» Tuesday, 15 July A.D. 2008
library search interfaces
To all those library webmasters out there:
Please stop making your search results pages auto-reset to the home page of the library after several minutes. I looked up that book, or author, or whatever for a reason; don't touch my stuff.
I know why you do this: you fear that somebody's going to walk away from an in-library terminal with search results up and some clueless user is going to come up to said terminal and be totally confused as to how to get something done. So you attempt to be helpful with this auto-reset magic.
Two comments. First, your home page is generally a travesty of UI design anyway, so you're not really helping anybody (especially since the “search” feature might not be immediately available off the home page, whereas it almost certainly is from the search results page(s)). Second, if this is really your concern, there's a simple solution: only do the magic reset when the accessing IP comes from one of your library terminals. Don't screw over those users coming in from home for the sake of some hypothetical clueless computer user.
Thanks.
posted by Nate @ 10:33PM