Following last week’s great news celebrating 100 million views from a single SobekCM instance at Florida and the birthday of the SobekCM software, and following Monday’s news on the new thumbnail display (and upcoming online QC), there’s more good news to share with a new item view!
The new item view is a general update to a bar rather than tabs for item-level navigation. The new design was updated for visual appearance and speed, but always with an eye towards accessibility and compatibility for different system and user needs.
The new design looks cleaner and loads much more quickly. Plus, the left-side bar (which contains additional functionality with table of contents and wordmarks) will auto-hide for displays that are set to a default smaller size, like some tablets. Also, the bar instead of the tab also includes drop-down options which duplicate the functionality of the sub-tabs. The sub-tabs remain (for ease of accessibility and support across different browsers, as can be seen with an item on the citation view and others).
This is wonderful new enhancement because it combines two things I love: better display and better infrastructure. I always care about both because both matter for usability. It’s often the case that the really exciting stuff for me is on the backend. This is because infrastructure is so often not emphasized enough (or at all). This lack of emphasis results in systems that don’t work at scale and things that don’t really work at all because the speed is so slow for users that they get confused. For this, I tend to think of most enterprise payroll and personnel systems, where their speed takes seconds to respond. For those systems, it’s arguably arguable on how much speed matters. There’s no argument on digital libraries, production, and curation systems. Speed matters. Scale matters.
SobekCM is developed with the knowledge that speed and scale matter. With the new item viewer, the site is faster, faster, faster! This is so important for search engine optimization (SEO) and for working with groups with different technical equipment and expertise. It’s very important for systems to be not just responsive, but fast, because people understand how the system works better and thus are better users when the systems respond quickly.
It’s great to see the improved SobekCM item view, and to know the even greater value and significance for users and future enhancements made possible for increased speed and an ever cleaner and sleak design.
2013-03-13