ux at york: starting small and scaling up (#nclxux)

starting small and scaling up

UX at York

UXLibs I

Summer UX

PGRUX

Understanding Academics

UX Space

@ned_potter#nclxux

UXLibs IThe adventure begins atthe first User Experience in Libraries Conference, 2015

We sent 5 staff from different teams, including Academic Liaison, Customer Services, and Comms


3 days of intense UXing



We came away with a lot but uppermost in our minds were the 5 main ethnographic methods



We were enthused, excited, we believed in UX; but it was hard to shake the feeling of, oh god what do we DO though?

We came away with a lot but uppermost in our minds were the 5 main ethnographic methods



We kept coming back to the 5 main ethnographic methods, we wanted to try them out





So we got in a UX Intern, Emma Gray







Which led to our first project…






Summer UX

Summer UX

2 month project led from within Academic Liaison Fieldwork conducted by our UX Intern

What can we learn from 5 ethnographic techniques?

The format

The aims

Create a UX Toolkit for future projects

Focus on PGRs and PGTs

Observations

Touchstone Tours

Cognitive Maps

Love & Break-up Letters

Unstructured Interviews

(TOP TIP: Don’t underestimate the importance of Cognitive Map coding)

Emma started off with Observation and Behavioural Mapping to familiarise herself the library and our users. Then we recruited students – 25 in total – who each took her in a Touchstone Tour, drew a Cognitive Map of the Library, and this was used as the foundation of the Unstructured Interview. At the end the students wrote a Love Letter or a Break-up Letter to a library service. Each session took around an hour.

Emma started off with Observation and Behavioural Mapping to familiarise herself the library and our users. Then we recruited students – 25 in total – who each took her in a Touchstone Tour, drew a Cognitive Map of the Library, and this was used as the foundation of the Unstructured Interview. At the end the students wrote a Love Letter or a Break-up Letter to a library service. Each session took around an hour.

Emma was with us for 125 hours so the work conformed to the 4:1 ratio of analysis-to-fieldwork – she spent 25 hours with students, and around 100 hours preparing, processing, analysing, writing up the data and recommending changes.

Emma also created a UX Toolkit to help us with future projects. This was a Google Drive folder which included, for each technique: examples, consent forms, her experiences and recommendations, what worked and what didn’t, and further reading she recommended or found particularly useful.

If you’re interested click here to see the structured introduction we put together to introduce our interns to Library UX – this contains presentations, blogposts, articles, and books.

https://www.ned-potter.com/ux-in-libraries-resource-list/



PGRUXA second UX intern for

PGR only

Targeted departments

Smaller pool

Love & Break-up Letters

Unstructured Interviews

Cognitive Maps

The second project was more stripped down. We employed Oliver Ramirez as our UX Intern over a period of around three months.

PGRUX focused only on Postgraduate Researchers. We targeted the Departments they came from (choosing Depts with the most and least satisfied students based on the PRES) and used fewer ethnographic techniques with them.

The analysis-to-fieldwork ratio here was more like 6:1.

Service tweaks

Service tweaks

We added a hot water drinking tap

We put some whiteboards in a new PGR space to help foster community

One area of the library used to close at 10pm which put people off using it – we made it 24hrs access in line with the rest of the building.

We changed various aspects of YorSearch, the Library Catalogue

This included the terminology we used to describe materials available online and in the library, and displaying classmarks in the search results screen rather than only when people clicked on an item

We gave students blankets to use in our main campus library, and the one in Kings Manor in the centre of the City, and the one in York Minster. These latter buildings are old (c. 500 years and c. 1400 years respectively) – so they get quite chilly.

The blankets have been incredibly popular! If you can add blankets to your library, do…

We’ve also added a Graffiti Wall which has proved so popular all other feedback mechanisms have tailed off

UNDERSTANDINGACADEMICS

A huge up-scaling for Academic Liaison doing the fieldwork

100 academics involved

1 month prep, 2 months fieldwork, 6 weeks data processing, 2 weeks assigning of themes, several months writing up and designing changes

Cognitive Maps

Semi-structured Interviews

This project was by far the biggest we’ve done.

We asked academics to draw cognitive maps that were not geographical but process based: a map of their process for creating a new module, or running a research project.

After they’d drawn the maps they talked us through their process – this usually took around 15 minutes and was hugely revealing. That then formed the basis of the interview which followed.

We learned so much that analysis and improvements are still emerging and being implemented now.

Service tweaks

Service tweaks(with plenty more to come as we near the final project report)

We changed the way our Flexible Loans work for academics

We used their feedback to inform our choice of a new Reading List system

We changed the way we communicate key

information to academics

We changed the way we manage our annual review of journal and database subscriptions

UXSPACE

A year long project called

Will run for all of 2017

Primary focus on two spaces

We’ll be led by the data!

Behavioural mapping, but modified…

‘Final’ generative* project for now –need to move to evaluative* research

*(Generative research establishes what the problems are, evaluative research tests potential solutions)

[Internal] [Library industry] [Lib UX Community] [Specialists] [Outside HE] [Anyone]

We’ve tried to share as much as possible about our work with as many differenttypes of audience as possible. From internal reports to regular blogposts to talks like this one for a library UX community to presentations entirely outside the world

of libraries. We also try really hard with the slides in case they get picked up by Slideshare and featured on their homepage, which can exponentially amplify how

far you reach. User Experience in libraries is still a relatively new field, so it’s important that we all share our experiences and our impact.

A strategic approach to dissemination


[Internal] [Library industry] [Lib UX Community] [Specialists] [Outside HE] [Anyone]


[Internal] [Library industry] [Lib UX Community] [Specialists] [Outside HE] [Anyone!]

if you want to try this

at your institution

Next steps

1. Choose a space or a

demographic

2. Start with some observation then progress

from there


demographic


from there

3. Use cognitive maps asa jumping off point for

the interviews

4. Design some changes. Rapid prototyping…


demographic


from there

3. Use cognitive maps asa jumping off point for

the interviews

4. Design some changes. Rapid prototyping…

5. SHARE YOUR FINDINGS!

you can read about all our UX work at York on the Lib-Innovation blog:

libinnovation.blogspot.com

@ned_potter

thanks for watching

http://libinnovation.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/ux

http://twitter.com/ned_potter

With the exceptions of the screenshots and screengrabs captured for this presentation, the images in these slides are CC0, sourced via iconfinder, pixabay and pexels

credits

http://libinnovation.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/ux