Rebecca Blakiston delivers the keynote presentation for the Michigan Academic Library Association (MiALA) Annual Conference in Saginaw, Michigan. Academic libraries are essential contributors to the higher education mission, supporting student success, faculty research productivity, and community engagement. And as the role of the academic library evolves, we are given countless opportunities to provide value through …

Rebecca Blakiston delivers the keynote presentation and facilitates a workshop at the Web Content for Everyone Symposium at Ferris State University. Free to register for the Ferris State community. Keynote: Designing Inclusive Web Content Our university websites are the primary way we deliver information to students, faculty, and staff. So it’s critical that people of …

Rebecca Blakiston delivers the opening keynote for the Annual Meeting of the Upstate New York Ontario Chapter of the Medical Library Association (UNYOC/MLA). We do our best work when we understand the needs, behaviors, motivations, and challenges of our end users. Empathy is one of our greatest tools for doing this, and empathy is both …

Rebecca Blakiston, America Curl, and Lara Miller present as part of the University of Arizona's IT Summit. Website content is often hidden behind cumbersome menus. How can we better label, organize, and design navigation so users can find what they need? Learn two information architecture techniques for a better user experience: card sorts for creating …

Rebecca Blakiston, Bob Liu, and Lara Miller present a workshop for staff at the University of Arizona. The everyday experience of students and faculty matters. It is critical to the university's long-term success. The field of user experience (UX) provides us with tools to build empathy, expand understanding, and recommend impactful solutions. In this hands-on …

Rebecca delivers a design thinking workshop for staff of the Copley Library at the University of San Diego. Student success is critical to the mission of the university, but the needs and expectations of our students are evolving rapidly. As a library, how might we empower all students to be successful in 2020 and beyond? …

Rebecca Blakiston presents online for ALA eLearning. Individuals visit our library websites for content, so it’s important to ensure our content is clear, concise, and created with our users’ needs in mind. Our content should help users quickly and easily complete tasks and get the answers to their questions on the first try. You’ll learn …

Rebecca Blakiston presents for the CNI Spring 2020 Membership Meeting. 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 …

Rebecca presents virtually as part of the NISO Humanities Roundtable. We design systems so that students and scholars can discover and access content, yet how do we know we are meeting their needs and expectations? How do we know if our language and taxonomies are enhancing or hindering discovery? In this presentation, you will learn …

Rebecca Blakiston presents online for ALA eLearning. Individuals visit our library websites for content, so it’s important to ensure our content is clear, concise, and created with our users’ needs in mind. Our content should help users quickly and easily complete tasks and get the answers to their questions on the first try. You’ll learn …