Rejected titles for my 2023 UXLibs plenary talk

I found it really difficult to come with a title for the UXLibs plenary talk I gave earlier this year. I eventually called it “More Than Just Working Together: Reflections on UX Work and Collaboration” and then retitled it during the talk to “It’s Not Just You.” At the time, I wrote down a list of any title that came to me, hoping to find a good idea among the terrible ones. I found that list today and found even the awful ones weirdly interesting:

• Failure is the Most Likely UX Outcome
• You’ll Get Knocked Down: How to Get Up Again
• “I Don’t Know. I Do Not Know.”
• If UX is All About Collaboration, Why Am I So Lonely?
• It’s Not Just You: UX is Hard
• UX as Disruptor vs UX as Helper: Mismatched Expectations Bring Frustration
• There’s No I in UX: Collaboration is the Only Path Forward
• “Doing UX Demands Collaboration:” What UX Workers Say About Collaboration, Expectations, and Feeling Lonely
• Doing UX Demands Collaboration” So Why Can’t I?
• I Talked to 30 UX Workers and I Still Got it Wrong
• Structure Can’t Save Us But Collaboration Might: Reflections on Research Into How to Do UX Work Well
• I Tried to UX My UX Job and My Prototype Sucks
• It’s Not Just You: Reflections on Research Into UX Work in Libraries
• Conversations About UX Work: Collaborations, Expectations, Frustrations

It’s an intensely pessimistic list! I don’t think my talk was as grim as all this, but as I go back to those interviews one last time, I’m curious to see if the pessimism screaming out from the above list was grounded in what I heard or if my own feelings and frustrations were taking over.

Access 2023 Conference Lightning Talk

Usage stats are great and everything, but have you tried non-usage stats?

This is approximately what I said in my lightning talk at the Access Conference, October 25, 2023.

In summer 2022 I got it into my head that I wanted to look at not what people use on the website, but what they don’t use. Are there particular kinds of links that no one ever clicks on? Are people less likely to click on anything when confronted with a page full of links? What better place to find pages full of links than library guides? (Note: we don’t use LibGuides; our library guides are part of our library website, managed in Drupal.)

I scraped links from our library guides and matched them with web analytics from the previous academic year. It was super-messy and I did a really shitty job. But it helped me figure out how to do it better so I’d actually feel confident showing my data to people. So I redid the whole thing for Fall term. This time, I:

• Created the list of guides and their links before the term was over and guides were changed or removed
• Pulled links from the CMS (Drupal) rather than scraping from the website, which made it easier to get a clean list

In January, I grabbed the analytics from Fall Term and matched those to the list of guides. To get a list of links that had been followed, I combined Events and Previous Page statistics to get both external and internal links (Google Analytics has completely changed since then so that’s totally irrelevant now, but it’s what I did).

I matched the link data with the list of all links and where there was no match, that link got 0 visits. There was a lot of clean-up at this stage but finally, I had a list of all of our guides and every link in each guide along with how many times each of those links had been followed. (I also had pageviews.)

The idea was not to present this giant spreadsheet to each content owner, but for me to do some analysis to look for patterns in use or non-use. I did that analysis and wrote up a report and gave a presentation for our content owners in May 2023.

In a nutshell, this is what I told them:

• Of 516 (!!!) guides, 130 had fewer than 10 visits in Fall Term, and 53 of those had fewer than 5 visits (we don’t filter out staff IP so this includes every time a content owner showed their guide in a class or to a student at the reference desk)
• Guides with more links had fewer links followed. This showed up in two ways:
  • As there are more links on a page, the proportion of links that are followed even once goes down. Where there were fewer than 30 links on a page, 56% of those links were followed. Where there were 50 or more links, only 15% were followed.
  • As there are more links on a page, the number of times any link is followed goes down. For pages with fewer than 30 links, there was an average of 13.5 clicks per link. For page with 50+ links, there were only 0.5 clicks per link. When I presented this to content owners, I heard rumblings of “that’s just math.” But if it was just math, people would be clicking on the same number of links on every page and then graph would be very smooth. But this is the graph of the data and there is a nice cluster of engagement between about 16 and 29 links on a page and then the clicks per link go down quite quickly from there.

There were no particular kinds of links or link text that were universally avoided, but links to the catalogue (Primo/Omni) were followed less often than other links. In Fall 2022, 84% of non-Primo links were never followed, but 90% of links to Primo were never followed.

My advice to content owners was to limit the number of guides, to provide a limited number of links to critical resources, and to be particularly sparing with links to the catalogue.

So: what happened? What do things look like in Fall 2023? Well:

• In Fall 2022, there were 516 guides
• In Fall 2023, as of last week, there were 536 guides
• In Fall 2022, there were a total of 27,511 links, about 5900 links to catalogue.
• In Fall 2023, there were a total of 26,939 links, about 5400 links to the catalogue.

So, there are more guides but fewer links, so maybe a bit of a win? <shruggie>

Was it worth looking at non-usage stats? Well, it made me even more confident telling people that less content is better. But when I look at the time I spent versus the effect it had: it was absolutely not worth it! Not the best note to end the conference on, but again: <shruggie>.

More Than Just Working Together: Reflections on UX Work and Collaboration OR It’s not just you (UXLibs Plenary Talk, June 2023)

This is approximately what I said in my UXLibs plenary talk on June 8, 2023 in Brighton. Or at least what I’d planned to say.

The last time I was at UXLibs was 2019. I had a poster and was recruiting participants for a research project on structures and supports for UX work in academic libraries. Some of you in the room took me up on that – thank you! – and I did interviews later that year. I was lined up to present some of those results at the 2020 conference. Oh well. But as it turns out, I think it’s a good thing that I didn’t do that presentation. Because if I had, I wouldn’t be doing this presentation. And I think this one is better.

I originally titled this talk “More than just working together: reflections on UX work and collaboration” partly as a blatant tie-in with the theme, but it is about collaboration and it is a reflection on that 2019 project on UX work. And not just my own reflection. I asked some of the original participants to reflect on the resulting article, published in WeaveUX in 2020. (Again, some of you in the room did that reflection – thank you!) Andy didn’t think the title was very punchy. He’s right. It’s very academic. There’s a colon there and everything. But this is not an academic talk. So, I’m changing the title. Although collaboration is more than just working together, that’s not really the main message of the talk. The main message of the talk is what I said or wanted to say to almost every person I interviewed for these projects: “It’s not just you.”

This morning I’m going to describe that first project very briefly, so that you know what people were reflecting on, I’ll mention why I wanted to do this reflection, and then focus on that collective – you could say collaborative – reflection on UX work and collaboration.

The original project: In 2019, I interviewed 30 people in 5 countries about how their UX work is structured and supported. I was hoping to find which structures and supports were most likely to set UX workers up for success.

The thirty participants worked in academic libraries in Canada, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. They worked in a wide range of libraries and had a wide range of UX experience.

I’m not going delve deeply into the findings, but will quickly look at the main themes that came through:

• On the structure side:
  • Have a formal UX group: Participants with a UX department, committee, or working group saw their UX work had big impacts in their libraries.
  • If you don’t have a UX group, working with an informal group of colleagues led to some impact, including shifting the library culture toward UX.
  • Not surprising, given the above, involving colleagues in UX work had a positive effect on UX workers.
  • Authority to implement change is important: Participants who cited impacts were able to directly implement changes or ensure that others did so.
  • Move beyond web UX: Participants with a web focus struggled with a lack of support, lack of authority, and a lack of impact.
• And for support:
  • Concrete management support is important: Participants who cited impacts and support from colleagues also pointed to management interest in UX and staff being allowed time to do UX work.

I was hoping to apply these findings to a new role in my library. I worked with my boss and my boss’s boss to change my job description to include UX beyond the website. They supported the creation of a UX Committee, as I wanted to structure in the involvement of colleagues, including a senior manager to oversee the committee. I hoped this would confer some authority and make management support concrete.

