Waiting for the day

You know how you wait and wait for an event? The anticipation builds. The day arrives, your heart is beating wildly- you go and ---- you know the feeling?

This morning I went to my computer before the crack of dawn to try out the new GALILEO interface. It wasn't up. At school I opened this e-mail from Lauren Fancher, Director, GALILEO Support Services:

Dear GALILEO Users,

GALILEO is pleased to announce the upcoming release of four new interfaces for each of the GALILEO user communities: Scholar (academic), Library (public library), High-School, and Teen. The initial designs have been available for review and testing in beta since early October.

During that time, revisions have been prototyped based on the findings of usability testing, development for these revisions has been in process, and critical issues uncovered in beta testing are now being addressed prior to the production release.
The majority of the usability findings addressed the need to further clarify differences in navigation between the user views through color and design; functionality will not undergo major changes. Screen shots of the final designs are available for review at:
http://www.usg.edu/galileo/about/planning/projects/upgrade/redesign.phtml

We had hoped that the release would occur at the transition between Fall and Winter school calendars in order to have the lowest possible impact on users, given the year-round services libraries provide, and had been aiming for the coming week of December 17th.

Work continues to prepare the four new interfaces to appear in production within that window; however, the revisions will not be ready until the first week of January; a fifth interface intended to replace the Kid's interface now in production is being revisited based on feedback from usability and K12 stakeholders; the current Kid's interface will continue to be in use through January.

Thank you for providing help and assistance with this release and the many positive comments you have shared – we hope that the timing of the release will be acceptable and appreciate your understanding.

As the saying goes- if it's worth having, it's worth waiting for...and better to do it right than to do it over. We go back to waiting. I'm glad the staff at GALILEO want to get it right.