Does your website have content that is complicated, outdated, or irrelevant? Content strategy provides us with a set of principles, tools, and processes to sustain useful, usable, and findable content. In this presentation, learn how to identify content challenges, create content principles and style guides, and establish workflows to support the entire lifecycle of your …

Rebecca presents online as part of the eduWeb Spring Innovation Showcase. Learn how to build community, leverage expertise, break down silos, and foster user-centered thinking and practices campus-wide. In many higher ed institutions, user experience (UX) expertise is scarce and lives in pockets across campus, such as libraries, IT, and online learning, as well as …

Do users struggle to understand content on your library website? People visit our websites to get answers to their questions, but are often overwhelmed with what they find. Fortunately, writing effectively for the web is a craft you can hone. In this presentation, learn tips for writing content that is concise, organized, and created with …

Do you want feedback from your patrons? From surveys and focus groups to journey mapping and usability testing, our users can tell us a lot about what's working well and how we can improve. In this presentation, learn a variety of methods and how they can be conducted safely at a distance, and what we …

Rebecca Blakiston presents as part of a panel, "The workflow librarian: Reaching library users where they are." How do libraries add value for patrons increasingly working outside library-preferred workflows (e.g. searching via Google Scholar), and accessing the library’s collection off-campus? This is a question of profound relevance to all library stakeholders – librarians, publishers, and …

Rebecca presents for UX Wellington. Constraints within the UX process can be a fairly common challenge. Different restrictions such as budget, time, tools, and access to users can lead to new ways of producing lightweight yet impactful work. In this talk, Rebecca will share methods and experiments she has run at the University of Arizona. …

Rebecca Blakiston delivers a keynote talk for the sixth annual UXLibs conference. The conference theme is UX and organizational culture. We know that culture eats strategy for breakfast, and shifting to a user-centered culture can be exhausting work. But organizations are made up of people, and as human-centered thinkers, we’re well positioned to lead the …

Rebecca presents for Florida Library Webinars. Free registration for Florida library staff only. Libraries are often strapped for resources, and are fortunate if they have anyone on staff dedicated to UX research and design. Many of us try to squeeze UX work in between other duties, which can leave us feeling both frustrated and exhausted. …

Rebecca presents at Designing for Digital. Libraries aren’t flush with resources, and UX research often falls to a small team, a team of one, or perhaps no one at all. Barriers appear at every stage: picking a method and designing an effective study (and maybe getting it approved), securing incentives and recruiting enough of the …

Rebecca presents a workshop at Designing for Digital. Library websites tend to have a lot of content. Our homepages are often cluttered, and hidden in the depths of our websites are often outdated, duplicative, and overly complex web pages, many of which are irrelevant to website visitors. Let's learn some tools and techniques to reduce …