Two years later, I felt like the committee wasn’t effective and I felt like I wasn’t effective. What did I get wrong?

Looking back at my main themes, 4 of the 6 were about working with other people in some way. I worked with other people to develop a structure where I was working with other people but still felt like I was mostly working by myself. Was there something specific about working together, about collaboration maybe, that I’d missed? I wanted to check in with the original participants; maybe I’d misunderstood or misrepresented them.

I knew re-interviewing 30 people was overly ambitious, so I contacted 16 of them, assuming some would say no. But everyone agreed! Again, there were people from 5 countries, but I didn’t look at other demographic data because it wasn’t a formal research project this time.

What did people think?

My findings did resonate. Everyone definitely agreed that working with other people and having support from management is vital for UX work – it can’t be done in isolation. They had some good things to say about the importance of collaborating with your colleagues, not just at the research stage but during data analysis and the rest of the process, so I want to share some of those:

No one person in the library ever has the full picture around an issue. And so the more that you can gather people together to share those perspectives, the fuller picture you’re going to have. And that is really key for the success of any sort of project.

[When people are in the room] it’s more of a conversation and people are more open. I feel like sometimes whenever it’s just a recommendation list people get really hung up on whether that specific recommendation is feasible in their context, not why does the need for that recommendation exist, what’s the problem that’s been identified.

Any sort of group work definitely seems to work a lot better and get more staff buy-in and more interest; people want to know what’s happening with the outcomes.

The findings resonated in another way: a lot of people I spoke to said that they were relieved to read that other people were struggling with UX work.

It was really affirming and helpful to read through those findings and to understand that there are perhaps some external factors that were impacting my ability to be effective; it wasn’t necessarily just me.

A number of people expressed that they were happy to realize “it’s not just me.”

There were two people who I’d been especially interested in reconnecting with to hear how things had been going. When I spoke to each of them in 2019, great ad hoc UX work had excited library management who had committed to formalizing UX in their libraries. Both people saw the formalization of a structure for UX work as a key indication of support for the work and a foundation for embedding UX into the library. Both included members from senior management in their UX groups. It had all sounded fantastic. And it sounded achievable! My library was not going to create a UX department or add UX to other job descriptions, but a committee? We could form a committee! These two were a particular inspiration when I was thinking about my own structure. But, reconnecting with them, they still felt like they were the only ones trying to make UX happen; nothing was embedded, the inclusion of senior management hadn’t helped to push anything along. They were both feeling pretty discouraged.

So that was disappointing. But I have to say that I was a little bit happy to hear that maybe I hadn’t been completely inept. That these very capable people had not been able to make it work either. I was able to have my own moment of “it’s not just me!”

But also: why couldn’t we make it work? All of us had support from management in the formation of our UX groups. All of us had a formal structure to work with other people.

Let’s start with the first part – “support from management.” What does meaningful support—useful support—look like? In the original interviews, when people talked about the importance of support from management, I asked them to describe what that looked like in concrete terms. Mostly people said things like giving the time to do the work, money or other things to use for participant incentives. It was very much focused on support for specific projects. Or it was very vague “interest in UX” or “valuing UX;” a sense of that UX work was appreciated. Which is important and good. However…

I think that meaningful support from management is a kind of collaboration. That collaboration should involve you as the UX worker getting what you need (and yes, that might be money, that might be staff time), and it also should involve management getting what they need from the UX work. The word that kept coming to me as I talked with people was “expectations.” Here’s what some participants said about expectations:

[UX is] a bit of a ‘stirring the pot’ kind of role… If you have an organization where they want a smooth pond all the time (to mix metaphors), it can be at cross-purposes.

This participant went on to say that if the expectation is that UX will confirm all the great work the library has done in a particular area, then if you do interviews and discover, for example, that underrepresented populations feel attacked by library policies, when you bring those findings back, it may not be what people in the library want to hear. Another participant talked about this same thing:

[Management] had an idea of how students did use the library and when what you find doesn’t conform with that idea, then, rather than act on it, it’s kind of sort of hidden away and forgotten about.

Understanding management expectations helps you align UX with the organization. Which can help the work feel relevant and meaningful. But often, it’s difficult to tell what management expects from UX work. Often, it seems like there are no expectations beyond a general feeling of “valuing UX.”

When UX is valued but not expected, it can be enough to create a UX group or a UX position and then never ask them to do the work or listen to what they recommend. One participant said

[I feel like] they hired me so they could check a box on a list of priorities: ‘UX – alright, we have a person here: check.’ But then: nothing.

Or when UX is valued but not expected it can be enough to ask for UX research to back up a decision that’s already been made.

[Sometimes management will ask] ‘Can you do this piece of research to try to find out how students are doing x, y, and z and why they’re doing x, y, and z?’ And we’ll go off and do it and then we’ll go back with what we’ve found and it will be very much cherry-picked what they want to implement and what they don’t want to implement.

Or, when UX is valued but not expected, the organization says all the right things but no action follows. All of these are tricky because how do you advocate for UX when everyone already seems to be on your side? Said one participant:

It’s much better if people say that they don’t understand or don’t agree or don’t think it’s a good idea because then we can talk about it. We can’t have a discussion if you’re pretending to agree with me.

The library valuing UX is really important. But there has to be more.

In my original research paper I talked about “direction” from management but I don’t think that was enough. Direction is important and certainly a lot of people talked about how a lack of direction impacted them. How I phrased it in the article was a feeling of: “If it doesn’t matter what I do, then what I do doesn’t matter.” But I think direction without a sense of expectation is almost as unhelpful: “If it doesn’t matter whether I’ve done anything, then what I do still doesn’t matter.”

OK, let’s look at where it works, because it is working in some libraries!

UX is part of the strategy. These are the things the [library] wants to achieve; we want UX research to feed into these changes that we want to make.

The Dean has said ‘UX is important… we’re going to make this department, we’re going to give them money and we’re going to listen to them.’

Our colleagues can see that okay, we are forming this group to help you do UX work, we have it in the strategic plan, we are communicating around these things—there’s a message that this is a preferred way of developing library services.

There is a sense of expectation here, that UX is how work is done, how decisions are made. UX isn’t just a thing we like, it’s a thing we DO.

So, looking back, I had support from management, but it didn’t feel like a collaboration and I don’t think there were any particular expectations. However, it seems reasonable to assume that explicitly adding UX to my job and creating a UX committee indicates a certain level of support for UX in the library. It feels like it comes with expectations. So maybe you don’t know that you don’t have useful management support until you realize you don’t have useful management support.

What about the working with people part? A couple of participants said this about their own UX groups:

My hope is that I get more people on the staff thinking in UX ways…. Doing UX work in their own areas sort of organically would be my end goal, with me as a resource for ideas or methods or help, collaboration.

I wanted them to come along feeling enthused about it and knowing about within their area of expertise, or the area of work that they have, that there’s things that they want to investigate.

Those participants went on to say that this hadn’t really worked out yet. This was my experience too; I had similar expectations for my UX Committee and it hasn’t happened. But I know I haven’t clearly articulated those expectations with my colleagues because I’m worried about overloading people; I don’t want to ask too much of them. Other people voiced similar feelings:

Making another committee or making another group… is work and everybody’s already on 5 different committees or groups

They were really excited about it [UX] but it quickly died a death. And I think it’s probably more to do with their day-to-day and their workloads.

Working with people is super important. But if their workloads dictate that there are 7 other priorities before they get to UX work, that’s going to affect how collaborative the work can be.

So, support from management is important but you need to have the right kind of support and it’s hard to know if you actually have that, and working with colleagues is important but you probably have very little control over how they prioritize UX work. So, how do we structure our work to set ourselves up for success?

