I had the privilege of delivering the keynote presentation at this year’s Michigan Academic Library Association (MiALA) Annual Conference. I had been preparing this talk for a few months. I knew I would talk about library value (the theme for the conference) and how user experience practices could help libraries build upon and expand their impact.
I thought I’d share a couple images from my process in putting this together. I began by generating ideas around value we provide to different target audiences: learners, instructors, researchers, community, and campus.
Initial idea generation and mind mapping
I started working through my slidedeck, then paused to outline what I was trying to do. This was helpful in organizing my ideas and noticing gaps.
Visual outline of the presentation
Here’s my final slidedeck.
Some of my key messages:
The mission of academic libraries is tremendous, so we are challenged to focus on what matters most.
We should focus where our organizational goals and our user needs overlap.
We can use design thinking as a guiding framework: understand, create, validate.
We can better understand our users and make user-centered decisions if continually build our capacity for cognitive empathy.
While building understanding, we should practice cultural humility and realize we will never be experts of another’s experience, only our own.
There are many emerging ways to advance student success by supporting inquiry and learning in a rapidly changing world. We can focus in on some of the things that matter most to students, such as:
belonging
health
financial stability
job preparation
There are also ways to excel researcher productivity by supporting creative endeavour, scholarly communication, and the global academic community. We can focus on what matters most to scholars, such as:
expertise
research data
publishing
For members of our community, we can support social, cultural, and economic impact. We can focus on things like:
lifelong learning
preparing youth
local economy
local partnerships
Overall, I really enjoyed this project and hope people enjoyed the talk.
If I were to do it again, I would find a way to incorporate empathy and understanding towards ourselves, both personally and as organizations. It can be overwhelming to think of all the possibilities of what academic libraries could be doing, and we need to be mindful of our own barriers and challenges as well as those of our end users.
Also, MiALA was a blast. Great conference. I learned a lot.
When the UX team moved out of the technology department to be housed centrally in administration, I knew we’d expand our scope to include projects related to physical space. I didn’t know that for two weeks at the end of the fall semester, I’d be immersed in a furniture study to quickly gather feedback from students on dozens of furniture options. It was a new thing for the UX team. It was interesting. And I thought I’d share what we did.
Preliminary user interviews about furniture in spring 2018 (that’s me on the left)
Context
We’re undergoing a massive, multi-million dollar renovation to our Main and Science-Engineering Libraries. Part of the renovation includes new furniture for our ground floors. In early November, 2018, we received dozens of chairs, a few tables, and a couple pieces of lounge furniture to pilot for a few weeks. They were placed throughout the Main Library ground floor, with tags identifying them.
We were given a quick timeline to gather as much feedback as we could from students to guide decisions. The UX team (3 of us) worked with our new assessment librarian, Lara Miller, and staff from access services, John Miller-Wells and Michael Principe.
Methods
Michael and John created a survey with Qualtrics that people could take online or fill out in person. They have student workers dedicated to data collection who collected observational data (primarily counts of furniture usage) and transcribed the print survey results.
Survey we provided in person and online
Lara and the UX team conducted more qualitative observations, and did some informal interviews with people using the furniture.
We placed stock photos that the companies gave us (just a selection of some of the furniture) on boards in the space and asked people to mark their favorites with sticky notes. Realizing quickly that this did little to tell us why pieces were marked, we asked participants to also describe the furniture in a few words.
Stock photos with instructions for passersby to vote on their favorites and describe them
Getting close to the end of the pilot, we realized we didn’t have as much feedback as we wanted on particular choices, such as the laptop tables. We also wanted to compare some specific stools and specific chairs side-by-side.
To get this feedback, we posted photos of the pilot furniture on a large whiteboard and then placed the actual furniture nearby. We asked participants to mark their favorites with green sticky dots and their least favorites with red sticky dots. (We since realized this would be an issue for colorblind users, so in future might use something like stars and sad faces instead).
Pilot furniture placed around a whiteboard where students could provide feedback
Limitations
We were short on time, it was near the end of the semester, and we had a lot of furniture to get feedback on. The stock photos also didn’t match the pilot furniture exactly.
