A free virtual presentation for librarians and library workers.
How do you know that your digital library services are meeting the needs and expectations of your customers? In this talk, you will learn key service design techniques that focus on optimizing every interaction a customer has with the library—from seamless book checkouts to easy event registrations, efficient study room bookings, and simplified access to digital journals. Attendees will learn how to create a more intuitive and cohesive experience across all library touchpoints, fostering a more accessible and responsive environment for the people it serves.
My dog Biscuit enjoying a spring day at Fort Lowell Park in Tucson
I have the pleasure of presenting for the Arizona Parks and Recreation Association this week, and wanted to share my slide deck here (or see slide deck in Google Drive). I introduce human-centered design principles and practical methods to improve services and better meet the needs of visitors.
Some key takeaways:
Human-centered design is about creating public services around the real needs, experiences, and challenges of the people we serve — not around the policies that mandate them, the systems that deliver them, or the staff who provide them.
Gather community feedback on all things at all stages and from all levels, no matter your day-to-day jobs. Start with community needs, get feedback early and often, and then iterate, iterate, iterate.
Get out there to learn what’s working and what’s not:
Solicit feedback from the public through user interviews, impression testing, and preference testing
Run surveys and focus groups if you like, but follow best practices to avoid survey fatigue and groupthink
Observe user behaviors through ethnograph-ish research, usability testing, and wayfinding testing
Do the thing yourself by putting yourself in the user’s shoes
Follow good design principles:
Be welcoming, familiar, and simple to use with few steps
Make it easy for people to complete their goals
Encourage the right behaviors from visitors while keeping it human
Provide help when people need it and have no dead ends
Keep it lightweight and low budget:
Solicit feedback on the fly by intercepting passersby in busy locations
Recruit people in the field and where they are
Run talk-back boards to passively gather feedback on a regular basis
Government agencies are under increased scrutiny at all levels, and must demonstrate their value and impact now more than ever. By incorporating efficient feedback mechanisms into to our everyday work and fostering human-centered cultures within our organizations, we can better meet our public service missions and serve our communities.
Parks and Recreation aims to create spaces, events, and services that positively impact the community. While we often collect feedback through surveys, there are many more ways we can enhance the way we design programs and experiences to truly meet the needs of our visitors. In this interactive session, Rebecca will introduce human-centered design principles and practical methods to improve the services we provide.
The workshop will be held in person in Tucson, Arizona.
Due to sudden and unexpected funding cuts at the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), this program has been cancelled. I hope funding gets restored.
How do you know that your digital library services are meeting the needs and expectations of your customers? In this talk, provided free of charge for library workers in the state of Florida, you will learn key service design techniques that focus on optimizing every interaction a customer has with the library—from seamless book checkouts to easy event registrations, efficient study room bookings, and simplified access to digital journals. Attendees will learn how to create a more intuitive and cohesive experience across all library touchpoints, fostering a more accessible and responsive environment for the people it serves.
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.
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.
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.