I think this participant nails it:

Recipes don’t work on people; it’s so frustrating! [laughs] Because that’s what I really want. I want this recipe that says do this, this, and that and then it works.

But there is no recipe, no magic structure or set of supports. People. It’s… people. In one of the keynotes at the very first UXLibs conference, Matthew Reidsma told us: the library is people all the way down. UX work, too, is people all the way down.

That feeling of relief that I heard over and over from the people I talked to: “It’s not just me!” That’s as close to a generalizable finding as I’ve got: It’s not just you.

It’s not just you:

• If things are not going well, there are likely lots of other elements at play. It doesn’t mean that you are bad at this work.
• If things are going well, there are likely lots of other elements at play. It’s doesn’t mean that are you are great at this work. (It doesn’t mean you’re not great! But your ability to be great doesn’t happen in a vacuum.)

It’s not just you: UX work does not happen – cannot happen – in isolation. You need other people to help you. If it’s not working, it’s likely because you’re not getting the help you need. If it is working, it’s likely because you are getting the help you need.

It’s not just you: It is not solely your responsibility to improve the user experience in your library, even if you’re the only one in the organization who has it in your title. Or your job description. You cannot fix a library by yourself. It’s not that you’re doing it wrong or that you’re bad at your job. Lots of capable, talented people cannot get this work done in their libraries. I know this because some of them have changed jobs and gone on to do really great, impactful UX work in other libraries. It wasn’t just them. It’s not just you.

It’s not just you: There are a lot of feelings in this work UX is wonderful and exciting and inspiring AND FUN when you can do it well. And I think it’s particularly dispiriting when it fails; when you see what a difference a few changes could make and you can’t make those changes happen, for whatever reason. It can feel like you’ve let down the users who gave you their time and their thoughts, their feelings. It can feel like you’ve let down your colleagues who engaged with the project and wanted to make improvements too. And it can feel like you’ve wasted your own time, your own energy and enthusiasm, when everything you’ve done is just ignored. It’s so very easy to take it personally when we fail, because when we succeed it feels so good. As one participant said:

It could be great, so it’s that much further to fall.

This is another reason why it’s so important that UX work is a collaboration. Because the failure should not feel personal. And the success should not feel personal. And when it feels like you’re doing it alone, it’s always going to feel personal. One of the people I spoke to who shares UX responsibility with a colleague said

It’s such a joy to have another person. I have such a luxury – a person to do this work with.

It lets her know right away that it’s not just her, that her colleague has the same struggles that she has.She had what I found to be pretty inspiring advice, given that she’s been doing this work for a long time in a library that doesn’t always support and appreciate the work:

I’ve also adopted a mindset that this one thing didn’t work this time but that doesn’t mean it’s not going to work next time. I’m really able to compartmentalize and say ‘oh, we tried this little strategy and it didn’t work for this project, but we can try it again with different people and a different project and a different set of external factors and it could maybe work.’ And that, to me, kind of keeps it fresh.

What really strikes me about that is the emphasis that context is so very important and that it’s a shifting thing. So maybe what I got wrong in my original project wasn’t the analysis or the themes. Maybe the entire premise was flawed.

Because there is no structure or set of supports that will set us all up for success. We all work in different contexts. We all work with different people. What works for someone else might not work for you. What works for you this year might not work for you next year. Context changes. People change.

So my new takeaways aren’t about structures or supports. They’re a little more personal, and a little more in my control:

• As that participant advises: Keep trying things. Not in a cult of productivity “keep going no matter what!” kind of a way. Take breaks when you need to, beware of burnout, don’t bang your head against the same wall all the time. But for me, I can become so afraid of wasting effort that I do stop trying. So I will try different things, I will try the same things in different ways. I will keep trying.
• So many people I talked to said variations on “Concentrate on where you can be successful.” One person said “There has to be a prioritization anyway. So that becomes one of the aspects when we do that prioritization: Where can we be successful? Where should we put our time and efforts? To me, it makes more sense to do it where it’s going to be easier.” I also like it as “Figure out what makes you happy and do more of that. Figure out what makes you miserable and do less of that!”
• Celebrate every win; keep track of them for yourself. Remind your future self that they can do this. And share your wins with your colleagues. One participant said “It helps to see someone else be successful. It helps to have a positive example somewhere else… [Colleagues] can see [UX] is a viable way of doing something and achieving something.”
• And finally: Reach out to other UX folks. Our jobs don’t always give us what we need. One participant said: “I miss, I can’t even say that I miss it because I’m not sure I’ve ever had really good management, sadly…. There are good managers in the world – you hear about them – and somehow they inspire and push and lift their employees.”

A lot of us are seeking community. I know this came up at last year’s conference and a sub-Reddit was formed but that hasn’t seen much use. But you can think a little smaller. There are 2 presentations at this conference about regional UX communities – one in northern England and one in the Netherlands. Even smaller scale is wonderful. A UX person at another library in my city reached to me when she started her position, and we started meeting over Teams once a month to chat about what we were doing. We’ve recently expanded that to 3 other people. It takes a little organization and coordination – it takes more than just putting a structure in place – but it’s so worth it. Have you met someone great here? Stay connected! Check in with each other. If you can’t find anyone, please, get in touch with me and I will find you people.

Honestly, the absolute best part of both of these projects has been talking to other UX people. We’re great. Collectively, individually, we are just lovely. So talk to each other. Help each other out. “Inspire and push and lift” each other. It’s not just you.

That would be a lovely way to end, but I do want to take a moment to sum up.

I hoped my original project would point to some structures and supports that would help us be able to do great UX work. And although the themes that came through in that project bear out – essentially: don’t do the work by yourself, and have support from library management – upon reflection, they aren’t sufficient. And they aren’t necessarily things you can control. You can advocate to your management team, but you can’t make them give you direction or priorities or have expectations for you. You can try to encourage collaborative work with your colleagues, but you can’t make them be engaged, particularly if they’re overwhelmed with their own workloads.

Although structure is not sufficient for success, there can be structural impediments to success. Most of us will come up against those at some point. So, particularly after a conference where you’re hearing from so many fabulous people doing amazing things, please do remember that what works for someone else may not work in your context. With your people.

If you’re struggling to make changes or to do the work at all: it’s not just you. A lot of us are feeling a bit lonely trying to do amazing things in our libraries and not quite getting there. Keep trying. If things are grim, do the easier things, do the things that make you happy. Celebrate your wins, no matter how small! Share them with your colleagues, share them with us. Reach out. It’s not just you.

Web Librarians Who Do UX: Access presentation

This is the text (approximately) of my presentation from the virtual Access conference on Oct.19, 2020, “Web librarians who do UX: We are so sad, we are so very very sad.”

Last year, I was doing interviews with library people who do User Experience work and noticed that people who were primarily focused on the web had the most negative comments and fewest positive comments overall. It made me think of the song from Scott Pilgrim—the comic and the movie—“I am so sad, I am so very very sad.”

So there’s the title.  And I’m saying “We are so sad” because I am also a web person who does UX work. And a lot of what I heard seemed familiar.

I want to say that although the title and the visuals are based around a comic and comic book movie, I’m not trying to be flip. A lot of the people who I talked to were very open about being unhappy. Not everyone was unhappy. But, there was a lot in common among the people who said they were struggling and those who were pretty positive. Here are some quotes from people who were generally pretty positive :

• “How much can I do that no one will block me from doing?”
• “Why am I really here then, if I’m just moving things around the page?”
•  [I keep feedback] “for promotion purposes but also not-being-sad purposes.”

And from the not-so-positive :

• “You have all the people who have their own personal opinions… and you’re like “you’re violating every good norm of website development”… they think their opinion is just as good as anyone else’s opinion. … That can definitely demoralize you.”

