In a remarkable way to cap off my career as a UX librarian, I had the privilege of presenting a keynote at UXLibs VI in Newcastle, UK. The conference theme was a big one: organizational culture.
I believe that UXers are well positioned to influence cultural change. Titled “Harnessing our Superpowers,” the focus of my talk was on how to use our UX powers of curiosity, empathy, ideation, and iteration to advance UX maturity within our organizations.
I’ll be writing a chapter inspired by the talk for the UX in Libraries Yearbook (a version of conference proceedings), but in the meantime here’s the slidedeck. You can also access the Google Slides version.
Constraints within the UX process are a common challenge. Restrictions such as budget, time, tools, and access to users can lead to new ways of producing lightweight yet impactful work.
In this talk for UX Wellington last month, I shared methods and experiments from the University of Arizona. Given that I’m leaving for a position in the private sector next month – improving federal government services – this was a great way to cap off my career at the University of Arizona Libraries and share various approaches we used to scale our work including our tiny café, participant pool, and research repository.
The talk is filled with examples of how I implemented impactful UX practices within constraints and on a tight budget. An interactive presentation, participants shared a little bit about their work and the challenges they face. We’re in this together, all.
On my team, we’re just past the two-year mark of a fully remote work environment (with a few rare exceptions). I sometimes long for the days of sketching on a massive whiteboard, bringing pads of sticky notes and boxes of sharpies to almost every meeting.
UX team in-person debrief, 2019
I’m not a fan of talking-only meetings, which is what we expect from most of our Zoom meetings. Too often, one or two people dominate the discussion and others don’t contribute, often because they aren’t encouraged or given the opportunity. And when you have sometimes 6 or 7 hours of Zoom meetings in a day, it can be especially rough.
I would much rather be doing things in our meetings: visualizing concepts, generating ideas, solving problems, creating something new. We used to do this with whiteboards and sticky notes in our physical meeting rooms. Fortunately, we have tools that can mimic the experience. So I thought I’d share some examples.
Retrospectives
We love our retros, and sticky notes are a must to allow people to generate all their thoughts on what we’ve learned for the future. When we did our first Tiny Café since the pandemic began, we did a retro to discuss how everything went. On top of using sticky notes to share comments, we used stamps to up-vote things we agreed with.
Retrospective using Figjam
At the end of last spring semester, we did a broader team retrospective using the 4 L’s: what we liked, learned, lacked, and longed for.
Retrospective using Miro
At the closeout of the recent Advancing Research, my attendee cohort did a version of a retro by using Miro to share what stood out to us, what we wanted to do next, and how we might stay connected with one another.
Retrospective using Miro
Debriefs
Soon after a research session (e.g., user interview, usability test), it’s helpful to debrief on what stood out and begin to identify any patterns. More in-depth debriefs after a lengthier studies are also important as you start to dive in to the analysis. This is usually a wall of sticky notes in a physical space, but virtual can work just as well.
Debrief on employee experience study using Miro
Emotions check-in
How we feel matters and impacts how we approach our work, and I’ve found great value in practicing awareness and naming emotions out loud. In a recent meeting where we were tackling a thorny issue around organizational structure, we started by asking how everyone was feeling. Using a Figjam board with some pre-populated descriptors on sticky notes (as well as the option to write something new), people named their emotions with stamps.
Learning how people are feeling using Figjam
I helped lead a similar activity at the end of the Advancing Research conference to see how people in my cohort were feeling after three days of conferencing.
Learning how people are feeling using Miro
Team planning
We do kickoffs at the beginning of each semester, and use remote collaboration tools extensively. At our most recent one, we found Figjam helpful for identifying skills areas to build. Since we all had Figjam accounts, we were able to place our avatars on sticky notes.
Identifying learning goals using Figjam
Team thank-yous and celebrations
Virtual parties can sometime be awkward and sometimes a bore. Inviting colleagues to share their kudos and thanks can be a great way to foster appreciation and recognition.
Employee farewell recognition using Miro
Idea or artifact reactions
When we were embarking on a website redesign project last year, we put a screenshot of the existing homepage up in Miro, then asked people to add their comments and observations using sticky notes and reactions.
Getting feedback on a design using Miro
Notetaking
Less about collaboration, but I’ve been playing around with using these tools for visual notetaking. Sometimes I’ll use physical sticky notes for capturing takeaways when attending a conference. Virtual tools have some benefits and more flexibility to add screenshots, connect ideas, and re-group things as you go.
Notetaking using Figjam
Getting creative
These are just a few examples of some of the ways I’ve used virtual sticky notes to facilitate engagement, participation, and richer employee experiences.
Are you working remotely? What are some other examples of ways to leverage the power of the virtual sticky note? Share in the comments!
Since March 2020, our UX team has been working remotely due to the pandemic. We’re expecting to go back on-site in a few weeks, so I wanted to take the opportunity to reflect on what we’ve learned about remote research. It took awhile, but we learned several strategies that allowed us to keep a research practice going.
