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.
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.
At Internet Librarian this week, I was thrilled to present on it alongside David Lee King. It was a lot of fun – we talked about why web writing matters, why we’re not so good at it, and how we can do it a bit better. Sadly our third panelist, Elaine Meyer, wasn’t able to attend at the last minute, but I think David did her justice in presenting her content.
Thanks for everyone who came out and participated. It’s cool to see so many people interested in creating better experiences through better content. I had a blast. Here’s my slide deck:
Yesterday, I presented a webinar sponsored by the Arizona State Library, Archives, and Public Records. They organize professional development for library workers across the state. This was a great opportunity to share an overview of how to conduct usability testing easily and on a budget.
We had a few technical issues at the start, and some of my slides came out funky or incomplete, but other than that I think it went well. Webinar recording (1 hour)
Earlier this year, I helped organize the UX Certificate program for Library Juice Academy. It’s 6 courses, completely online, with each course lasting 4 weeks. I’d previously been teaching the Do-It-Yourself Usability Testing, which was super fun & interesting, so I was happy to add a couple more, and also bring in some colleagues from elsewhere to contribute.
I was lucky to get others on board to help with the curriculum and the teaching:
Nicole Capdarest-Arest, Emerging Technologies Librarian at the Arizona Health Sciences Library. She co-teaches Writing for the Web.
It’s great to see so many familiar faces in these classes – students taking the entire program. I also see some new faces in each course, which is also fun. We have a mix of students from academic, community college, and public libraries as well as some who are working towards their MLS or who are just seeking some continuing education.
We have in the final month of teaching right now, wrapping it up with Content Strategy for the Web. I am possibly most excited about this course, because content strategy has been on my mind for a long time and I want to share the love. I published an article earlier this year, Developing a Content Strategy for an Academic Library Website, and am currently right in the middle of a search for a one-year Web Content Strategist for our library. I’ve been de facto content strategist, but if we could have someone whose whole job is dedicated to this type of work, that would be awesome. I think we could so some really innovate stuff with our site. And we have some great candidates, which is really exciting. This position has been funded for 12 months, but I am thinking we might be able to justify having a permanent line in this role, depending how the year goes and what we accomplish. We shall see!
