steve kwan user experience designer

Library software is more dangerous than you'd think

(May 30th, 2006 - 3:53PM)

One of my favorite clients told me today that she's dreading doing year-end inventory of her library. This was part of my e-mail response.

Glad to hear things are going well. We are working on a feature that will allow the software to get up, walk to the shelves and manually verify each item. This should be a bit of a time saver. Unfortunately our developers are having trouble figuring out how to make the software walk - it's a lot more difficult than you'd think! We keep encountering a bug where the software periodically becomes self-aware and tries to kill the librarian - generally not the desired behaviour.

Another common feature request is the ability to use the barcode wand as an electric taser gun. That also has met limited success.