• “I bounce back and forth between, for my own sanity’s sake, needing to be apathetic about it, saying ‘I can’t change this therefore I can’t be stressed about it’, and also on the other hand, caring that we have crappy stuff out there and wanting to improve it.”

• “It is what it is. There’s lots of other things to be disappointed by.”

Heartbreaking, right? So why is this the case?

First  a tiny bit of background on the research project. The aim of the project was to look at how UX work is structured and supported in academic libraries and then to examine those supports within the context of the structures. I did hour-long semi-structured interviews with 30 people in academic libraries from 5 countries (Canada, the US, the UK, Sweden, and Norway). These were library workers who do UX, so not necessarily librarians, and not necessarily people in UX positions. The people I’m talking about today focus mostly on the web in their jobs.

The frustrations of web folks were particularly  striking because I didn’t ask a question about frustrations; I asked what supports were helpful to them and what would be helpful. Admittedly, asking “what would be helpful” is going to bring up deficiencies, but I didn’t ask what supports were missing or what they found frustrating in their work. And again, the web folks talked more about frustrations and difficulties than participants who didn’t have a web focus.

So let’s dig in a bit. Why, specifically, are we so sad?

First off, we have a tendency to want to think big! Do more!

• “That’s what motivates me—the opportunity to really sit down, talk, observe, have a conversation with our users, how they approach the website, how they approach the research process, how they approach finding out about our services and how we in turn can better highlight our resources, how we can better highlight our collections, our services.”

•  “If I see people struggling with things, I want to make them better.”

• “I don’t want UX to be just a website thing. I don’t want people to think of it ‘oh, it’s just a web thing.’ I want it to be in everything.”

• “I just see lots of potential all the time. I see potential everywhere, the whole library. I see things we could do that would enhance things.”

That doesn’t sound sad. There’s energy and excitement in those words!

But contrast it with:

• “Why am I really here then, if I’m just moving things around the page? I’m trying to get deeper. I’m trying to get a better understanding. It’s not just a matter of moving things around.”

Web people who do UX are, I think, well positioned—and perhaps uniquely positioned—to see big picture problems across the library. One participant told me they found that users were confused about the Circulation section of the website because there were 18 different policies underlying it; they could rewrite the web content but couldn’t do anything about the underlying spaghetti of policies. Another said that users found the floor maps confusing but the maps reflected the language used on the library’s signage; they could put clear language on the website’s floor maps but couldn’t do anything about the signage in the building.

So we see these problems and naturally want to solve them. We get excited about the potential to make more things better. And we chafe against having to think smaller and do less.

Which brings us to: lack of authority. Lack of authority often comes up around those larger library issues. One participant put it this way:

• “The UX work is actually informing something else to happen. Whether that’s a space being reorganized or a webpage being redesigned—the UX work is informing this other work. Right? So it would be easier for me to do the UX work if I could actually do the work that it’s informing.”

• Another person was even having problems at the research stage: [I’d like to] “have the authority and freedom to actively engage with users.”

• And someone else, in talking specifically about their web work said: “Nobody tries to stop me.” The implication being that people try to stop them when they do other things.

But for many participants there was a lack of authority even when dealing with the library website:

• “The web team doesn’t feel like they can really make changes without consult, consult, consult with everybody even though – even if, and even though – the web team has web expertise.”

•  “Just because I’m our internal expert on this stuff doesn’t mean I can persuade everybody.”

• “There’s too much of a sense that these things have to be decided by consensus”

• “Everyone feels… like they should have the right to declare how databases should work, how links should be configured, things like that.”

• [Each library unit feels] “they have the right to do whatever they want with their content and their presentation. … I’m not their boss and they realize that.  I’m happy to draw up more guidelines and stuff like that but if I’m not allowed to enforce that… [it’s] hard to keep things together when you just have to go hat in hand to people and say ‘pretty please, stop breaking the guidelines.’”

One participant described how having no authority for the one thing they were responsible for made them feel: “Of course that has stymied my initiative, not to mention my disposition. My purpose even.”

Another frustration that came through was resistance from colleagues. A few comments have already touched on colleagues ignoring expertise but resistance comes through in other ways

• One participant described how they always approach a particular department: [I’m] “treading very slowly and carefully and choosing my words very carefully”

• Another said: “Are they deliberately killing the idea but trying to avoid being disagreeable about it but just letting it die from attrition, or do they really actually mean it when they say they agree with the idea in principle but just don’t want to be bothered to follow through? I don’t know – I can’t tell the difference.”

These are things participants were told by their colleagues:

• A manager said that “staff felt unfairly targeted” by their work

• In opposing to changes to the website: “We have to keep it this way because we teach it this way”

• And similarly, “It’s our job to teach people how to use, not our job to make it easier to use.”

So, not surprisingly, these kinds of things make us feel isolated. Feelings of isolation come through in a few ways. Some participants felt they were completely on their own when deciding where to focus their attention. This is one participant talking about being new in their position:

• “I remember asking for, if there were any focuses they wanted to focus on… they said ‘no, there’s nothing. We don’t have any direction for you to go in.”

That lack of direction is often coupled with not having colleagues who do the same work:

• “It’s really me and up to me to figure out where to focus my attention by myself. So sometimes having someone to bounce ideas off of and talk things through with… would be nice.”

And when no one else does what you do:

• “Sometimes that’s a barrier, if I’m the ‘expert’ and other people don’t really know what I’m talking about.”

So, isolation, having to think small and do less, resistance from colleagues, and lack of authority. Yeah, no wonder we feel a bit sad.

What are my take-aways?

We need to find our people. UX folks who worked with groups of colleagues were more positive about their work. However, people who tried to do UX work with non-UX committees were even more negative than people who had no group at all. So we can’t just look for any people, they have to be the right people.

I wrote an article about the larger project that was published in Weave earlier this month and in it, one of my recommendations was to try to move beyond the website. But I want to say here that moving beyond the web is not a panacea. I talked to someone who had great success in UX for the website and other digital projects. They wanted to embed UX throughout the library and they had management support to do it. But after continued resistance from colleagues, they realized they couldn’t make it work, and decided to move to a completely different area of the library. Which brings me to my next point.

Advocacy is important, absolutely, but when we’re not getting buy-in, we need look at next steps: do we need to change our tactics? Would it be better to have someone else advocate on our behalf? Do we need to wait for a change of leadership? Or, as a few participants said, a few retirements? At a certain point, do we give up, or do we get out? Because advocacy doesn’t always work. And if it’s not working , we shouldn’t keep banging our heads against the post, right?

Ultimately , I think we need to be clear about authority.

We need to understand how authority works in our own library. Not just who can block us and who can help, but are there organizational structures that confer some authority? Is it better to chair a committee or a working group? For example.

Then, we need a clear understanding of what our own authority is within our organization. Maybe we underestimate the authority we have. Maybe not. But we need to be clear before we get to the next part.

Which is: we need to clearly understand our own tolerance for doing work that will never be acted on. The report that sits in a drawer. If our tolerance is low, if it’s upsetting to have our work ignored, then we need to stick very closely to our own sphere of authority. We have to dream within that sphere or burn out.

“Dream small or burn out” is an exceptionally grim note to end on.  But these frustrations are largely beyond one person’s control. If you’re feeling so very very sad because of some of these things, IT’S NOT JUST YOU. The fact that these issues were common to web folks, regardless of how they seemed to feel about their work, suggests that these positions are prone to these kinds of frustrations.

I wish I had some ideas for how to fix it! If you do,  please add them to the chat, tweet at me, email me (see contact info). I’ll gather it all in a blog post so it’s all in one spot. Thanks.