Feedback on popular stock photos – we didn’t actually have this furniture as part of the pilot
It’s hard to get authentic feedback on this type of thing. Most of the data we collected was attitudinal rather than behavioral. And if we really want to make the best decisions for our students, we should know what they do not just what they think. The best way to discover how students actually use the furniture and what they prefer might be an ethnographic study, but we didn’t have time or resources for that.
A significant issue with most of our methods is that students could vote on a chair for aesthetic reasons (color, shape) when they haven’t actually used it in any real capacity. So a chair could score highly because it’s attractive but not particularly functional, especially for long periods of study.
The decision making process at the end of the day was also unclear, as it’s a negotiation between the library project team, the architects, and the vendors. We can provide the data we collected, but then it’s essentially out of our hands.
Findings
We ended up with 283 completed surveys, 606 sticky notes on the stock photos, and 573 sticky dots on the whiteboards (we removed the stickies as we went so the boards wouldn’t get overwhelmed). We also had 13 days worth of usage data and a handful of notes from qualitative observations.
While we had a couple of hundred survey results, since each survey only referred to a single piece of furniture it was hard to make any conclusions (just 0-5 pieces of feedback per piece). We found that the comparative data was much more useful, and in retrospect would have done more of this from the get go.
We put together all the data and in December were able to present a selection of furniture we recommended and didn’t recommend for purchase.
In the chairs category, most of the recommendations were adjustable, on wheels, with arms, and with fabric seats. For stools, the ability to adjust up and down for people of different heights was especially important. Those chairs we didn’t recommend tended to have hard plastic seats or metal arms, be non-adjustable, or be less comfortable for longer term use.
Stools and chairs comparison – results of preference voting
The winning laptop tables had larger surfaces (to fit a laptop and a mouse/notebook), felt sturdier, and the legs could fit under a variety of chairs or tables.
Laptop table comparison – results of preference voting
Overall, we didn’t find anything groundbreaking in the data. But we do now have some solid recommendations to share with the powers that be. And we did learn a lot just through the process, which was in many ways an experiment for us:
how to gather data on people’s attitudes around furniture
how to act quickly and iterate on our process
it’s possible to gather a bunch of data in a short, focused amount of time
a mixed methods approach works best for this type of thing (as it does for most things!)
I’ve taught Writing for the Web for Library Juice Academy for several years, the last time being this past March 2018. And I’m so pleased that the fabulous Heidi Burkhardt will be adapting it and teaching it in the future. My colleague Nicole Capdarest-Arest and I co-created this course back in 2014, and it’s been so much fun to teach.
So now seemed like a good time to share the lectures (I’m also sharing lectures from my other course on Usability Testing).
Much of the content is also covered in my book on writing effectively. Feel free to use and adapt, and I hope you enjoy!
I’ve taught Do-it-Yourself Usability Testing for Library Juice Academy for the past four years. I’m stepping back from teaching due to other commitments, so thought it would be a good time to share my lectures publicly. These were last updated about a year ago.
Hope these prove useful even outside the context of the course. Much of the course content is also reflected in my usability testing guide from 2014. Feel free to use, adapt, and share these videos!
At the University of Arizona Libraries, we’re replacing Millennium and Summon with Alma and Primo later this month as our library services platform and primary discovery tool. Needless to say, it’s a critical piece of the library’s experience. It’s the main way people find library materials (both digital and print), access full text, request holds, and manage their accounts. So checking and improving its usability is key.
The team
The focus of our (small but mighty) UX team the past couple months has been Primo. It’s critical, so we were all in.
We hired a grad student intern from the School of Information, Louis Migliazza, who focused his summer internship on Primo usability. That was awesome. Student worker Alex Franz and content and usability specialist Cameron Wiles took turns pairing with Louis for the testing.
We also met weekly for an hour with Erik Radio, our metadata librarian and product owner for Primo. He helped us come up with solutions and worked on the backend to make improvements, contacting Ex Libris when needed.
And we met weekly with the broader Primo implementation and discovery teams, which included stakeholders from throughout the library and were led by our fearless project manager, Joey Longo. At these meetings, we regularly shared our findings and gathered feedback on our plans to address them.
The methods
Louis and Erik’s leadership over the past 6 weeks made it possible for us to conduct a ton of usability testing and make significant customizations to the interface. Building on preliminary research and testing we’d started earlier in the spring, we ultimately tested 22 tasks with 91 participants.
