I am looking at an article by David Campbell and Theodore Shlechter published in Library Quarterly. The authors used 3 UX methods (interviews, diaries, observation) to learn about the holistic effect of the design of a library on user behaviour.
Interesting, but pretty standard stuff, right?
But look closely. The paper was published in 1979! There is nothing new under the sun.
Top reasons I ride my bike to work:
1. Cheaper than driving.
2. Faster than walking.
3. Show off my cool biking shoes.
4. Extra space to schlep things by using the panniers.
5. Parking right outside the library door.
Now, consider these new bike racks installed in the Westdale neighbourhood in Hamilton. 
Note how they are nowhere near anything. Located about 500 m. from the nearest McMaster building and 500 m. from the nearest shop in Westdale, the only reason to park your bike here is to sit on the curb and contemplate your future. WHY WOULD YOU INSTALL BIKE RACKS WHERE NO ONE CAN USE THEM?!
Juliene McLaughlin, a student at the Faculty of Information & Media Studies at Western University, is joining our UX team for a co-op term. Welcome, Juliene!
I met Tony O’Kelly last winter in the belly of the beast that is the Toronto underground pedestrian walkway disaster. We were both taking a break from the Ontario Library Association Super Conference and had wandered out of the stunningly cold February day and into the heated labyrinth to find food. Tony was peering at a convoluted map of the pedestrian tunnels trying to find his way back to the surface, and so was I. By chance, we were both attending OLA. By chance, we were both UX librarians. By chance, Tony was planning on meeting Doug later that day.
Anyway, we stayed in touch and Tony sent me a link to this great initiative in BC.
While standing in line to renew a prescription at Zehr’s pharmacy yesterday I had a chance to think about how user-centred pharmacies are/ have become/ can be.
It is a rigorous, science-intensive, regulated service, with undoubtedly lots of technical language behind the scenes and complicated processes involving technicians, pharmacists, doctors, etc. yet it does not subject the customer to this.
1. It’s where the customer is: at the grocery store
2. The signs are clear and user-focused, rather than reflect the behind the scenes processes: “Drop Off” “Pick Up” “Talk to a Pharmacist”
3. Self-service options are available to a degree possible: phone in a prescription
4. Interactive elements: test your heart rate, health-related pamphlets
5. Some pharmacies have a waiting area lounge. Some have pagers you can use to tell you when your prescription is ready.
6. Expertise offered but not imposed, if you have questions about your medication
It may be that my expectation of being treated fairly and pleasantly while purchasing my first GPS runner’s watch is all out of proportion. You be the judge.
I started at the Running Room in Guelph. I was the only customer in the store. I asked about watches. The salesperson grunted and pointed down at the display case. I asked to see one. She took it out and put it on the counter. I reached for it. She pulled it away and said I’d better not trying opening the package. If I mess up the package, I’d have to buy it. She opened it for me. I asked her to demonstrate how it works. She said if I turn it on, I’d have to buy it. I left with my head hanging down.
I decided to buy it online from The Source. I got an email telling me it would be available for pick up at my local store in 3-5 days. On the fifth day I called the store, but they said they had no access to my order so I’d have to wait patiently for The Call. On the eighth day I used the online chat function and asked about my order. They said they had no access to my order so I would have to call. I called. I was told my watch was on backorder and was supposed to ship in two weeks. I’m used to Amazon-like communication. Amazon updates me with the status of my order in a timely way. I wanted my watch, but I didn’t want to wait two more weeks for a company that didn’t bother communicating with me. I told her I want to cancel my order. She said she would “try.” I waited. She came back and said it was cancelled, “most likely.” Most likely? Can I have a confirmation number? No such thing. Will I be receiving an email to confirm this? No.
All of this headache, and I still don’t even know if I will like or use this watch.
I finally tried the Running Room in Hamilton. The transaction was benign. I didn’t feel used or abused or ignored. I am now using my watch, which I am enjoying.