The TPL Debacle: Values vs People

I can’t stop thinking about the situation at TPL. The short version is that the library has accepted a room rental from an anti-trans speaker, and despite outcry from trans people and their allies, despite a petition and a boycott by writers, despite their own policy on room rentals not allowing events that promote discrimination, they insist on letting the event proceed. Some library associations are supporting them because librarians love being Champions of Intellectual Freedom.

Many people have made cogent arguments about why TPL’s stance is wrong (see posts by Fobazi Ettarh, Sam Popowich, Kris Joseph). I agree. But there seemed to be more of a reason why the whole thing made me so sad. I’m writing because I think I’ve figured it out.

In its two public statements on the matter, TPL has made sure to say that they “are supporters of the LGBTQ2S+ community.” They “are aware that the upcoming room rental event has caused anger and concern.” But the “community is asking us to censor someone because of the beliefs they hold and to restrict a group’s right to equitably access public space and we cannot do either. Doing so would also weaken our ability to protect others’ rights to the same in the future.” Fine.

But they also said “While TPL encourages public debate and discussion about differing ideas, we also encourage those with opposing or conflicting viewpoints to respectfully challenge each other’s ideas and not the library’s democratic mandate to provide space for both.” That doesn’t sound super supportive. And at the board meeting held on October 22 where the matter was discussed, it was clear they were more concerned with a respectful tone than with actually listening and understanding. Reading how the trans women who spoke at that meeting felt about how they were treated was heartbreaking.

So @torontolibrary is only letting 8 of us into the room to speak or engage the board. They’ve moved most of our group into an overflow room. They had extra security guards and obviously have a plan for how they want to contain us.

— Runaway Supernova (@GwenBenaway) October 22, 2019

I had to leave after I spoke. Being forced to recount all of the transphobic violence that I face in daily life to the TPL board in a room of strangers and watch them stare silently at me as if I was subhuman was one of the worst experiences of my life.

— Runaway Supernova (@GwenBenaway) October 22, 2019

I asked @vbowlestpl directly if she would say that trans women were women and she refused. I asked the entire board if they thought that I should use men’s restrooms and if they thought that would be safe. Silence again.

— Runaway Supernova (@GwenBenaway) October 22, 2019

No one on the @torontolibrary should serve this community, especially not @vbowlestpl , because regardless of their transphobic beliefs, they couldn’t even acknowledge my humanity in that moment.

— Runaway Supernova (@GwenBenaway) October 22, 2019

 

I want to thank everyone that was there. I had to leave after I spoke, it was a lot to sit in front of people that barely seemed to care I was speaking. Thank you all for your support and love both in the room and out of it.

— Niko Stratis (@nikostratis) October 22, 2019

The TPL board and staff showed us their true colours and allegiances tonight. Gwen was the ONLY person to be called at time and that’s because she was asking them to treat her like a human. Tonight was disgusting and dehumanizing. https://t.co/YAuXCBK0eR

— Niko Stratis (@nikostratis) October 23, 2019

The TPL board showed us who they are and who they support today. I feel awful, like I have never felt. That was dehumanizing, to throw my trauma out on a table to a sea of uncaring eyesx waiting to move to the next agenda item. I feel honestly sick to my stomach. https://t.co/LIPPMLN6Rc

— Niko Stratis (@nikostratis) October 23, 2019

It does not sound like these women were talking to “supporters” of their community.

And that is what’s making me extra sad about the whole thing. Not only is TPL choosing to value intellectual freedom more than they value trans people in their community, they are choosing to value intellectual freedom instead of valuing trans people in their community.

It is not incompatible with upholding intellectual freedom to also acknowledge that it’s doing harm. TPL could reach out to the community and say “we know this event makes trans people feel unsafe. But we’re convinced that not allowing it to go forward will set a precedent for future decisions to shut down other events, possibly those that actively support trans people, and we cannot let that happen. We understand that this event will cause harm and undermine our relationships with LGBTQ2S+ people and your allies. What can we do to mitigate this harm?”

It’s not as good as cancelling the event entirely, but at least it would show that TPL has been listening to its community. It would show that they have thought through the consequences of choosing values over people. It would show that they are not just “aware” of “anger and concern” but they understand the fears, risks, and harm their actions are causing. And of course, the community would have every right to tell them, no, there is nothing you can do to mitigate this harm. But that doesn’t mean TPL shouldn’t try. To not just say “we uphold intellectual freedom,” but to acknowledge exactly what that means in this particular case.

I’m reminded of the saying that goes something like “your right to swing your arm ends when your fist meets my face.” TPL is insisting that they have the right to keep swinging. Fine. But they have been told that their fist has already met the face of the trans community. The compassionate thing would be to offer first aid.

But TPL is not interested. Which, sadly, speaks volumes. It makes it crystal clear that they do not care about the trans community. It makes it crystal clear that they believe that the trans community and its allies are dispensable to their operations. The consequences of their decision (or, to be fair, their decision not to make a decision) are acceptable collateral damage; they are happy to make no attempt to mitigate any of it. If they really were supporters of the LGBTQ2S+ community, they would be supporting the LGBTQ2S+ community.

In a way, it’s not surprising that the trans community is the group that so many librarians are choosing to not care about. Being trans is simultaneously visible and invisible. A trans person may be visibly trans in that they do not present in the way that some might expect, but what makes them trans is inside them, not outside. What makes a person trans is in their heart and their mind. They know who they are *inside* in a way that cannot be seen by people who don’t know them (people who do know them can see how much happier they are when their outside gets closer to matching their inside). But to the outside eye, to the dispassionate eye, there is no evidence. And without evidence, their trans-ness can be seen as just a belief. And if it’s just a belief, well then, we can debate it. And we should debate it because, as librarians, we are Champions of Intellectual Freedom.

I so wish that we were champions of people instead.

Library Workers and Resilience: More Than Self-Care

An article in the Globe and Mail this spring about resilience was a breath of fresh air—no talk about “grit” or bootstraps or changing your own response to a situation. It was written by Michael Ungar, the Canada Research Chair in Child, Family, and Community Resilience at Dalhousie University and leader of the Resilience Research Centre there. The research shows that what’s around us is much more important than what’s inside us when it comes to dealing with stress.

The article was adapted from Ungar’s book, the now-published Change Your World: The Science of Resilience and the True Path to Success. I know, the title is a little cringey. And honestly, some of the book veers into self-help-style prose even as it decries the self-help industry. But on the whole, there is quite a lot that it interesting here. I was looking at it for an upcoming project on help-seeking, but it keeps coming to mind during discussions about self-care and burnout among library workers.

Ungar writes of the myth of the “rugged individual” who can persevere through their own determination and strength of character. We get fed a lot of stories about rugged individuals, but Ungar has found that when you look closely at them, what you find instead are “resourced individuals”—people who have support from the people and environment around them.

“Resilience is not a do-it-yourself endeavor. Striving for personal transformation will not make us better when our families, workplaces, communities, health care providers, and governments provide us with insufficient care and support.” (p.14)

Ungar is mostly focused on youth but also writes about workplaces, even though this is not his direct area of research. Two passages in particular caught my eye: “Every serious look at workplace stress has found that when we try and influence workers’ problems in isolation, little change happens. … Most telling, when individual solutions are promoted in workplaces where supervisors do not support their workers… resilience training may actually make matters worse, not better.” (p.109)

A now-removed article in School Library Journal explained how one library worker changed herself to deal with her burnout. The reaction to this article was swift and strong. Many of us know that individual stories of triumph over adversity are bullshit, particularly when we have seen those same efforts fail in our own contexts. I have found it validating to find research backs that up.

Ungar does allow that there are times when changing oneself can work—either a) when stress is manageable and we already have the resources (if you can afford to take two weeks off to go to a meditation retreat, why not), or b) when there is absolutely nothing else you can do to change your environment or circumstances (your job is terrible but you can’t leave it and you’ve tried to do what you can to improve things, so sure take some time to meditate at your desk to get you through your day). But most of us live somewhere between perfectly-resourced and completely hopeless. So what needs to be fixed is our environment, not ourselves.