We used Tiny Café (our pop-up food/drink station in our Main Library lobby) to recruit passersby for testing, who were by and large undergraduate and graduate students. We had a handful of library staff stopping by, too. We did this on Tuesdays and Wednesdays for two hour blocks (4 hours a week total). Ultimately, we held 27 hours of Tiny Café, intercepting 84 passersby.
Tiny Café
We’d usually test 2 or 3 tasks per participant. And the tasks changed nearly every week as we learned what we needed to learn, made adjustments to the interface, tested again, and/or moved on to the next tasks we needed to test.
We also recruited faculty with help from our liaison librarians. The majority of those sessions were lengthier, moderated, remote tests using Zoom.
All told, participants included 36 undergrads, 31 grad students, 7 faculty, 7 library staff, and 10 community users.
Findings
Searching and filtering
Participants were 100% successful at:
Finding a specific item by title
Searching for journals by topic or title
Renewing an item
One grad student said, “Looks pretty intuitive, pretty easy to navigate.” And one undergraduate said, “I think it’s easy to find what you’re looking for.”
Original Primo basic search interface, where participants would start their search
They were mostly successful at using filters, specifically:
Using facets to narrow results (84% success)
Finding an item at a specific library (83% success)
Some of those who weren’t successful would only use the search box to narrow their results, avoiding filters entirely. Or they would skim through their results to try and find an item like what we were describing. (In our scenarios, we intentionally didn’t ask them to “use the filters” to avoid leading them in that direction. Rather, we asked them to “narrow your results to only books from the last ten years” and “find a book that’s in the Health Sciences Library.”) That said, we did make a number of changes to our filters along the way (described later on), hopefully making them a bit more useful.
Original Primo search results page, without customizations
Signing in
We observed some issues with signing in, too. Only 83% of people successfully signed in to see the due dates of checked out items. To address this, we changed the language in the top-right utility navigation from “Guest” to “Sign in/account.” We also removed the word “English” along with the language options, which caused confusion (and disappointment, since Spanish wasn’t an option and we’re a Hispanic-serving institution).
Customized utility navigation
Saving items
Interestingly, only 2 of 8 students successfully saved an item to their account. But then 4 faculty and PhD students were successful on first attempt. This might tell us that undergrads don’t tend to think of or use this feature. It doesn’t fit with their mental model when it comes to saving articles.
When asked, they said they would use other methods outside the tool, such as bookmarking the URL or emailing themselves. We didn’t make any changes to the interface based on this, but found it interesting.
Only faculty and PhD students were successful in using the pin icon to save their results
Requesting items
The most challenging task was requesting a hold. Only 40% of participants were successful. This is because you have to be signed into Primo in order to see the “Request” link. If you’re not signed in, the option doesn’t appear. We ran a subsequent test where we were already signed in, and 100% of participants were successful.
By default, Primo has a yellow bar that says “Sign-in for more options,” but people didn’t notice this most of the time. Especially since it’s in the “View it” section of the records, and people tend to be looking near the “Find it” section.
“View It” and “Find It” sections of Primo item records, without customizations
We found it problematic that the interlibrary loan option appears when not signed in, but the hold option does not. In contrast to requesting a hold, 90% of participants were successful in requesting an interlibrary loan, using the link: “Borrow this item from another library.” By requiring users sign in, the interface essentially hides functionality from the user, causing a significant usability issue.
Ideally, we think, the “Request” link should always appear and upon click, the user is prompted to sign in. (This is how our current catalog works). But with this not being possible, the only thing we could really do is customize the message. So we changed it to say: “Want to place a hold? Sign in.”
Custom text to indicate people need to sign in to place holds
User impressions of usability
A few weeks into our testing, we decided to add on a System Usability Scale survey after each session to gather overall impressions in a more systematic way. Of the 32 people who filled it out:
89% thought various functions were well integrated
84% would use Primo frequently
83% thought most people would learn to use Primo very quickly
78% think Primo is easy to use
70% were very confident using Primo
Needless to say, we were pretty happy with these numbers.
