1birder4106
I envision a LibraryThing with at least four interfaces:
For readers, for collectors, for professionals, nerds, etc., and dummies like me.
The first two versions would be divided into variants for professionals, nerds, etc., and one for dummies.
For the professional version, something would have to work perfectly to be offered. This would include input fields that allow for entering even the most specific customizations.
For the dummy versions, input should be via lists whenever possible. These lists don't need to cover 100% of all possibilities; 80% in some cases and 95% in others would suffice.
I'm becoming increasingly overwhelmed, uncertain, and frustrated.
So many good suggestions and ideas come from members, but they all fall short because they can't offer 100% perfect solutions.
And there is a world beyond the US-English-infused world and beyond the 128-bit ASCII code.
It just seems that even in the forum, the silent majority receives too little attention, while the know-it-alls get too much.
I sincerely apologize for my post to everyone I may have personally offended.
And least of all are the operators of LT, who are doing their best under the difficult circumstances.
For readers, for collectors, for professionals, nerds, etc., and dummies like me.
The first two versions would be divided into variants for professionals, nerds, etc., and one for dummies.
For the professional version, something would have to work perfectly to be offered. This would include input fields that allow for entering even the most specific customizations.
For the dummy versions, input should be via lists whenever possible. These lists don't need to cover 100% of all possibilities; 80% in some cases and 95% in others would suffice.
I'm becoming increasingly overwhelmed, uncertain, and frustrated.
So many good suggestions and ideas come from members, but they all fall short because they can't offer 100% perfect solutions.
And there is a world beyond the US-English-infused world and beyond the 128-bit ASCII code.
It just seems that even in the forum, the silent majority receives too little attention, while the know-it-alls get too much.
I sincerely apologize for my post to everyone I may have personally offended.
And least of all are the operators of LT, who are doing their best under the difficult circumstances.
2SandraArdnas
I'm not entirely sure what your main point is. Who has more sway over design decision and features? Or that it should overall be simpler? Or that it actually needs different interfaces?
Yes, LT with its many features can be overwhelming, especially in the beginning, but it comes with the territory of complexity. For the dummy version (and to attract those who just track their reading and socialize with fellow readers), I personally think Quick Add (the plus sign on work pages) should do away with sources and offer automatic adds. There's enough data from OverCat to create such entries per ISBN, curated by the community, so that people can just pick one and it will come with data and LT-hosted cover. For those outside that scope, it could pre-populate title and author from the work-page. In both cases, those who want to fiddle with details can still do so, but those who just want to have an entry can do it as easily as in any of the other reading sites that do not have LT's other functionalities.
Yes, LT with its many features can be overwhelming, especially in the beginning, but it comes with the territory of complexity. For the dummy version (and to attract those who just track their reading and socialize with fellow readers), I personally think Quick Add (the plus sign on work pages) should do away with sources and offer automatic adds. There's enough data from OverCat to create such entries per ISBN, curated by the community, so that people can just pick one and it will come with data and LT-hosted cover. For those outside that scope, it could pre-populate title and author from the work-page. In both cases, those who want to fiddle with details can still do so, but those who just want to have an entry can do it as easily as in any of the other reading sites that do not have LT's other functionalities.
3AnnieMod
>1 birder4106: Just as an idea - don’t try to understand and use everything all at once. Find your own workflow and venture into other areas in time.
That’s how most of us old-timers learned - sometimes by choice, sometimes because certain features were not there yet.
The challenge of maintaining multiple UIs/personas are two-fold - a lot more development time but also a lot of unhappy people because they fit in a persona but need that one additional feature or field or a way to do things. Or people who do things a certain way that creates issues because they are in a smaller/more restricted persona and do not realize that there is more to the site.
As for LT for non English works and authors - that is an ongoing issue which gets compounded by sources which have their own ideas of how to encrypt and legacy data. Or is frustrating and annoying but it is what it is and there is no easy solution for it.
Don’t get me wrong - making things easier for casual users is important and LT had been doing a lot about this - the filters on the edit book page, the add books green button, the various imports and so on for example. But it is not something that is easy to design wholesale and even if a perfect design is possible, the legacy data and the sources data complicate things.
That’s how most of us old-timers learned - sometimes by choice, sometimes because certain features were not there yet.
The challenge of maintaining multiple UIs/personas are two-fold - a lot more development time but also a lot of unhappy people because they fit in a persona but need that one additional feature or field or a way to do things. Or people who do things a certain way that creates issues because they are in a smaller/more restricted persona and do not realize that there is more to the site.