I have noticed resilience has been coming up as a theme in my own university over the last year or so—workshops on becoming more resilient or fostering resilient employees. Ungar says “To be resilient is to find a place where we can be ourselves and be appreciated for the contributions that we make.” That’s not something individuals can do by themselves. People in leadership positions would do well to better understand the research behind resilience rather than the self-help inspired, grit-obsessed, bootstraps version. Workshops and other initiatives that focus on individuals will not fix anything. At best, they are resources for people who are already doing pretty well. At worst, they add to the burden of people already struggling by making them feel like their struggles are caused by their own insufficiency.

Anyway, these are just some thoughts based on a single book; I’m nowhere in the realm of knowledgeable on this subject. But I thought it might be helpful to share that there is research that backs up the lived experience of the many library workers who struggle in their organizations, despite their own best efforts.

 

Research projects: Call for help

I’m on a year-long sabbatical as of July 1 and excited to get started on a few different research projects. For two of the projects, I’m going to need some help from the UXLibs/LibUX community. In one of them, I want to look at love letters that users have written to academic libraries so I need people to send me love letters their users have written. In the other, I want to look at the different ways UX work is structured and supported in academic libraries so I need people who are willing to participate in an interview that will take around 60 minutes.

Do you want to know more? Read more about the love letters project. Or, read more about the UX work project.

I am happy to answer any and all questions: shelley.gullikson[at]carleton.ca or @shelley_gee on Twitter, or in the comments below. Thank you in advance for considering! And endless appreciation if you decide to help!

UXLibsV: Notes

Five years of UXLibs – hurrah! Let’s dive straight in.

Barriers to UX Design: Andy Priestner

Andy kicked off the conference with his address about why he thinks not many of us are moving beyond research reports when it comes to doing UX work in our libraries:

1. We see research as the finish line. UX is about uncovering actionable insights, not about statistical significance
2. We’re terrible at idea generation. We tend to get set on the first “safe” idea we come up with.
3. We pursue perfection. Instead, we should evolve services with our users.
4. We’re too cautious. After talking with library directors, Andy thinks library staff perceive less agency than we actually have; directors say they want their staff to try new things.
5. We’re not agile enough. Not everyone needs to be consulted before we can take action.
6. Issues around ownership and politics. There is uncertainty about where UX sits and the scope is misunderstood.
7. Ignoring the basics. UX is often perceived as innovation (and institutions love innovation) but UX can also be sorting out the basics.
8. Fear of failure. We overreact to negative comments. Failure is not modeled; we may hear that it’s okay to fail but we don’t tend to see it.

Andy then gave some examples of projects where libraries created prototypes out of their UX research, and iterated to improve the design to actually meet user needs.

Leadership is Key—My UX Journey: Anneli Friberg

Anneli gave a very warm and personal keynote, talking about her experiences growing UX at her library.

One of the things that stood out most for me was her explanation of how “the user perspective” is different from “the user’s perspective.” Library workers often feel they have “the user perspective” because they spend so much time serving users. But Anneli said that this “user perspective” is only ever the best guess of library workers, looking from the inside-out. “The user’s perspective” is outside-in; we walk along with our users to learn what they actually do, say, and feel. It’s not a guess.

Anneli showed us her version of a UX maturity model (created in Swedish and translated into English). She talked about the importance of recognizing what kind of organization you work in and where you are in the maturity model. She spoke about the frustrations she encountered when her library was in the early stages of maturity and how it helped her to have an external network she could rely on for support.

To get through the frustration of the early stages of UX maturity, you have to shape the culture of your library. Anneli recommended leading this culture change by example.

Michael West has said “The core of leadership is compassion and kindness” and lays out four aspects of leadership: attending, understanding, empathizing, and helping. He describes “attending” as “listening with fascination,” which I really like as an idea. A few other interesting bits from Anneli’s keynote:

• Failure is success in progress
• Do idea generation together with your users
• Take pictures of how students are using the library so you can easily show needs and gaps (e.g. a student hanging their coat on shelved books points to the need for coat hooks!)
• Lead by clearing the path (help remove barriers for others)

Anneli had some interesting and useful things to say about failure. She believes that having a project fail was an important step in moving her UX vision forward. Her team did some research, found a problem, and wanted to try a solution. Anneli was pretty sure it wouldn’t work, but didn’t discourage them. They launched the solution and, sure enough, it didn’t work as well as they’d hoped. But having the experience of a failure, they were able to move on and try other things. They saw that failure wasn’t the end of the world, that the important thing was to try something, learn, and move on to try something else.

Neurodiversity, Universal Design and Secrets of the Library: Penny Andrews

Penny started her plenary talk by defining what neurodiversity is and is not. She then talked about how neurodiverse people experience the library. And often it’s not good.

Libraries have a lot of unwritten rules and unspoken social norms, and this is very challenging for neurodiverse students. Library staff often don’t want to be the police so we expect users to manage the space themselves. But this usually relies on those unspoken social norms. Clarity of the rules and enforcement of those rules would help neurodiverse students.

Silent study spaces can be difficult because they are never actually silent. It’s easier to hear things like people chewing and keyboards clacking in silent areas. But often, silent areas are where individual study spaces are found. Having individual spaces in non-silent areas could be helpful.

Penny told us that most neurodiverse students do not ask for individual accommodations, or else wait until their situation is completely unbearable. Autistic students are most likely to drop out within their first year. But if they continue, they tend to have the highest marks.

So, what can libraries do?

• Be upfront with our information (not hide it under “Services for Disabled Students”). Library websites have so much information and no good way into it.
• Related, be specific with our communications. Don’t just say “we’re here to help!” but make it clear how and why to make a one-on-one appointment.
• Use universal design and consider various people’s needs from the start, not as an add-on. We can’t do one-size-fits-all because of competing needs, but our designs can account for these competing needs.
• Don’t depend on Disability Services as a liaison. Not all students declare their disabilities so Disability Services won’t know what those students need.
• Recruiting can be difficult. Talk to people in the library who look like they’re not having a good time. Go to special interest groups that might draw neurodiverse people (Penny recommended something geek-related). Regular recruiting methods often bring out the outliers who always want to join in and who don’t represent the majority of neurodiverse people.
• Always go in assuming we know nothing. A little bit of knowledge (knowing one neurodiverse person) is worse than knowing nothing. Neurodiverse people are a diverse group.

After Penny’s presentation, someone asked her if there were certain UX research methods that neurodiverse people found difficult. Penny responded that ambiguous prompts—particularly things like “draw your research experience” or “build your ideal library”—tend to be difficult, as is anything with group work. Definitely good things to keep in mind.

Tales of the UneXpected: Hannah Fogg and Lorraine Noel

Both speakers talked about the experiences of having front-line staff engage in UX work at their libraries. Hannah started off with the experience at Angela Ruskin University (ARU).

At ARU, they didn’t want UX to be just for librarians, so they brought in Andy Priestner to do UX training for their frontline staff. As part of the training, the staff did mini UX projects using their newfound knowledge of UX research methods. Having “mini” projects was meant to not overwhelm some staff who might be scared off by a big project, and at the same time not give free rein to others who would be tempted to be too ambitious.

One of the projects Hannah highlighted was a mapping exercise that showed users completely avoiding the print journals shelving (they diverged to one side or the other), so a decision was made to move those shelves out of that area of the library entirely.

Lorraine was up next to talk about the experience at Huddersfield. They had seen what ARU had done and wanted to replicate it, in hopes of professionalizing their front-line staff and enhancing the user experience. Bryony Ramsden led the workshops for Huddersfield staff. Attendance was mandatory and they also had to work in groups on a “modest UX project.” Those groups had to include staff from at least two different areas of the library (I love that idea!), and each of the 10 groups had a manager as a “guide on the side.”

