We’re all familiar with Zappos, right? The friendly online shoe company that offers free shipping and free return shipping and is notable for its excellent customer service? I have a problem with them. It has nothing to do with customer service. It has nothing to do with their website. It has to do with (thank you, Dr. Weinschenk, for the word) indebtedness.
I first ordered a pair of shoes from Zappos about four years ago. I saw a beautiful pair of green Dansko sandals in a shop but they didn’t have my size. So I did what anyone else would do – I searched online. Not only did I find my size, but they were the last pair at Zappos for a ridiculous percentage off AND I got free shipping and returns. I ordered them, they didn’t fit, I sent them back. All with almost no trouble on my part. A year ago, I was hunting for a pair of red sandals. I had red sandals on the brain. Zappos has lots of red sandals. I ordered three pairs, intending to keep one at the most. I sent them all back. Perfect, right?
Wrong. You may have noticed that I have not actually purchased anything from Zappos. And now, after my two good encounters with the company, I feel downright guilty. I still look at shoes on the website, I read the reviews that make me feel good about a particular item, I may even drool a little – but I don’t even put anything in my shopping cart anymore. I can tell myself that this is a huge corporation which undoubtedly has the price of returns worked into its business plan. I can tell myself that this is no different from taking up a salesperson’s time in a brick-and-mortar store and returning THOSE shoes. But I know that I will not order from Zappos again unless I plan to keep the shoes. Unless I have actually tried them on in a store. I feel like I owe them that. Yet, if I try shoes on in an actual store, I will probably just buy them in that store.
In this week’s readings, both Howard and Weinschenk discussed the importance of remuneration. Howard points out that “functionality is not a sufficient condition for remuneration” (47). Functionality is important, of course. No one enjoys running into “404 not found”, especially when you are convinced that THAT LINK led to the very answer you were looking for – if it only worked. But functionality, as Howard points out, serves the user best by running in the background, by being the “old brain”, so to speak.
I teach a few LIB 100 classes each fall. These are “introduction to the library website” classes for freshmen and transfer students. If you’ve looked at the library website, you’ll understand why an introduction is necessary. I try to make the classes fun and useful. I try to explain why it’s important to know how to use library databases. I try to explain why Google does not actually answer all questions or necessarily provide the best information. And I try to explain how to search a database for a journal article. And as I do this, I am inwardly cursing all of the database vendors and designers who have designed this part of the “deep web” to be impenetrable to the average user.
Here’s why. I do not use a database such as Academic Search Premier every day or even every week, mostly because I’m not a reference librarian. So when I teach one of these classes, I sometimes stumble. I can’t tell, unless I am watching every move a student makes, how he or she got to a certain point or even how he or she can get back to the starting point. There are layers and layers of choices (i.e. barriers) to navigate before getting to a manageable number of usable articles. Many students give up before they arrive at the final destination. There is absolutely no remuneration along the way. There often isn’t an indication that the path chosen is the correct one. But, as Google has shown us, people don’t need or want a zillion options. They want to ask a question and get the answer.
I completely understand why certain information is not available on the surface web – there are issues of remuneration and copyright and privacy at work – but I am looking forward to the day when a student can go to the library website, enter a search and come up with a reasonable result. Professionally, I’m interested in the nuts and bolts, because someone has to know the nuts and bolts or the functionality disappears, but personally, I want things to be easy. There are tools (called discovery layers) that can do this for a library. They’re still fairly new, but several are quite promising. Maybe the next time I teach LIB 100, I’ll be able to focus on where to find the typewriter instead of on how to find a research article. Perhaps by then I will have also gotten over my Zappos guilt.
I have the share your feelings about Academic Search Premier with RefWorks. Everyone says how wonderful RefWorks is for the dissertation. I say, if you have 900 hours to figure it out. I do not think I am dense with technology, but RefWorks has me stumped.
ReplyDelete@Reed - I've never used RefWorks; I should probably set up an account and try it. I've heard good things from students, though, especially the ones with a zillion citations. Get in touch with Bobby Hollandsworth in the library (but don't mention pro cycling).
ReplyDeleteYour zappos experience is interesting. So in your case, their effort to make you feel indebted worked, but those feelings triggered the opposite action of what they hoped for! I was thinking about what you said about the library interface and how you wished that a search would just yield decent results. I've had some similar frustrations with software help sections. Nearly every time I search a help function in AutoCad or Illustrator, the information I receive is useless or a pain to access. For example, if I want to draw a 3d square (cube) in AutoCad, I can search by typing "3d solids". The information that pops up is a series of paragraphs that begins, "You can create 3D solids and surfaces from scratch or from existing objects. These solids and surfaces can then be combined to create solid models." It tells me about all the things I can do, but it does not tell me how to do it. I have to search 5 pages deep to find the actual method for creating the object. It usually frustrates me beyond comprehension. There is no remuneration in the help sections, so I almost never use them. I never really thought about remuneration before this week's reading, but it is probably the main thing that determine's a website's success!
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