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 user engagement with a product or service, from initial discovery to final disposition, and each stage contributes to 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 arrived at by technical writers and other documentation specialists over the years. As written texts, finding aid language—the word choices made and sentence structures used to describe archival holdings—alienated a large part of their potential audience! Finding aids were initially 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 approaching 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 design researchers developed techniques for assessing the effectiveness of messages, content elements transmitting and imparting knowledge leading to informed action. For a message to be effective it must have a clearly defined audience, but documents distributed online to unknown, anonymous audiences don’t necessarily have the luxury of targeted, mediated delivery.
However, best practices suitable for communicating effectively to the widest possible audience do exist. In the English-speaking world these take the form of “plain language” writing, 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 direct correspondence between the goals of plain language writing and information design establishes the practice as an essential component of UX design.
So how does archival description, in the form of finding aids, reflect plain language standards? How usable are these descriptions? How do they impact the UX of the archival collections they represent? Before testing a specific audience’s experience of archival description, I want to understand how these documents appear to the general public. Which leads me to my next project: interrogating the usability and effectiveness of finding aids by conducting a series of readability and comprehensibility tests following plain language guidelines.