NYPL Labs

Well, Barbara has outed me as a new employee, so it’s about time I start posting here!

I am the new User Analyst for the Digital Experience Group, in which capacity I will be researching patterns of use and serving as an advocate for all users of the NYPL web sites and digital tools. After my first few weeks I have realized that my most important purpose here is to serve as a sort of congressman, voicing the needs of my constituents (library staff and patrons) to the rest of the DEG. As such, my door is always open to any internal or external users of our web sites. I can be reached at michael [underscore] lascarides [at] nypl [dot] org.

During the interview process for this new position, I was asked by Josh and Barbara to give a short presentation about projects I have worked on and how I approach the analysis of a web project from the user’s point of view. As I thought about how to tie in my experience (mostly in e-commerce and interactive agencies) into the way a library works, I was reminded of William Whyte, a usability pioneer with a strong connection to the NYPL and its environs.

Willliam “Holly” Whyte was a sociologist and urban planner who spent some twenty years observing the streets of midtown Manhattan in loving detail (including a lengthy study of the famous steps in front of the Humanities and Social Sciences Library). In his book “City: Rediscovering the Center“, he catalogs a lifetime of observations from the street level. Published when I was in college, “City” is a lost classic of the usability canon and a hugely formative influence on me. It’s filled with counterintuitive findings about how people, when observed in a natural setting, will behave in unexpected ways (quick examples: men touch each other more in public than women do; and sidewalk conversations are far more likely to happen smack in the middle of the flow of pedestrian traffic than at the edges). Far from dry, it’s a smiling little optimist of a book, filled with anecdotes gleaned from a lifetime of careful watching and wry tweaks of the prevailing urban planning dogma of the time. Here’s Whyte training his eye on people as they sit down:

The possibility of choice is as important as the exercise of it. If you know you can move if you want to, you can feel all the more comfortable staying put. This is why, perhaps, people so often approach a chair and then, before sitting on it, move the chair a few inches this way or that, finally ending up with the chair just about where it was in the first place. These moves are functional. They are a declaration of one’s free will to oneself, and rather satisfying. In this one small matter, you are master of your fate.

Small moves can say things to other people. If a newcomer chooses a chair next to a couple in a crowded situation, he may make several moves with the chair. He is conveying a message. Sorry about the closeness, but it can’t be helped and I am going to respect your privacy as you will mine. A reciprocal shift of a chair may signal acknowledgement.

[...]

Fixed individual seats deny choice. They may be good to look at, and in the form of stools, metal love seats, granite cubes, and the like, they make interesting decorative elements. That is their primary function. For sitting, however, they are inflexible and socially uncomfortable.

Whyte’s focus on the little things, like how people sit down, influenced the redesign of Bryant Park. Next time you pull up one of those little green chairs that surround the main Library building, give a little tip of the hat to the man who once wrote, almost bemusedly, “People tend to sit most where there are places to sit.”

My goal here at the Library is to keep that sharp focus on the little things  in order to ensure that our patrons have control over their environment and enough digital “places to sit”. I’ll be sharing some discoveries and some works in progress in the weeks and months upcoming, so stay tuned.