As for LT for non English works and authors - that is an ongoing issue which gets compounded by sources which have their own ideas of how to encrypt and legacy data. Or is frustrating and annoying but it is what it is and there is no easy solution for it.
Don’t get me wrong - making things easier for casual users is important and LT had been doing a lot about this - the filters on the edit book page, the add books green button, the various imports and so on for example. But it is not something that is easy to design wholesale and even if a perfect design is possible, the legacy data and the sources data complicate things.
4krazy4katz
Since all of us have been here a long time, it would be interesting to hear from new users. I have adjusted to the user interface and the ability to add books but would not like to do that by ISBN because I never look at that. I read mostly ebooks, so I end up going from the green button through several steps to get to the page that lists author and title. Then I add "ebook" to that and am able to find the correct edition.
5anglemark
>3 AnnieMod: @birder4106 has been here since 2008 ...
6prosfilaes
>1 birder4106: For readers, for collectors, for professionals, nerds, etc., and dummies like me.
From your profile page:
Media
Book (2,527), Paper Book (1,413), Paperback (241), Hardcover (1,162), Board book (1), Magazine (paper) (1), PDF-gedruckt (2), Audiobook (126), Digital audiobook (106), CD audiobook (1), digitale Datei (mp3_ZIP) (13), Streaming, temp. Download (6), Ebook (979), ???-Scan (2), ePub (926), ePub-Scan (13), mobi (1), mobi-Scan (1), PDF (18), PDF-Scan (2), ePub + mp3_ZIP (3), Sreaming + (ePub) (3), Sound Recording (2), Digital sound recording (1), Streaming audio (1), Other (1), Calendar (1)
You took what was literally a list and insisted on adding your own options to it. If you are a representative of the "dummies like me" group, then that group won't be satisfied by more lists. There's a rule of thumb in programming I recall: most users only use 5% of the features of a program. That doesn't help if you're trying to write a replacement, because each user uses a different 5%.
beyond the 128-bit ASCII code.
It's frustrating, because a large part of the reason why (7-bit) ASCII is so important is because of Europe. At the start, back when computers had 16K of memory, naturally Europeans used 7-bit or 8-bit codes that supported their languages and maybe that of a couple neighbors, instead of 16-bit codes or codes that took more computer code to handle. These 8-bit codes proliferated wildly. At the frustrating end, instead of saying people who need to use the Euro symbol should use Unicode, a character set that supports everyone, in 1999, Europe created ISO-8859-15, an eight-bit character set that supported the Euro, but not most of the languages of Europe.
If Europeans had wanted to bite the bullet and create a system that supported everyone, we wouldn't have a lot of the problems we do. But they made a bunch of incompatible systems that supported their languages, leaving the lowest-common denominator of ASCII still being the most compatible parts of systems.
Americans didn't build this system. Every programmer on the planet who decided to make another character set to support their language or their needs did. And the Americas can largely survive on Latin-1, or CP-1252 if you want to get fancy; French, English, Spanish and Portuguese are all covered by those. The big players in Asia, China, Japan and Korea all made sets that supported thousands of characters, and frequently used tools like ISO-2022 which let them be used together. Europe looked at some 350 characters needed for modern European languages, and basically said, we can ignore Malta and Greece and Turkey and anything behind the Iron Curtain, really.
there is a world beyond the US-English-infused world
You said "80% in some cases and 95% in others would suffice", in which case, no. There's 3.2 million accounts on LT, and only around 200 thousand are in a non-English language, or 6%. 80% covers all English language users.
As for the more general, design is hard. It's easy to say that something would be better, but it's hard to actually design something that's strictly better. It's easy to talk about the silent majority, but it's hard to know about them. They're often not united by anything besides being silent. There's people who care specifically about keeping track of a physical collection, some of which care about how much everything costs. There's people for whom this is mostly a reading list; some people have said that a large part of their LT use is to stop them from buying a book that looked good, but they've read and got rid of because it wasn't really all that good. Some people are just looking for recommendations. I suspect if studied, the silent majority would proportionally be close to the more noisy people.