There were a lot of benefits to the Huddersfield experience, but Lorraine also mentioned that there was some initial resentment from staff, likely due to the mandatory nature of the project.

Hannah said that at ARU, staff appreciated learning skills in project management that could help with their career progression. Also, ARU lost their UX expert and staff were happy to feel empowered to carry on the UX work on their own.

Passionate About Floorplans: Tim Graves

(I was excited about this session because floorplans are the bane of my existence. We get a lot of requests to make them fancier or add functionality, but keeping them up to date is a constant struggle. I finally resigned myself to walking through our 5 floors three times a year, making any necessary corrections on printed versions of our maps so I can update the ones on the web. The maps posted in our building get updated by the campus facilities people and at times bear little resemblance to the web versions. ARGH!)

Anyway, Tim also wanted to improve the floorplans on the website of the University of Sussex. The library was receiving a lot of questions about how to find things in the library and Tim thought that better floorplans on the website might help people better navigate to what they needed.

First, he came up with a version based on printed floorplans, but they were too complex and not responsive on smaller screens. Inspired by the London Tube Map, he created a simplified version, but discovered it was *too* abstracted from reality to be useful. The “just right” solution came after he did a lot of reading in the design literature (especially Alberto Savoia and Jeanne Liedtka & Tim Ogilvie) and started iterating his design with users.

Tim mentioned the usefulness of “pretotyping” a solution to see if it’s worth getting to the prototyping stage. A pretotype is essentially a very rough, low-fi prototype. It might be a good thing to keep in mind if you work with people who find it difficult to create quick and dirty prototypes. You could say “we don’t need a prototype yet, let’s just pretotype it!” Even though *you* know a prototype can just be a rough sketch, they can think it’s a whole different (and new!) thing.

You can see Tim’s improved floorplans. And he said that he’s happy to share the code that drives them. You can contact Tim at t.c.graves[at]sussex.ac.uk.

Appreciative Inquiry Workshop: Kristin Meyer

Appreciative inquiry is a method that helps people focus on solutions instead of problems, leads groups to action, and does so in a very positive way. I was really excited about this workshop because anything that Kristin does always seems excellent. I was not disappointed.

The workshop started with an introduction to appreciative inquiry and then Kristin led us through a sped-up process of appreciate inquiry as we worked through an issue that’s been raised through UX research at her own library. The steps we took:

1. Connect to purpose: Look at the big picture and why this problem is important. How could exploring this area benefit users?
2. Frame it and flip it: Clearly state the problem so that everyone is on the same page. Then, think about the desired state instead of the problem and come up with a question to help us explore what we desire for our users.
3. Dream of the ideal future: Think about words and phrases that describe an ideal solution. How will success look and feel?
4. Ideate: We skipped this step in the workshop because it takes a lot of time. Kristin mentioned her favourite ideation technique is Brainwriting, described in the book Gamestorming (2010).
5. Prototype internally: Our colleagues may have good ideas and asking them for feedback can help build early buy-in. Generative questions keep things positive: What do you like about this idea? How can we improve this idea?
6. Prototype with users: Again, we skipped this step because we had no users to prototype with.

I liked step 2, where we flipped the problem into a desired state. I’m guessing that thinking of “what do we want to happen” instead of “what do we want to stop” could help avoid the “solution” of putting up a sign or trying to curb behaviour with punitive measures.

I also really like the idea of connecting to colleagues with generative questions, rather than asking for general feedback. Andy may have said that not everyone needs to be consulted, but sometimes it’s important or useful to consult our colleagues. Using generative questions would be a way to lessen the chances of hearing “that will never work” or “why don’t you do X instead?”

Advanced Interview Techniques: Danielle Cooper

Since I’m about to embark on a project that involves a lot of interviewing, I thought it made sense to make sure that I took advantage of any opportunity to improve my skills in this area.

Danielle has a lot of experience with interviewing users in her job at Ithaka S+R. The short version of this workshop is that the best way to get better at interviewing is to keep doing it, so we spent most of the time in groups of 3 taking turns being interviewer, interviewee, and observer. Danielle gave us some practical tips as well.

To probe for more information, from least obtrusive to most:

• silence
• non-verbal affirmation
• echoing the response
• affirmative neutral comments
• repeating or clarifying the interview question
• summarize and synthesize the answer
• simply saying “tell me more”

If participants are not very forthcoming, you can try a variety of these probes. Be willing to cut your losses and end the interview if you’re not getting any useful information.

On the other hand, if participants are way too chatty, you can try the following:

• gentle inattention
• polite transitions
• graceful interruptions

Working in Difficult Environments: Lessons from the World of Civic Design: Suzanne Chapman

Suzanne started her keynote with some examples of behaviour that many of us recognized from our workplaces.

She then pointed out that these behaviours were from the Simple Sabotage Field Manual from the OSS (predecessor to the CIA), a document explaining to spies how to sabotage enemy organizations.

She gave a quotation from a senior person in one of the organizations she’d worked in: “We are trying to do as much end user testing as possible without actually talking to users.” Suzanne noted that UX maturity models, such as the one Anneli showed in her keynote, are missing the part where humans are difficult and sabotage-y.

She also noted that doing UX in libraries is extremely hard.

But this work can be made easier if everyone can agree on specific guiding principles. She shared seven that she uses at the Centre for Civic Design:

1. Do the most good for the most people who need it the most (italics mine). This goes beyond the 80/20 rule and looks at need rather than just numbers.
2. Delivery is the strategy. Given the choice between culture change and “getting shit done,” they have chosen to let culture change come second.
3. Work lean, iterate quickly. Sometimes this means doing the least shitty thing, but it always means that you should only make *new* mistakes.
4. We use design to make things better. Design means working your way through the problem in order to reach a solution, not just grabbing a solution.
5. We design with users, not for them. This is similar to Anneli’s message to take the “user’s perspective” rather than the “user perspective.” Also, research is done with a goal of improvement, not just for learning.
6. Hire and empower great people. And there has to be agreement about what it means to be empowered; there should not be responsibility without authority.

These principles may not resonate, or even be possible in your library. But going through the process of deciding what your library’s guiding principles are can be your anti-sabotage model.

My web committee went through this process, based on guiding principles Suzanne wrote while she was still working in libraries. The process was very helpful in making sure we really were on the same page. It’s also a useful document to show people coming on to the committee for the first time. It would definitely be *more* useful if it went beyond just our committee, but it’s something. If you’re interested, we’ve made our guiding principles public.

UXVR: The Potential of Virtual Reality to UX Research: Victor Alfson

Victor spoke about a project he did at the Black Mountain Library in Stockholm. He asked users to create a great library for themselves using a VR headset, Tilt Brush (a 3D-painting app), and a 3D model of the existing library. He asked participants to narrate their actions, but also jumped in with questions.

It’s a similar task to what you could do with pen and paper, but using VR gave a different angle. To recruit participants, Victor asked the (possibly slighty creepy) question, “Do you want to come down to the basement to try something cool?” 9/10 people that he asked agreed to participate! And once they were there, they stayed—for 40 minutes on average— because the task was novel and engaging.

Victor found that participants were very candid in what they said, and he wondered if that was due to people feeling like they were in a private space. With the VR headset on, they were alone in the 3D library space, with Victor’s disembodied voice occasionally asking them questions.

So what did users draw and talk about? Well, it was the usual things: food, noise, finding the right kind of space. But the insights were interesting. A few kids drew a McDonalds in the library, and went on to say that they just wanted to be able to eat their snack without a librarian bugging them. One kid drew a vortex in the library that would take them directly to their home. Victor asked further about this and found out that this kid had to take two buses and the metro to get home from the library. I wondered if this kind of thing would have come out in a pen-and-paper exercise, or if it was the technology that made the kid think about an amazing technological solution to their transportation problem.

