If you visit the National Library's homepage you can see the several lines devoted to the digitised Singapore collection which are available online. The only problem is they all open in hideous popups for which you need to be an acrobat so that you right click at the right time on IE before IE popup blocker deletes the popup. This has, no doubt, added more to the flexibility of my fingers ( mebbe I can now do a 360 degree rotation of my fingers now), but I do fear many others will not have such remarkable positive thoughts of such implementation.
I do know that NLB hires usability specialists to give recommendations. I guess there is many a slip between the cup and the lip and what gets churned out in the end are just trimphant opinions of a majority in the development team while the usability factors get erased.
I just called up the NLB and found out that I need to disable popup blocker in IE everytime I need to access the digitised content (no, they do not support Firefox access and they will feedback my request to put that on their website to the technical team). And forget about using firefox. I wonder what mac users will have to do. And the answer I get from them is that "it is designed in that way (to use popups) because we use PDFs and that is the only way". And refresh the page every few minutes for the links to remain active. The ideas are so absurd that I was absolutely stunned to silence.
I cant tell you the anguish in my heart. A whole technical team designs the software and implements it without batting an eyelid for usability. This is precisely why e-governance will not work in singapore. You cant expect thousands of people to change their internet options and remove popup blocker. I cant emphasise more on how good the popup blocker is and how much it stops unsuspecting people from clicking and downloading some worms and virus.
I just hope RamblingLibrarian can do something about it and make the singaporean digital library a saner place.
Comments
2 years 51 weeks ago, Ivan Chew wrote:
Hi, it's scary how I've been perceived to be omnipotent! What I can do is to let my colleagues incharged of the digital library know of the issues you've raised and they'll take it from there. I'm not fully aware of the technical implementation and design so I can't comment further on the issue. :)
2 years 50 weeks ago, Ivan Chew wrote:
Hello, me again. Ok, my colleague explains why they designed the PDF files to load in a pop-up: If the PDF file loads within the browser, some users might intutively close the PDF file once they finish reading and hence the entire browser. Given the time to load the PDF file, some users would be frustrated when they lose the main navigation page.
Not sure if I explained it well enough. Personally I've not had issues with pop-ups (I just allow selected sites to go thru). I'm ok either way, but I guess if you feel strongly about it, feedback to NLB is welcome and if enough people suggest the same thing, they'll respond accordingly. Cheers.
2 years 50 weeks ago, divya wrote:
Ivan: Sorry, if I did put u on a pedestal! But I know only you as the face of the blogging in NLB :)
I understand the point of view, but the option is to open a new window instead of a popup. The reason popup blockers exist is because unsuspecting viewers may click on the fake "system messages" that are shown in popups by which it is possible to download these spyware software or the annoying "bonzo buddy"! I am emailing the helpdesk once more :)