From your profile page:
Media
Book (2,527), Paper Book (1,413), Paperback (241), Hardcover (1,162), Board book (1), Magazine (paper) (1), PDF-gedruckt (2), Audiobook (126), Digital audiobook (106), CD audiobook (1), digitale Datei (mp3_ZIP) (13), Streaming, temp. Download (6), Ebook (979), ???-Scan (2), ePub (926), ePub-Scan (13), mobi (1), mobi-Scan (1), PDF (18), PDF-Scan (2), ePub + mp3_ZIP (3), Sreaming + (ePub) (3), Sound Recording (2), Digital sound recording (1), Streaming audio (1), Other (1), Calendar (1)
You took what was literally a list and insisted on adding your own options to it. If you are a representative of the "dummies like me" group, then that group won't be satisfied by more lists. There's a rule of thumb in programming I recall: most users only use 5% of the features of a program. That doesn't help if you're trying to write a replacement, because each user uses a different 5%.
beyond the 128-bit ASCII code.
It's frustrating, because a large part of the reason why (7-bit) ASCII is so important is because of Europe. At the start, back when computers had 16K of memory, naturally Europeans used 7-bit or 8-bit codes that supported their languages and maybe that of a couple neighbors, instead of 16-bit codes or codes that took more computer code to handle. These 8-bit codes proliferated wildly. At the frustrating end, instead of saying people who need to use the Euro symbol should use Unicode, a character set that supports everyone, in 1999, Europe created ISO-8859-15, an eight-bit character set that supported the Euro, but not most of the languages of Europe.
If Europeans had wanted to bite the bullet and create a system that supported everyone, we wouldn't have a lot of the problems we do. But they made a bunch of incompatible systems that supported their languages, leaving the lowest-common denominator of ASCII still being the most compatible parts of systems.
Americans didn't build this system. Every programmer on the planet who decided to make another character set to support their language or their needs did. And the Americas can largely survive on Latin-1, or CP-1252 if you want to get fancy; French, English, Spanish and Portuguese are all covered by those. The big players in Asia, China, Japan and Korea all made sets that supported thousands of characters, and frequently used tools like ISO-2022 which let them be used together. Europe looked at some 350 characters needed for modern European languages, and basically said, we can ignore Malta and Greece and Turkey and anything behind the Iron Curtain, really.
there is a world beyond the US-English-infused world
You said "80% in some cases and 95% in others would suffice", in which case, no. There's 3.2 million accounts on LT, and only around 200 thousand are in a non-English language, or 6%. 80% covers all English language users.
As for the more general, design is hard. It's easy to say that something would be better, but it's hard to actually design something that's strictly better. It's easy to talk about the silent majority, but it's hard to know about them. They're often not united by anything besides being silent. There's people who care specifically about keeping track of a physical collection, some of which care about how much everything costs. There's people for whom this is mostly a reading list; some people have said that a large part of their LT use is to stop them from buying a book that looked good, but they've read and got rid of because it wasn't really all that good. Some people are just looking for recommendations. I suspect if studied, the silent majority would proportionally be close to the more noisy people.
7birder4106
>6 prosfilaes:
Thank you for the effort you put into your reply.
I agree with much of it. Some things are new to me. And on other points, I have a different perspective. Unfortunately, I'm completely unsuited for anything even remotely related to programming.
And it seems that over the course of my life I've become a "black-and-white person." At best, I can still understand a few shades of gray. I've lost my ability to see colors.
It would probably be better to withdraw from all these discussions. To enjoy the many good things. And to try to ignore the rest.
Thank you for the effort you put into your reply.
I agree with much of it. Some things are new to me. And on other points, I have a different perspective. Unfortunately, I'm completely unsuited for anything even remotely related to programming.
And it seems that over the course of my life I've become a "black-and-white person." At best, I can still understand a few shades of gray. I've lost my ability to see colors.
It would probably be better to withdraw from all these discussions. To enjoy the many good things. And to try to ignore the rest.
8SandraArdnas
>7 birder4106: The shade of gray in LT feature discussions is to put forward your ideas when new features are being announced and worked on. You'll get quick feedback from developers themselves if it's feasible or not and why. Currently, they are working on various aspects of author pages. As you use the site extensively, following New Features group and throwing your 2 cents is probably worthwhile. It might bring some of your desired features, without you getting bogged down in overlong debates
9conceptDawg
>7 birder4106:
@SandraArdnas is correct: put forth ideas and describe some solutions. We are very open to talking about the decisions we make about the system, design, data, etc. Often, we are limited by the needs of the many when we build systems. Other times we can certainly cater to the 5%. It all depends on the individual case and how much effort or technology it needs.
@SandraArdnas is correct: put forth ideas and describe some solutions. We are very open to talking about the decisions we make about the system, design, data, etc. Often, we are limited by the needs of the many when we build systems. Other times we can certainly cater to the 5%. It all depends on the individual case and how much effort or technology it needs.
