My research into User Experience (UX) design concentrated on a specific component of the archival toolkit: the finding aid. But, considering the multifaceted and holistic nature of UX, limiting my investigation to a single resource presents a challenge. Should I evaluate finding aids according to their visual design—their layout, typography, color palettes, and graphical components? Should the focus be on the usability and accessibility of the systems disseminating finding aids, according to their interface affordances and interaction capabilities? UX covers every engagement with a product or service, from initial discovery to final disposition. Each stage contributes to or detracts from a satisfying experience.
Reviewing the literature, archival technologies are regularly subjected to thoughtful criticism. Focusing on finding aids, I found myself returning to a conclusion regularly arrived at by technical writers and other documentation specialists: As written texts, the word choices and sentence structures used to describe archival holdings frequently alienate inexperienced readers! Finding aids were initially intended as inventories, mediating access to collections. Specialist research communities, including historians and genealogists, subsequently familiarized themselves with archival description to facilitate locating primary source materials. As the profession evolves and self-directed online search improves, newer generations of scholars with different expectations are employing these information artifacts. And the results are … not great.
This is where the UX “ecology” offers guidance. A finding aid, whether on paper or online, is a document, and information design is the subset of UX directly concerned with the usability of documents. Information designers developed techniques for assessing the effectiveness of messages, content elements transmitting knowledge and supporting comprehension. For a message to be effective it must have a clearly defined audience, but documents distributed online to unknown, anonymous audiences don’t have the luxury of targeted, mediated delivery.
Best practices for communicating effectively to the widest possible audience do exist. In the English-speaking world these take the form of “plain language,” a concept originating in the early twentieth century that evolved into a series of guidelines formally enacted as U.S. Federal legislation: the Plain Language Writing Act of 2010. Put simply, plain language is language that helps people find what they need, understand what they find, and act appropriately on that understanding. The positive correlation between plain language and information design indicates an essential component of UX design.
So how does archival description reflect plain language standards? How usable are these descriptions? How do they impact the archival collections they represent? Before testing an audience’s experience of finding aids, I want to understand how these documents appear to the general public. Exploring these questions, my next project will interrogate the usability and effectiveness of finding aids by conducting a series of readability and comprehensibility tests following plain language guidelines.