I'm collecting "search stories" these days. These are stories detailing a user's interaction with information online. Examples of these are Books by the Chapter? One Man's Quest and What Newspapers Still Don't Understand About the Web.

These stories are useful in writing out use cases for designing web-based library products and services. What do people go through when they are looking for information online? What obstructed or facilitated their wayfinding? What are their expectations about online information services?

Peter Morville's Ambient Findability came out in 2005 and I have heard him speak of his book in one of the sessions at ICKM 2005 but I've read the whole book only today. On a same-day, round-trip Greyhound bus ride to Seattle for job interviews.

There are several reasons why I would skim a book at one time and then immerse in it at another time. In 2005, seeing and hearing Morville in person was good enough for me. In 2008, his work was cited by several other material I've recently read so I thought I could understand better the intersection of all these ideas by fully reading a common link. And it helped that someone is doing the driving 3+ hours up to Seattle and another 3+ hours back down to Portland.

Some people knit their brows when I tell them I take the Greyhound. It was my mode of transportation between Seattle and Portland during the six residencies of my dMLIS program at the iSchool. My classmates from Portland either took the train or drove up by car. My second son hated his first experience of the Greyhound - from Corvallis to Los Angeles, with friends, during a spring break. The crying babies, the man who wouldn't stop yapping or snoring and the woman who insisted she was Jesus or the Virgin Mary.

Obviously, my son and I grew up in different worlds. The Greyhound is a luxury to me compared to the crowded buses between Manila and my province in the Philippines when I was a college student. I've learned to let life happen all around me and still stare out the window and feel bits of information from the chaos inside and the passing scenery outside cross synapses in my brain.

The interview. Everyone in libraryland, it seems, is looking out to the future or maybe they always have been. In one interview, I was told that I would notice a pattern in their questions. The questions started with an area of librarianship (collection development, cataloging, digital librarianship, etc.), a detailed description of the applicant's experience in that area, what he/she wants changed in or his/her vision for the future of library services in that area, and, if in a lead role, how he/she would make the change or the vision possible. And so we toured several functional areas of librarianship to see if I would qualify for a rotational position involving all areas.

The questions assume that an applicant's ability to think about change or improvements for the future depends on his/her past and current experiences in definable areas. Fair enough. My problem is that I have difficulty gathering my bits of experience here and there and articulating them within the framework defined by these kinds of questions. So, as an understandable perception, if one cannot describe or articulate one's experience in a defined area in spoken language then one probably cannot do the tasks related to that area. I find however that this is not true in my case. Once on the job, I'm able to quickly integrate my knowledge and skills from diverse areas, see the interrelationships of functional areas in a workplace and perform beyond expectations.

Same thing with the ability to ask questions: In my previous job, I was easily evaluated as someone who doesn't ask questions. I don't ask many in spoken language but I ask a lot in written form and I wanted them to realize that to produce the work that I did that I must have asked a lot of questions along the way. The problem is, in spontaneous situations, I find people to be unsatisfactory sources for answers - they don't know, they forgot, they're not sure or in worst situations, they give misleading answers. So most of my questioning processes, which appear to be soliloquys, actually occur when I'm interacting with information contained in documents. In this sense, the distance created by the written word is doing me no good, at least with perceptions of abilities deduced from articulating one's self in the spoken word.

The bus rolls down the stretch of I-5 between the Emerald City and the City of Roses. It is one of those beautiful evenings around the end of spring and the beginning of summer. The setting sun bathes the rolling hills in shades of yellow and shadows of gray. It's insane to take this trip for interviews that may never result in job offers. But I've read a whole book, I've connected with people in some way and somehow I find a piece of myself looking out the window of a bus.

If I were to design products and services for libraries, what personas would I create for this domain? This question was going through my mind as I listened this evening to Liz Bacon of Devise and Steve Calde of Cooper speak about personas as design tools. This was at the monthly meeting of CHIFOO.

Liz and Steve first tackled the arguments against personas - they're fluffy, they're not actionable, they're expensive, among other things - before laying out why personas are strong design tools. Personas are data-driven - their creation requires research into user behavior, attitudes, goals and needs. They facilitate communication and creative thinking between people involved in product design and development. And because people are creatures of habit, personas do have a relatively long shelf-life even if the contexts and tools in which they work change over time.

What interests me most about Liz Bacon's take on personas is her emphasis that they are design tools to understand interactions within an ecosystem or context in which a product will be used. In this sense, creating personas is not simply gathering user needs or letting users design the product. Users do know what they want or need and may actually articulate them well but they don't always do so from a holistic point of view. It is still the job of the designer to gather and analyze all the interacting elements within a domain of interest. Personas help bring some of these elements to an abstracted level but with some features like names and photos to keep them grounded in real contexts. They are also only one of several tools used in interaction design. Liz and Steve will be doing a full-day workshop on scenario-driven design this Friday.

As far as I know, interaction design has not penetrated into the library world yet though libraries now routinely include usability studies and testing in their projects. Interaction design is definitely one line of thinking that I'll try to get into some more if I am to be involved in designing new library products and services.

Anyway, it was nice to get back to CHIFOO. I haven't been attending their meetings for a year now. I served as secretary for this non-profit group in 2006 and I have very high regards for the dedication and commitment of the group of volunteers who put together these quality programs. And tonight is my lucky night - I won the book raffle and came home with "Paper Prototyping: The Fast and Easy Way to Design and Refine User Interfaces" by Carolyn Snyder.