In May was the annual conference for NACVSO, the National Association of County Veterans Service Officers. I’m currently working on a team that’s designing tools for VA-accredited representatives, which includes VSOs, attorneys, and claims agents. This was a great opportunity to speak directly with the hundreds of CVSOs at the conference, a big segment of our audience.
Over the course of a few days we staffed a booth in the exhibit hall and indeed, we learned a lot from this experience. Our methods included:
Unstructured interviews. We’d identified some gaps in our knowledge and topics we wanted to explore. Officers stopped by and we engaged them in conversation about their work, our work, and ideas for building solutions together. This helped us more deeply understand their goals, behaviors, and challenges with current systems and processes.
Preference testing. We had printed prototypes and asked them which of the options they preferred and why. This helped us narrow down our options and in some cases, combine features from multiple options.
Concept testing. We had some ideas, printed on paper, and asked for their impressions and feedback. This helped us learn if we were headed in the right direction.
Talk-back boards. We wrote prompts on a large poster board and invited responses and feedback to the responses.
We gathered over 90 data points, producing insights and recommendations that will guide our work going forward. We also grew our participant panel for future research opportunities. Remote teams don’t often get the chance to immerse themselves in the community in which they serve. It was a worthwhile and unique experience!
My first project at Ad Hoc LLC was an overhaul of a state agency’s website, the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry (LDAF). Check out the website we launched last fall at: ldaf.la.gov. 🎉
Partnering with LDAF stakeholders, we were able to improve task success rates, reduce time on task, and increase user confidence in the website overall. I led research for the project, which included market/competitor analysis, a top tasks survey, card sorting, tree testing, first-click testing, and usability testing (pre- and post). There was also a ton of information architecture and content strategy work.
It comes as no surprise to most that government websites can be hard to use. And getting a chance to improve this website for the people of Louisiana was really rewarding.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
User interviews are a great way to learn about and understand the current user experience. They require asking a lot of questions, so asking the right types of questions matters.
Awhile back, I created a basic training for library employees on how to conduct effective user interviews. I’ve pulled this together as a resource for others.
Don’t lead.
Staying as neutral as possible will ensure more authentic responses from your participants.
Leading question
Non-leading question
Is research funding a big stressor?
What has been causing you stress lately?
Did you come to the library to study?
Why did you come to the library today?
Have you noticed that it’s cold in the library?
What do you notice when you visit the library?
When you said X, did you mean Y?
Can you tell me more about what you meant when you said X?
Get them to talk specifics and stories.
What people say is not always what they do, so try asking them to recollect specific experiences.
General question
Question that invites specifics and stories
How do you usually conduct research?
Can you walk me through your last experience conducting research?
Tell me about your teaching challenges.
Tell me about a time you had a teaching challenge and how you handled it.
How do you tend to do that?
Can you give me an example?
Be encouraging but neutral.
There are no right or wrong answers, and all insights are valuable. Don’t insert your own reactions or ideas. Try to keep your poker face and manage expectations.
Leading
Neutral
That’s a fantastic idea – I love it!
Interesting. Thank you for sharing that.
Yeah, but…
I appreciate your ideas.
We tried that once before, but…
Thank you, this is really helpful for us to hear.
Listen and dive deeper.
As advocates for our libraries and organizations, we are tempted to talk about ourselves and the services we offer. We also might want to share our own experiences. But this can harm the interview, distracting from the focus: learning about the user.
User interviews are not intended as two-way conversations. As the interviewer, you should ask questions, listen to the responses, then ask more questions. If there’s a moment of silence, that’s fine! Avoid jumping in. Be comfortable with seven-second breaks where no one is speaking. Allow the participant time to process their thoughts and share their experiences.
Avoid such comments as:
You probably didn’t know that the library already…
We’ve already heard…
Don’t worry, we’re trying to….
We tried that before but…
Insert “why” and “how” questions to dive deeper.
Interesting. Can you tell me why?
Why is that important to you?
Why did you approach it that way?
Interesting. Can you tell me how?
How did that make you feel?
Why do you think you felt that way?
Why is that important to you?
How do you currently deal with this?
Why does that example come to mind?
Other helpful follow-ups include:
Tell me more about…
Can you expand on that?
Is that what you expected?
Can you give me an example?
What did you find frustrating about that experience?
What might have improved upon that experience?
Do you have another example of…?
If participants don’t think they are helping.
Participants will occasionally express concern that they aren’t being helpful. They might say things like, “I don’t know enough about…” or “this probably isn’t the type of response you’re looking for.” To respond to this, try things like:
We’d like to hear from everyone and your input is really valuable to use. Can you tell me more about…?
This is exactly the sort of information we’d like to hear. Why…?
Don’t worry, I have lots of other questions! If you don’t have more to say about ____, can you instead tell me about…?
If participants ask you questions.
Participants occasionally will ask you questions about the project or related services. It’s probably fine to talk with them about these details at the close of the interview (depending on the project), but you want to avoid distracting your conversation with these details while you’re still in the midst of the interview itself.
If a participant starts asking you questions, try something like:
I can’t answer that right now, because we’d like to hear from you first. But if you still want to know more when we’re done with the interview, I’m happy to share more.
I’m happy to tell you more about X, but first let me ask you…
I hope you find these tips helpful! I’d love to hear more tips or suggestions in the comment sections, as this (like everything) is a work in progress.
