Very happy attendees at the conference reception with ER&L
Last week was Designing for Digital, a conference focused around UX work in libraries. the first time I’ve been in Austin since 2019. Also the first time I’ve been surrounded by UX-minded librarians since UXLibs last year. Always a treat!
I delivered two presentations so wanted to share the slide decks here. Recordings are available to those who registered:
Other highlights were a talk on form design by Robin Camille Davis and Erik Olson and the closing keynote on identity literacy by Michael brown. Also connecting with Frank Sweis who I knew through Weave and Tammy Wolf who I hadn’t seen in person for years, and making new connections Nora Burmeister and Lily De La Fuente among others. Not to mention some pretty legendary battledecks and karaoke nights.
Til next time, Austin!
Denise, Ashley, Rebecca, Josh, Robin, and Erik at the Texas Capitol
At the close of my UXLibs keynote earlier this year, I asked the audience to share their ideas on building UX maturity at their library organizations. The specific prompt was:
Build UX knowledge and make it visible. Let’s hold workshops, form learning communities, bring senior staff and colleagues along, advocate, and sell by doing.
Break down silos. Let’s collaborate across departments, bring people together, and foster relationships with our colleagues.
Do some lightweight UX. Let’s do small things often and celebrate small wins; let’s create pop-up stations and cafés, install graffiti walls and talk-back boards, and do rapid prototyping and ideation.
Put UX to work. Let’s unpack pain points and frustrations, identify specific projects, get creative, and get to work.
Use UX on ourselves. Let’s harness our UX skills to explore problems, listen, ideate, and analyze what we find out.
Look beyond our own libraries. Let’s get inspiration from other libraries, other departments, and other organizations.
Bend the rules and get creative. When other things fail, maybe we can carve our own paths, breakout from the predictable, or just ask for permission later.
Use food and drink to recruit. Let’s build relationships and recruit others with food and beverages. [This one might seem silly or trivial, but some of the best ideas can emerge over a cup of tea or a pint].
Improve documentation and process. Let’s improve efficiency by creating templates and repositories and speeding up our processes.
Other ideas? Successes to share? Post them in the comments!
It’s been a pleasure serving as Weave’s Editor-in-Chief the past four years! Weave: Journal of Library User Experience remains the only international, peer-reviewed, open access publication dedicated to user experience in libraries.
I worked with a stellar team, and wanted to share some of our accomplishments:
Grew our staff to include new editors and editorial board members, and created a sustainable structure for ongoing appointments (job descriptions, term lengths, onboarding process). See the latest editorial team.
Created an international advisory team of UXers working in libraries.
Hosted our first Author Chats and Town Halls.
Were the very first of Michigan Publishing’s journals to migrate to a new publishing platform (Janeway) for both our publications and website.
Became a CLIR Affiliate, giving us a sustainable financial home.
Congrats and thanks to the team that made all this possible! 🎉
Since I no longer work in libraries, I stepped down this summer. Through an internal recruitment process, Scott Young was appointed as my successor. Scott has been an author, peer reviewer, and editor for Weave, and brings depth of expertise in user experience research and assessment. He serves as the User Experience and Assessment Librarian at Montana State University. Biggest congrats to Scott on his appointment. The journal is in good hands.
I’ll continue to be an avid Weave supporter and reader. Join me and sign up to get issue announcements: http://eepurl.com/hEDAhD.
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.
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
We’ve been using personas at the University of Arizona Libraries for a good while as design and communication tools for different projects. I’ve learned a lot from our different attempts at persona development, so wanted to share my learnings here. In particular, how we’ve collaboratively created personas, leading to buy-in and shared ownership across the organization.
Previous personas
I believe it was 2011 when we first tinkered in persona development. But we made several missteps on our first attempt. We:
based them on assumptions (rather than research)
created them in isolation (by the 4-person Website Steering Group of the time)
used stock photos and stereotypes
They were pretty silly and simplistic, and didn’t really help us build empathy for our users. I remember the donor persona, in particular, was inspired by Daddy Warbucks and became more of a joke than an actual tool for our conversations.
In 2014, we gave it another go. This time, we created personas specific to our Website Redux project where we were re-designing the digital user experience. We based them on data, including web analytics, usability testing, and surveys. We shared them with the library at a “Meet Our Personas” open house event.
“Meet Our Personas” event
These became much more useful, particularly as we incorporated them into the Redux project. We used them in:
User stories, the framework for all web development work (e.g. “Cheyenne wants to reserve a room from her smart phone.”)
