Working in the K–12 library world, one of my concerns with the plethora of e-content options available today is the risk of platform fatigue. With each publisher and distributor offering a distinct site design (sometimes quite a few different site designs!) with different search interfaces, navigation buttons, and content interactions, I worry that students will have to spend too much time relearning the interfaces to effectively use the content.
Why does each vendor feel the need to reinvent basic site design for each product? Why can’t companies just sit down in a meeting and pick a single icon set for basic navigation buttons? The problem is that, in many cases, the interface is one of the few things that differentiates one product from another.
Consider some of the large magazine/journal packages: The offerings from EBSCO, Gale, and ProQuest in their general reference packages are remarkably similar. All three companies try to use marketing language to differentiate their content–this one has more books, another has more journals, etc.–but in the end there is a very high percentage of overlap in titles. The platform is all there is to really sell. Which means we end up with some interesting new ideas in interface design, but at the risk of platform fatigue for users trying to navigate between products.
There is another option, however, as I discovered in a moment of unbelievably naive conversation with a vendor rep. I actually said that to add another new ebook platform, I would want to see unique content to offset the addition of a new platform for users to learn. Translation: there I was begging a vendor to sign exclusive content deals. I confess my sin and ask for your forgiveness.
So what is the solution? For the really big players in the field, there probably isn’t an easy fix for this (unless they do travel down the path of exclusive content deals . . . ugh). But for smaller publishers—true content creators as opposed to content aggregators—it might help to come up with a common set of design and navigation elements. In many cases, libraries purchase from small publishers specifically on the merits of the content being offered. I would rather a small publisher invest in creating more quality content as opposed to developing a new platform.
As e-content moves forward, developing a common platform for libraries to deliver digital resources might be a new role for ALA. Let the content developers develop content, and let the libraries come up with the best, most efficient, and hopefully most user-friendly way to deliver that content to end users.