It is axiomatic that the best designed tool, social program, widget, or information retrieval system meets the important needs of users and is adapted to how they think, feel, and act. Models of good design process in one way or another include efforts to understand users, envision products and programs based on this understanding, test design elements and models with users, and adjust designs based on user reactions. Most models assume an iterative and interacting process. The background paper for this workshop notes that HCI "research has been dominated by the view that the user should be at the center of the software environment design" and opines that "the HCI perspective has not been a strong influence on IR system design overall."
What if the user did become the center of an IR system design effort and that user were any one of our millions of elementary and secondary school students? What would the designers face? The student user is not the library professional or information specialist; rarely does he or she aspire to that status. Could one argue that an IR system design that placed the student user in the center would be adapted to an information seeker who does minimal planning, behaves opportunistically, may not be capable of much higher order analysis, does not consistently engage in logical processing, and is willing to settle for something that will satisfy rather than maximally meet needs? What would such an adaptation look like? What identifiers and organization would be used for the information base? What search tools would be available for this student?
A challenge in all good design processes is identifying which user needs and characteristics are essentially unchanging and which are not, and of the latter which should be changed. Students learn and develop. New opportunities create apparently new interests. An innovative IR system could create new needs. Some argue that the Web is just such an innovative information system. In attempting to link user needs to digital library design, we could miss great opportunities if we limit our options to those that uninformed, inexperienced students identify as what they need or can use. Formative evaluation and field trials could also be misleading if they are so short that likely learning of and adaptation to an IR system are truncated. What would IR systems look like if they were adapted to the learning capabilities of students? Would they be more innovative or more complex? Would they have several difficulty levels built into them? Like videogames, would the sophistication of the system presented to the student be adapted to his or her search skills? Would there be -in mechanisms for helping the student to learn more about the available features and underlying information database, not just at one sitting but over the years that he or she will be turning to IR systems?
If students learn, as all parents and educators must believe they do, then perhaps they can learn to interact with IR systems as information specialists do. A few older students are that sophisticated, but most students are not. Perhaps successfully linking student user needs and behavior to digital library design will entail several changes in our characterization of the student. We will view student users as more capable of learning and adopting innovations than we may have previously thought; however, we will also view them as less planful, analytic, motivated, and demanding than we may have previously hoped. Would an IR system designed with such a student user firmly in mind differ significantly from IR systems most students now use? If so, how? Would it be possible to design such a system? Would it be worthwhile?