Recruit from a pool
We built a participant pool that allows us to send out email invitations through Mailchimp. Now over 320 students, faculty, staff, and community members, we’re able to reliably get responses to our requests for participation. See how we set it up in Remote recruitment for UX studies, an article by our intern Rachel Brown from last July. We also just made a public webpage about our participant pool, including some guidelines for using it.
Google form inviting people to join the participant pool
Keep the ask simple and relevant
We’ve sent over 30 recruitment emails since last March, and one of our student colleagues Yashu Vats did an analysis of email data to determine which had the highest response rates. Those that did best:
Had active subject lines (e.g. “Help us pick the best thank-you items”)
Were a short time commitment (5 minutes or less)
Had clear calls to action (e.g. “Vote on your favorite”)
Those that asked the participant to respond to the email to set up a time, or complete an activity like a Padlet or Lookback, didn’t do so well.
Recruitment email for a simple survey
Consider unmoderated methods
We tend to prefer moderated methods, and miss Tiny Café terribly since it allowed us to conduct moderated, lightweight research on a weekly basis. But the logistics surrounding scheduling and technology for virtual sessions proved a big barrier for recruitment. Especially when we had no incentives to offer, we struggled to get people to sign up for time slots.
We learned how we can get useful data through unmoderated methods, including first-click tests, preference tests, impression tests, and other well-written surveys. Not always our first choice, but if we hadn’t used these methods we’d have barely heard from our users this past year. And when we kept the responses simple, we could easily get 50 responses within a day.
Survey sent to participant pool to inform language for a campus project on perceptions of COVID safety
Make signing up easy
For moderated sessions, the sign-up process can be a barrier. After trying out and failing with SignUp Genius, Zoom registration, and a “Respond to this email to sign up” option, we now use Calendly for almost all moderated research. It’s easy to use for both researchers and participants. You can customize time slots, sync with Outlook, and add screener questions. Calendly also sends meeting request invites, and we have yet to have a no-show.
Calendly sign-up form for user interviews
Provide an incentive
Some compensation or incentive for participants goes a long way. If you want someone to sign up for a moderated session especially, this can be critical. The incentives don’t have to be big, but they should be something. One of our campus partners offered a bag of swag left over from our IT Summit and had a strong response.
After much delay, we were able to secure gift cards for student participants through an incentive program offered by our campus bookstore. Since being able to offer gift cards (specifically $15 for a 30-minute session), we’ve had a huge increase in response rate. We’re working towards other, non-monetary incentives for the fall semester. In a survey, coffee, tea, and items unique and local to Tucson were popular options. In the guidelines we’ve set up for our participant pool, we now require some sort of incentive if you are asking for more than 30 minutes of a participant’s time.
Ideation board for incentives, completing by the library’s UX team, Business Office, and CATalyst Studios
Don’t stop now
We’ll be going back to the office almost fully in the fall semester, but we’ll continue to take advantage of what we’ve learned about remote research. Having this option strengthens our research program, since it allows us to connect with a diverse and distributed population of participants, including remote students and instructors as well as those who might never visit the library in person. That said, I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t really excited to be back at Tiny Café.
Tiny Café, pre-pandemic, at the UArizona Health Sciences Library
UX@UA emerged in 2017 as a learning community for people doing UX work at the University of Arizona. In a recent presentation at the eduWeb Spring Innovation Showcase, I gave a whirlwind tour of where we’ve been, what we’re learning, and what we’ve accomplished to date.
Breaking down silos and barriers, UX@UA is building UX capacity campus-wide and is committed to making our university a more human-centered organization.
We often talk of human-centered design, but rarely do we talk about how to make our research itself (which guides our design) also human-centered and empathy-driven. In this conversation, I joined Aditi Joshi, Code for America Senior Qualitative Researcher, to talk through human-centered, trauma-informed research that puts wellness and care of human participants front and center.
Being on a small yet mighty UX team means we try to do a lot with a little. To scale up and broaden our impact, my team has spent much of the past year prioritizing ResearchOps and DesignOps. Essentially, it’s about optimizing our “Operations.” Improving the “how” of what we do. Doing it better, faster, and with greater impact.
Since we act like an internal agency and consultancy, much of what we do is teach people how to do UX. We serve a 200-person library organization with just a handful of us, not to mention the 50,000-person university that also regularly approaches us for support.
The demand is too great for us to conduct all the research, write all the content, and curate all the design. We often find ourselves reinventing the wheel as we point clients to various articles, case studies, and the occasional template. So we realized that if we could create a playbook of UX practices, we could reduce our one-off efforts, empower our colleagues, and better build UX expertise campus-wide. So we did.
With the leadership of Bob Liu, our UX designer, we recently launched The UX Cookbook. A public website filled with 7 easy-to-read recipes so far covering:
We have many more recipes in the works, including ones focused on content planning and strategy, information architecture, and web analytics. It’s early days yet, but I’m pretty excited we now have this resource to share UX recipes with people at the University of Arizona and beyond.