Content planning, as we associated every new or revised web page with particular persona(s)
Project updates, as we held monthly brown bags and used them as a basis for much of our work
We also distinguished between our primary and secondary audiences. We had 4 primary personas:
Cheyenne, the freshman
Brandon, the PhD student
Emily, the graduate student and teaching assistant
Renee, the faculty member
And 3 secondary personas:
Donald, the potential donor
Elle, the library staff member
Craig, the community user
Snapshot of personas from 2014 website project
2018 Persona Project
Context
Come 2018, a number of things had changed. Our content strategist who provided leadership in persona development, Shoshana Mayden, left for another position on campus. We had hired a new content strategist, Kenya Johnson, who also played the role of marketing and communications manager. I had moved out of the technology unit into our administration, providing vision for our UX work library-wide. We also realized that hey, it’s 2014, and Cheyenne the freshman is graduating.
Most of the library staff were familiar with personas. In addition to having used the 2014 personas for several years in the context of our website, we’d also had a design thinking project in late 2017 that gave library employees the experience of creating their own student and faculty personas. This design thinking project also gave us a wealth of new user research data.
So in spring 2018, Kenya and I started working on developing new personas that could be used library-wide.
Intention
We wanted the new personas to be a bit different. We wanted them to:
Be useful and adaptable for different project needs
Be inclusive and diverse
Avoid stereotyping
We identified the purpose of personas as design and communication tools that:
consider the users’ perspective and experience, not ours
help us understand our audience
encourage us to question our assumptions
ensure we focus on what matters to people and has the mostimpact
provide a useful foundation and starting point for any project
We wanted personas to help us:
describe and empathize with our target audience
get on the same page about who we are designing for
guide decisions related to services, products, content, design, and more
Workshops
We invited all library staff to attend collaborative workshops to build our personas. We held multiple workshops at different times to allow people to attend no matter their work schedule.
We ultimately had 35 attendees including people from varied departments including technology, access services, research and learning, health sciences, and marketing. In the first 1-hour workshop, we:
reviewed design thinking personas
conducted mock user interviews
identified behaviors, motivations, and constraints of particular user types
Second persona workshop
In the second 2-hour workshop, we:
created teams; created goals, behaviors, constraints for 5 personas
identified names, quotes, and photos for personas
presented personas to the larger group in a creative way
Our new personas
Final persona for Nate the navigator
Informed by the outcomes of the workshop, we created the following primary personas:
Nate the navigator
Sam the scholar
Isaiah the instructor
Linda the learner
And secondary personas:
Esmeralda the explorer
Evan the employee
One of the main shifts from our previous set of personas was that these were structured around purpose rather than status. We had discovered over the past few years that many of our services weren’t geared specifically to a demographic such as undergraduates, graduate students, or faculty members. Rather, they were geared towards an audience based on their purpose.
Our research services serve all researchers, whether they are faculty, staff, students, or visiting scholars. Our instructional services serve all instructors, whether they are teaching assistants, faculty, or adjunct faculty.
When consulting with staff on projects, such as research support services, we’d often hear things like, “Well, it could be a PhD student or a faculty member, or maybe even an undergraduate.” So we’d often end up with three or four personas listed as an audience for a service, which was less helpful. So we shifted from thinking about students vs. faculty members and started thinking about learners vs. scholars. And recognized that depending on context, an individual could play the role of different persona identities throughout their experience with the library. Someone might be working on a class assignment in the morning, teaching a course in the afternoon, and navigating library spaces in the evening. We’ve found this to be a much more helpful framing.
Final persona for Sam the scholar
Rollout and training
Kenya and I presented the final personas to our library leadership team, encouraging them to use them in upcoming projects and to share them with staff. We also provided hands-on training to departments upon their request. In one-hour training sessions, we presented the personas and had people break into small groups. They worked through a Project Starter where they came up with a project (usually a real one), identified their primary persona(s), adapted them as needed, and thought through how the persona would help guide their design and communication decisions.
We were hopeful that by developing the personas collaboratively and through the hands-on training sessions, people across the library will find them useful in their daily work.
Adoption and adaption
Since launching the personas, they’ve proved helpful for a variety of projects, including the design of new websites, tutorials, and services. The staff who attended the workshops are also now equipped to develop personas whenever they find them useful.
I’ve probably found our new personas most useful as a starting point. Project teams will take one of the personas and adapt it to best fit their purposes. Since these were created in Powerpoint, they are easy to update to fit a particular need. By providing complete personas as well as adaptable template, we’re helping empower staff to place users at the center of their projects, informing their conversations and their decision making.
Over the past several months, our UX team has been preparing for updates to our primary, global drop-down menus on the library’s main website. We started this project in anticipation of significant building renovations and the launch of associated new services to happen in 2020 (see CATalyst Studios). We realized that our existing menu structure didn’t allow for this evolution in our services.
We still have some work to do to before launching our new menus, but in October, I presented with two colleagues, America Curl and Lara Miller, on our progress to date. This was part of the University of Arizona’s IT Summit.
In this talk, we covered our user-centered and content-focused process, with our main techniques being card sorting and tree testing. We’ve also done some prototype testing and first-click testing. Hope you enjoy!
