Ah, the good ol'days. You remember them. As a cutting edge member of the Information Age, you navigated YaleInfo, or possibly even Enterprise, in search of a useful morsel. Maybe you wanted to read an article in the Weekly Bulletin or needed the bus schedule. You would point and click, point and click ... and point and click. After diving down through five or six levels of menus, you would find your goal ... provided you knew where to look in the first place.
When the Gopher protocol (the software that makes YaleInfo work) was first introduced, there wasn't enough information in YaleInfo to make navigation a problem. But as new resources were added, the initial information design failed. The top level menu was a hodgepodge, valuable resources were buried deep in the menus, and browsing through the mix of files, folders, and links was unpredictable.
In March 1993, Yale's Committee on Scholarly Information (COSI) formed the Navigation Subcommittee (Navsub) chaired by Nancy Roderer, Director of the Medical Library. Navsub's charter was to develop a campus-wide approach to the user's first point of contact with the universe of electronic databases and services. As part of this overall development process, Navsub met repeatedly to brainstorm design and service concepts for a campus-wide navigation system to locate the electronic resources available at Yale.
In the summer of 1994, Navsub selected a design team to put theory into practice using Yale's campus-wide information system, YaleInfo. This core group included: Philip Long, director of Academic Computing Services, Matthew Beacom, a catalog librarian, and Rob Callum, the YaleInfo Administrator. The core group focused on users'two main complaints: valuable resources were buried too deeply in the menu structure and searching the whole structure was frustratingly unpredictable. The design team recognized that users of networks reach on-line resources in three ways: they can connect to known resources, browse through menus, or search for indexed resources. In the old YaleInfo, one menu structure served the connect, browse and search functions. This was too much strain to place on one menu, and the old structure was collapsing under the stress. The redesigned YaleInfo fulfills all three functions -- connect, browse and search -- while giving all users a more organized structure for information navigation.
The design team began to solve these problems by diversifying the menus. Connect functions would now be served by "Views." Each View is a point-of-view. The Views emphasize direct connections to known resources or highlight particular directories that are deep within the YaleInfo menu structure. Rather than try to serve everyone at Yale with one top-level menu, the design team tailored Views for three distinct groups of users: Academics, Administrators, and Visitors. Every user now sees a selection of shortcuts when they connect to YaleInfo. The Views are on top of the main or browsing YaleInfo menu. In the libraries and public clusters, the default View is the Academic View. For dial-up and off- campus users, the default is the Visitor View. To see the other Views, users may select "Other YaleInfo Views"from the Search Tools section in each View.
Since tailored Views on top enable quick access to key resources, the design team organized the YaleInfo menus to maximize the gopher's potential for structured browsing -- guiding the user from broad categories to specific resources. Directories at the top level are starting points for browsing resources within a broad category. Subdirectories below may be organized by subject, type, size, or other criteria appropriate to that region of the gopher. The YaleInfo browsing menu is the third item in each View.
But a user cannot browse forever. A multiplicity of menu levels was a flaw in the old YaleInfo, so the design team created "articulated menus." The new YaleInfo collapses two or three menu levels into one and provides an outline for the items in the menu. By grouping like menu items together and labeling these groups with descriptive titles, the articulated menu transforms an arbitrary list of resources into an organized "list of lists"and flattens the YaleInfo menu structure. Finally, the design team added a search tools module so that users could quickly find known resources.
The articulated menus, the tailored Views, and the browsable menus are the latest improvements to YaleInfo's navigability and ease of use. Users are now testing the value of these features. From Enterprise to the first YaleInfo to this year's model, the menu design process has depended upon feedback from users. Please continue to send your specific suggestions on improving YaleInfo to (yaleinfo@yale.edu)
Matthew Beacom (Matthew.Beacom@yale.edu) is the Catalog Librarian for Networked Information Resources
Rob Callum (callum@minerva.cis.yale.edu) is the YaleInfo Administrator and Electronic Publications Specialist