training our patrons to use our online tools, instead of helping to develop deeper skills. While our tools are often complex, they seem to have been designed for the computers they run on rather than the people who use them. This issue has rightfully come to the forefront of the library world in recent years.
The usual debate is between making our tools so simple that anyone can use them, or training our patrons to use the complex tools. But there is middle ground here. We can make our tools easier without losing the power that much of their complexity brings. But we need to shift the burden of teaching how to use the tools from our staff to the tools themselves.
In this presentation, I'll talk about what we can learn from fields like evolutionary psychology and video game design that will help us build helpful and powerful websites that people can actually use.
Sounds good. This whole talk came out of playing a lot of Megaman and Super Mario Bros. and realizing how genius the game designers were to build these games in the '80s that taught you how to play the game without being obnoxious link today's games, telling you how to do everything explicitly.
Trying to find this old interview with Miyamoto about this aspect of SMB, but hell if I can find it.