Straightway we’re going to admit that our on the cheap online card application is not the ideal online card application solution. But it costs nothing, takes minimal staff time and saves patrons a bit of time. So. It is better than nothing, which is what most libraries have to offer.

Quick-n-Dirty Online Card Application
It’s a simple idea. Just embed a Google Form on your site. Include the details from your paper card application and tell it to email library staff whenever there’s a new submission. Staff then enter patron details into the ILS and have a card ready for them when they come to the library with whatever identification is needed. A nice touch would be to email or call (depending on what they’ve selected as a preference) when the card is ready for them to pick up. This can also serve as a reminder to bring the proper form of identification.

Ideally these emails would be forwarded to an address that’s checked hourly so that people can be promptly alerted that their cards are ready. Not as ideal but still somewhat within reason would be checking for emails at the end of the day and getting in touch with people then. No one in the circ department checking their email that often? You could always setup a filter in Gmail and forward these messages to a cellphone.

Whether you’re going to check hourly or daily, make sure you clearly state the time period in which people should expect to hear back from you. Then follow through with it.

Here’s what a form embedded in your website could look like:

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Protip: When creating a form like this you can customize the confirmation message people see after submitting the form. So instead of the default “Thanks. Your responses will appear in my spreadsheet” create a message like:

Thanks for joining us!

We’ll be in touch within a couple of hours to let you know when your card is ready. If you have any questions in the mean time, phone us at XXX.XXX.XXXX or email us at info@xyzlibrary.org.

P.S. For people that aren’t comfortable submitting their details online, the online card application page would be a good place for a PDF of the application for them to print, fill out, and bring in.

25 User Experience Videos That Are Worth Your Time

Usabilla
Remote usability testing

Form Design Inspiration

Site Search Best Practices
Louis Rosenfeld offers 13 site search design principles.

8 Best Practices for Mobile Site Design

Consistent Labeling

There is nothing more disorienting than links labels that don’t match page titles. Imagine clicking a link called “Find Books” and ending up at a page called “Search The Library Catalogue”. After a while, your users might start associating their quest to find books with searching the catalogue, but why force them to make that cognitive leap when you can easily synchronize your link labels with your page titles? If the link says “Find Books”, that’s exactly what they should see (preferably in unapologetically large text) on the resulting page.

So, spend some time clicking around your site. Make sure the link labels you click on match the page titles that come up. If they don’t, change them.

Search

There is a usability theory out there that says that users only search a site when they can’t figure out how the site navigation works or when they lose the “scent” of what they’re looking for. While that might be true, in the strictest human-computer interaction sense, there is a whole subset of users who would rather just search your site to start with instead of clicking on navigation options. Blame Google.

If your library website doesn’t have a site search box, it should. Devote some template space to it so that users get used to seeing that search box in the same place on every page. Make the searchers happy and provide a simple wayfinding option at the same time.

Breadcrumbs

Think of breadcrumbs as the GPS of your website, the “You Are Here” marker that instantly orients users to where they are in your site’s architecture. Breadcrumbs are a perfect wayfinding tool because they provide a reminder to users about what section of the site they are in and how they got there.

If you don’t already have breadcrumbs on your site, there is no quick & dirty way to implement them unfortunately. But if you are using breadcrumbs, do a quick audit to make sure they are meaningful and provide some useful orientation to your users. Remember, your home page is not always the starting point for a lot of users (thank you, search engines), so make sure that every page has breadcrumbs that will also orient those who land on your site as a result of a search engine hit.

Next Up

#3: Online Library Card Application

• Drupal 7 User Experience Project
• the Drupal Redesign group on Flickr (complete with tantalizing wireframes and mock ups!)
• follow the #D7UX hashtag on Twitter

We need both both halves of the brain to work together and channel that brilliance through our hands and propagate ideas throughout our world. We all wonder why Apple’s products have that je ne sais quoi that draw us in. I’m beginning to think that it’s not just that they understand the power of simplicity, or the power of software. It’s that you can see they were born from a person, from two dirty hands, from just a little bit of technology, and from a massively powerful IDEA.

Read more from John Maeda at the Huffington Post