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!
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.
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!
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.
Forms are prevalent across the web, yet so many are poorly designed. They can quickly become a source of frustration.
Last year, Ann Shivers-McNair and I bonded over our passion for form content and design. So we developed a presentation on making better forms for people, presented at edUi last October.
Forms have been on my mind a lot recently, and I thought it would be useful to unpack the presentation into some of the key principles and considerations for easy reference. And I’ve added and slightly revised a couple based on other things I’m learning. So here goes.
3 key principles
Simplicity. Avoid the complicated and unnecessary.
Avoid instructions on how to fill out the form
Make sure every field serves a purpose
Get rid of any unnecessary fields (e.g. phone number, fax number, birthdate)
Never require a field if you don’t really need it
Inclusivity. Create forms for everyone.
Avoid jargon
Avoid legalese
Write like you talk
Be inclusive in your options
Readability. Use logical sequencing and follow conventions.
Be succinct
Place field labels above the field
Left justify, rag right
Allow for lots of white space
Use sentence case
Small but mighty considerations
Form names. Make it clear what you’re doing.
Start with a precise action verb (e.g. “Apply,” “Request”)
Use an action verb in the link to the form, too (e.g. “RSVP for event”)
Avoid too many nouns in a row
Optional vs. required fields. Make them intuitive to recognize. (Be aware these conventions are a moving target and may depend upon audience).
Most fields should be required
Indicate which fields are optional by saying optional
Be consistent in how you indicate required vs. optional fields
Asterisks are a common convention to mean “required”
Name fields. Make them inclusive.
Don’t limit character length (or if you must limit, make that limit 70 characters for full name or 50 characters for first name or last name)
Don’t force first-letter capitalization (e.g. charley)
Don’t prevent capitalization of a second name or within a name (e.g. Bonnie Jean; McClelland)
Allow hyphens in names (e.g. Sykes-Casavant)
Use one “Full name” field over separate “First name” and “Last name” field, unless it’s really necessary
Gender fields. Make them inclusive.
Avoid binary gender selectors
Allow write-in responses
Make it optional (when possible)
Selectors. Give clear options.
Pick a thoughtful default that’s either the most common answer or the first in a logical sequence
Put the most common options at the top, and for longer lists, use alphabetical sequencing
Use the right selector for the information you are soliciting (e.g. dropdowns, radio buttons, check boxes)
Question scope. Ask one question at a time.
Don’t combine multiple questions into one
Isolate the pieces of information you are asking for
Use logic to order questions that follow from previous information
Contextual help. Provide helpful hints at the appropriate time. (Be aware these conventions are a moving target and may depend on audience).
Use field labels to describe the field, and place them above the field
Use help text to provide an explanation or further information
Maybe use placeholder text to suggest the type of content you expect
Be cautious with placeholder text, and don’t use it as a substitute for field labels or help text
Feedback messages. Provide informative messages at the right time.
Make it clear when there are errors
Make it clear what any errors are
Don’t stress users out with error messages before it’s necessary
In confirmation messages, make it clear what the user just did and what to expect next
The slidedeck
Here’s the slidedeck that these tips were based on. It includes a few more details and a whole bunch of examples.
Hope you find this helpful! Please share comments on other things I should add.
