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:
How might we…
- Advance what people care about?
- Address what’s frustrating people?
- Collaborate with people?
- Leverage our systems?
I’ve grouped and compiled the 86 responses in hopes they’ll provide some inspiration for others. The patterns that emerged:
- 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!