Other customizations
Changing terminology
We found that some of the default terminology wasn’t ideal. For example, one grad student said, “Loans? I think about money…I just don’t like the word ‘loans.’”
Here are a few terms we updated:
Item in place > In library
Full text not available > Available to request
Fetch item > Find a specific item
Expand my results > Include results beyond UA Libraries
Loans > Checked-out items
Updating the homepage search box
To mimic existing Summon and Catalog options while focusing on the most common search behavior, we:
Created drop-down options for title, author, and call number
Put an Advanced search link in the bottom right
Added buttons to take users to the most common alternate starting points: See all databases and Find a journal
Simplified homepage search box
Removing less helpful or redundant elements
To make things as intuitive as possible, we:
Removed the vendor product name
Removed the sign-in banner for users on campus
Removed redundant title attributes from the tile menu
Removed Personalize option (redundant with subject filters)
Reduced and re-ordered the Send to options
Customized “Send to” options and ordering
Making search results and filters more intuitive
To reduce cognitive load, we:
Moved filters from the right to the left
Re-ordered filters so that the most-used options are at the top
Changed “Availability” to “Show only” as a filter category
Customized the icons to be more consistent and recognizable
Removed filters that were confusing, less useful (e.g. “Call number range”), or redundant (e.g. “Location” in favor of “Library”)
Reduced number of items displaying by default underneath each filter category
A preview of our filter customizations
Customized icons for book, article, and multiple versions
Putting content at point of need
To help users along, we:
Added a Locate button to print records that takes people to the call number guide
Put searching tips below the Advanced search option as well as the Library search landing page
Added suggested librarians for when people search particular disciplines
Added a link to WorldCat above the search box
Customized primary (tile) menu
Next steps
This is a huge change for our users, but we’re feeling pretty good about where we’re at. We did a lot of testing and a lot of tweaking, and participants were overall successful at completing the primary tasks we’d identified.
We go live on July 20(ish), and are sure to discover more UX concerns once we have people using the system in their daily lives.
We’ll continue to gather feedback and make adjustments as needed.
Perhaps one undergraduate said it best: “I think I liked the old interface better because I’m comfortable with it…I’m sure once I get used to [Primo], it will be ok.”
Last fall, I was asked to help lead an ambitious, library-wide project. It aimed to reimagine our strategic planning process through an inclusive, human-centered, design thinking approach. Having just moved into our library administration (from our technology team), it was a perfect opportunity to foster and support UX thinking across the organization.
With outside consultant Elatia Abate to guide us, over 117 library staff worked in teams to gather information, empathize with our end users, and iterate on solutions to grand “How might we…?” challenges. Library staff got to practice conducting user interviews, synthesizing findings, creating personas, and prototyping ideas. They also worked together with staff from other departments, building trust and long-lasting relationships.
I presented our work through a hands-on workshop at this year’s Designing for Digital back in March. Then in May, the University of Arizona Libraries unveiled one of the outcomes from this project: our new strategic map.
Slides from the March presentation, titled “Design Thinking for the Masses: Creating a Culture of Empathy Across a Library Organization”:
I had the privilege of presenting as part of an online panel last October with my brilliant colleagues, Emily Daly from Duke University and Josh Boyer from NCSU. We talked some shop and had a lot of fun. Check out the full recording if you’re interested in learning more about what it’s like to do UX work in large academic libraries.
This session was organized by the University Libraries Section (ULS) of the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL). The first session was pretty popular, so we hosted a “part two” in February where we dived into more details and examples of our work. Here it is for those of you who missed it!
I presented a webinar for LibUX last week that was super fun. I talked about knowing your readers, organizing your content, and writing with clarity.
Check out the full recording:
At Designing for Digital last month, I presented a 4-hour workshop on Building Your Content Strategy Toolkit. I appreciated hearing about other librarian’s content challenges, brainstorming over how to tackle them, and learning from each other throughout the day.
I’ve posted my slidedeck below and made it available along with associated activities at tinyurl.com/d4dcontent.
From the description:
Do you struggle with web content that is complicated, outdated, or irrelevant? In this workshop, learn how to identify content challenges, define messaging, create standards and style guides, and establish workflows to keep things going once a project is over. Whether you’re in the midst of a web project or just trying to get your feet wet, this workshop is for you.
