Your mission in 50 milliseconds, if you choose to accept...

As a web designer by heart and an enthusiast for aesthetically sound websites, I truly enjoyed the readings for this past week. The two articles that were required this week were, Gitte Lindgaard’s Attention web designers: You have 50 milliseconds to make a good first impression! and Ron Atkinson’s Transversality and the Role of the Library as Fair Witness.

Atkinson’s article over libraries as fair witnesses proved to be truly interesting. It seems that all of my professional work has been conducted in a library. Even though I’m 23 and have worked in a library setting for just over 5 years, I have noticed major trends and shifts in that time. From a time where the library was a haven of treasured books to a time where students huddled around the free Internet access computers. As with every organization and business, technology has changed everything. Being a lover of technology and a person who embraces change, I enjoy this time of change and emerging technology; however, libraries have been stuck in limbo over this very subject. According to the text, “authenticity and integrity are mechanical characteristics of digital objects; they do not speak to deeper questions of weather the contents of digital document are accurate and truthful when judged objectively.” This statement is related to the way that libraries view access and application utility. These two utilities must be understood by libraries because of the ever-changing landscape of technology.

The article also stated, “the function of the fair witness must not only be to supply the user with dependable access to the object but also to supply the user with the capacity to perceive or develop reliable contents—without which subjective user decisions about the meaning and value of an object are not possible.” The object of libraries as fair witness is simple, supply dependable sources/objects/items and helps translate how to use those items and helping users define their own information needs.

The second article (my favorite out of the two), was on the visual appeal of certain websites and the first impressions given by those websites. The article basically concluded that more research is truly needed to capture the overall opinion of first impressions on websites. From my experience of web design, I can tell that the aesthetic value is truly VALUABLE! The purpose having such a visually appealing website is to give the viewer something intangible, something they can form a memory around, something that will keep them coming back for more. Information that is not placed in an aesthetically sound format could be just as un-useful as lost information. Information needs the right medium to be displaced and the right amount of visual appeal to keep the viewer and keep them coming back. I will truly heed this information as designing my prototype and hopefully I will be able to find the balance between creativity and visual appeal that will display my information in all its glory.