It was a privilege to present last week at Service Design in Government, an international community event for anyone involved in designing, delivering, and commissioning public services. I presented with my colleague, Fan Huang, and we discussed ResearchOps in the government sector. Here’s the video recording in Vimeo, or click the image below to watch. A PDF of the slide deck is also below.
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!
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.
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.
Last week, I presented a talk titled, “Fostering a UX Culture Across Campus” at CNI’s Spring Meeting (the Coalition of Networked Information). It was originally going to be in San Diego in late March, but moved online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with talks spread out throughout March, April, and May. The slide deck and full recording are below.
Description of the talk:
User experience (UX) is a multidisciplinary venture that encompasses research, design, content, architecture, engineering, and systems. At the University of Arizona, an informal community of practice emerged in 2017 called “UX@UA” to support cross-departmental learning and sharing of resources. This community now includes over 400 students, faculty, and staff who are studying, teaching, and doing UX. Members of the UX@UA leadership team are from the Libraries, Department of English, Eller College of Management, and Digital Learning. In addition to monthly meetup events for sharing knowledge and networking, the group is supporting campus initiatives such as lightweight user testing through a “Tiny Cafe,” a shared participant pool, a drop-in UX consulting hour, a toolkit of reusable templates, and a UX/UI testing zone in the library. In this talk, you will learn how we are building capacity, breaking down silos, and fostering user-centered thinking and practices campus-wide.
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!
I’ve written and taught on the topic of web content for a number of years. And this past year, I’ve been thinking a lot about how our content decisions impact the accessibility and inclusivity of our websites.
The goal of this presentation was to cover the key principles to creating content that is useful, usable, and accessible to all. I discuss techniques including plain language, heading structure, content prioritization, meaningful links, alternative text, and more. My 5 tips for better, more inclusive web content are:
Know your audience. Create content with your readers in mind.
Keep it focused and simple. Reduce cognitive load with straightforward and succinct content.
Focus on clarity. Strive for immediate comprehension.
Organize and structure. Your content flow should be intentional, point-of-need, and easy to skim.
Make it readable. Be intentional with font choice, white space, and formatting.
Big thanks to Ferris State for inviting me, and for recording and captioning the presentation!
