NYPL Labs

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about new methods of releasing products/art/information. I am a serious Nine Inch Nails fan, so imagine my surprise a few weeks ago when I discovered their new album via the official website. No press, no ads, just a post on the website. While I could care less who “did it first/best/etc” of the artists who have recently released music this way, I do care about the general concept of the fanfare-free release. Is it even a real launch without the publicity? Is the correct term a “soft launch?” Is a soft launch ultimately a better release method—at least for usability-driven sites like the Digital Gallery?

Later today, we’ll be making the redesign accessible to the public through links at the top of the current Digital Gallery and on the NYPL home page. Then in a couple weeks, this redesign will replace the current one entirely. We’ll probably keep the survey open for a while, we will continue to welcome user comments here on Labs, and we’ll work on some additional ways to gather reactions. Sounds like a soft launch to me.

Part of the reason for launching softly is the experimental nature of NYPL Labs projects. The soft launch is conceptually much more in keeping with our mission to be transparent. We’re actively interested in both showing our users how we work and also involving them in the process where appropriate. As StevenB says in the above article from Designing Better Libraries:

“From a design perspective I tend to prefer the soft launch. While prototyping can help to refine the product or service to the point where it’s ready for the launch, there’s no doubt that a few details were probably overlooked or something obviously in error isn’t being seen; sometimes only the end users can capture those faults.”

I’ll add that our reasons for choosing a soft launch aren’t really so motivated by having our users find the bugs. I think of it more as one of the initial ways that we’re investigating and implementing usability testing.

That said, this redesign isn’t perfect. I feel that it does exactly what we wanted it to in terms of promoting image discovery and subsequent user engagement with the image. But it’s not as good at browsing according to metadata elements such as subject, name, or collection. Also, there’s a lot of legacy code still present, and I would really prefer the code to look as clean and precise as the visual design.

But in the spirit of the soft launch, this redesign is only Part 1. The next phase of development will continue to hone the design that we’ve introduced, and also will build new capabilities and tools for searching, browsing, and working with images. It’s ok that this rev doesn’t achieve perfection, so long as it advances usability.