Thank you, Luke Feast and your Social Research Methods Workshop
Introducing User Experience into the library setting has been an interesting process. About 4 or 5 years ago it struck me that while we had a lot of performance measures in libraries that had to do with measuring things such as cost, use, circulation, building traffic, and user satisfaction, nobody was just watching how or if the library “worked.” I’d been doing some reading about design of products and services outside of the library context and it always involved trying to understand what the customers were doing in order to design something that would suit their behaviour. There are quite a few examples of this type of work:
Introducing user experience in your library may not be so simple. When we started in 2009, just about nobody knew what we were talking about and we only had a vague idea ourselves. We had read Foster and Gibbons’ book Studying Students: The Undergraduate Research Process at the University of Rochester, so we knew that it had been done, and that there were things that we could do to get started. The tricky thing is that as a User Experience Librarian you don’t really have your own territory in the library and no matter what you study you’re going to wind up commenting on someone else’s work (i.e. – if you study circulation services, there are a lot of people who have invested in that and they aren’t necessarily looking for suggestions).
The first thing that we did was to study relatively “low-hanging fruit”. Our library signage was getting old and inaccurate and we were never too fond of its design, so everyone could understand why we might want to look at it. It was also something that was “owned” by a fairly small group that were more or less open to suggestion. More than anything, we set off to study SOMETHING, and hoped that if we made recommendations they might at least have some chance of being welcomed. Our study involved creating an inventory of signs, looking at what makes a consistent and useful system of signage, and we asked students to accomplish tasks related to finding one’s way through the library while mapping and recording what those students did.
We made recommendations that were accepted initially with a relatively small amount of enthusiasm. What we found, though, was that some of our recommendations were accepted, some were noted with some caution, and some were ignored. In the long run, however, the study contributed to improvements and that is what is important. The improvements (however incremental) build some confidence in the idea that user experience has something to offer and allows the departments involved to see that you do have some method and something to contribute. As we developed more confidence (and evidence) that we could contribute more people were willing to work with us and take our work seriously.
The executive summary? When starting up with user experience, keep in mind that you may be the only person who understands what you are doing and that it may take a while to get people to accept this new type of work. As you recommend and it becomes clear that you actually do have something to contribute, you can begin to build on small successes. Remember your audience when writing your reports … senior managers may deal differently with documents than other staff and you should try to create documents that work for your audience. Finally, be happy (particularly in the beginning) with any small influence that you may have on the design of your library and its services … positive contributions can lead to more of the same.
User Experience is a relatively new concept to libraries. Although studying user behaviour would seem like a natural thing for libraries to do (since they are generally buildings full of people behaving in all sorts of ways), our history is one of predominantly quantitative research. Libraries do collect lots of statistics, and historically the measures that we have used to determine the success of our libraries have been such things as gate counts, use of the resources that we offer, and various measures of user satisfaction. These measures are important, tell us a lot about the workings of our libraries, and have given us the information necessary to move forward over the years.
At times, however, I have felt that although we have a great deal of data to draw on, there is something missing. Our counts of collection size, circulation of material, gate counts, and satisfied/unsatisfied users have often left me wanting more. While these numbers tell us about the quantities of use and the level of satisfaction, they don’t help us to understand why the users are in our libraries, what they are doing while they are using our resources, how they use the tools that we provide, or what they commonly do to find information (even outside of libraries).
Without understanding the way that our users find their way through the world of information, it is difficult to deliver resources and design services that suit the ways that they behave. In these days when our users can simply go somewhere else if what we offer does not suit them, we need to understand more about our users if we hope to be their “go to” source for information. Fortunately, studying the behaviour of people has been an important step in the design process for many service industries and product designers for a very long time. There is an entire industry of user experience study and design that libraries can learn from, and this seems to be an idea that is catching on. One difficulty with this work is that libraries simply are not used to the idea of qualitative research, which is being practiced with quite practical outcomes in many disciplines.
This blog is meant to document some of the things that we (and others) are learning about our users, and the services and resources that we provide … and how the two interact. Since User Experience is a new discipline for many, this blog will also describe the ideas behind user experience design, the methods employed, and the basic concepts of qualitative research.
user experience 