Overall, Victor said that it was very fun research for both him and the participants. And his library will be following up on some of the insights they gained, such as creating a new quiet study room for kids working on their homework. Previously, these kids tried to find quiet nooks and crannies to work in, so both they and their needs were unseen by library staff. Victor’s project brought them out of their quiet corners and gave them a new space of their own. A nice real-world result for this VR project.

Internships and Ethnography: Students Researching Students: Claire Browne

Claire spoke about using a student intern to carry out a UX project using a cultural probe to get to know the needs of taught postgraduate students at the University of Birmingham. The university’s Careers department was looking for meaningful student placements that showcased careers in higher education and gave students experience with project management and data analysis. It was a great fit with the library’s desire to expand their UX work.

Before the intern was hired, the library had to have the project go through ethics review and recruit participants (10 in total). They had ideas for what they wanted in the cultural probe, but the intern, Luke, was able to put his stamp on it, finalizing the tasks and adding notes and jokes to the participant diaries to keep their engagement up throughout the 2 weeks of daily tasks.

Some of the tasks were: answering specific questions, writing a letter with advice to a student starting out, card sorting, a photo study showing their typical day, a love letter/break-up letter, and a cognitive map.

All participants did every task, which seems to show that Luke did a great job keeping everyone engaged. Participants enjoyed the variety of tasks and provided a lot of rich information in the self-reflective tasks.

Luke gave a presentation to senior staff about his findings and they were very engaged with this 17 year old telling them about the problems in their library. I want to know more about this; were they more engaged because he was an “outsider,” because he was a student, because he was young? Related, Claire mentioned that one of the benefits of having a student intern on this project was that he was not influenced by restraints or constraints felt by library staff; he saw only the user side.

Another benefit Claire mentioned was that Luke was able to engage with the student participants in a natural and informal way that she didn’t think would be possible for librarians. She thought the librarians would have been too formal or crossed the line into “cringey.”

If you want to know more, Luke wrote a report about the project and the techniques that were used in the cultural probe.

Love at First Sight: Consolidating First Impressions: Debbie Phillips

Debbie also spoke about doing a cultural probe, this time at Royal Holloway and focused on the experience of new students in their first weeks on campus. The focus was not entirely on the library, as the project was a collaboration among the library, Campus Life, and Internal Communications.

The Campus Life team were able to help with recruitment and 23 students agreed to participate, though only 13 actually finished all the tasks. Still, since they were hoping for 8 participants, this was a good result.

I was struck that, like Claire, Debbie said they were “hoping for a good mix” of participants. Both projects got a reasonable mix but missed out on representation from one or two groups. I think we often do generic recruitment when we want a mix, assuming that we should recruit from a wide group to get a wide range of participants. But if we want, for example, mature students or international students as part of the participant group, we really need to recruit them specifically in order to make sure of it. (I believe Claire did make this point as something they would do differently next time.)

Some of the tasks in the cultural probe at Royal Holloway: diary questions (2 questions from each of the 3 teams plus some general ones), photo tasks, postcard to friends/family (participants could ask for it to be posted but no one did), campus map with emoji stickers to indicate how they felt about specific buildings or areas of campus.

The library found they were surprised at how many students came to the library during their first visit to campus. They were also surprised at how few students attended their library induction. So, they’re planning to try to find ways to help students learn more about the library during that first campus visit, rather than waiting for induction.

Related, they also found that students expressed a preference for learning about campus prior to arrival, so the library will increase their communications ahead of Arrivals Week, rather than waiting until students are actually on campus.

Final Thoughts

I usually do a full post about my thoughts on the conference, but I don’t have a lot more to say. I had an amazing time, as usual, thanks to the wonderful group of people who come to this conference. In my professional life, UXLibs is my very favourite place.

I’m about to head off on sabbatical (maybe you can help with some of my projects!), so I’m not going to immediately apply much of what I learned but I am already excited to do that when my leave is over. I realize that I’ve been emphasizing the research part of UX because research is actually part of my job description and, outside of the website, design and prototyping is not. I felt comfortable doing research beyond the scope of the website, but not finding a way to move that research into action. When I get back to work I hope I can figure out how to, as both keynotes exhorted: get shit done.

Website Refresh: First Round of Iterative Testing

As I mentioned in my last post, we’re doing a design refresh of our library website, with a goal to make it “beautiful.” As such, we’re not touching much of the organization. But of course we have to pay attention to not just how the information is categorized but also where it appears on the page. We learned that a few years back when we tried adding a “Spotlight” feature near our Library Hours (tl;dr: people stopped being able to see the Hours when other content shared the space). So we are firm believers that user testing and iterative design is vital in making sure we don’t make parts of our site invisible by moving elements around.

After the results of our user research earlier in the fall, we came up with a design drawn from the sites that our users liked most that also worked within our current site structure. The layout was essentially the same, with three major changes:

• We pulled “Quick Links” out of the menu and put it in a box on the front page
• Hours moved from a box on the side to a banner under the search box
• Our Help and Chat button also moved to this banner

We wanted to do user testing to make sure that users could:

• find today’s hours
• get to the full set of hours
• figure out how to access help or chat.

We also asked them if there was anything they hated about the draft design. Just to flag anything that could cause problems but that we weren’t specifically asking about.

Since we were doing this testing early in the process, we didn’t have a live site to show. Our Web Developer, the fabulous Kevin Bowrin, built the mockup in Drupal since he’s more comfortable in Drupal than in PhotoShop, but it wasn’t on a public server. So we used a printed screenshot for this round of testing.

The first version of the design had a grey banner and small text and it was clear after talking to a few users that visibility was a problem. We only talked to 4 people, but only 2 saw the Hours and they were really squinting to make it out. Finding when the library is open should be really really easy. We decided to increase the text size and remove the grey background.

Version 1

This time, even fewer people saw the hours: 1 out 6. Since people didn’t see today’s hours, we couldn’t even get to the part where we tested whether they knew how to access the full set of hours. We decided to see if adding an “All Hours →” link would help; perhaps by echoing the convention of the “View More →” links in other parts of the page, it would be clearer that this section was part of the content.

Nope.

Version 3

Again, quite quickly we saw that this section remained invisible. Only 1 person in 5 saw it. One user noticed it later on and said that he’d thought that part of the website was just a heading so he ignored it. Clearly, something was making people’s eyes just skip over this part of the website. We needed another approach.

Kevin and I talked about a few options. We decided to try making the section more visible by having Library Hours, Help and Chat, and Quick Links all there. Kevin tweeted at me after I’d left for the day: “Just dropped the latest iteration on your desk. I kinda hate it, but we’ll see what the patrons have to say!” I had a look the next morning. I also hated it. No point in even testing that one!

A blurry photo of the hated, not-tested version 4

We decided to put Hours where the Quick Links box was, to see if that would be more visible. We moved chat down, trying to mimic the chat call-out button on the McMaster Library website. Quick Links were removed completely. We have some ideas, but they were never a vital part of the site so we can play with them later.

Success! Most of the people we talked to saw the Hours and almost all of them could get from there to the full set of hours. (I did this round of testing without a note-taker, thinking I could keep good enough track. “Good enough?” Yes. Actual numbers? No.) The downside was that most people didn’t notice the Help and Chat link (not pictured here). However, I think we’ll really need to test that when we can show the site on a screen that people can interact with. The “always visible” nature of that button is hard to replicate with a print-out. I feel like we’re in a good enough place that we can start building this as more than just a mock-up.

Oh, and no one we talked to hated anything about the design. A low bar perhaps, but I’m happy that we cleared it.

Version 5

We did all of this in one week, over 4 afternoons. For version 3, Kevin just added text to the screenshot so we could get it in front of people faster. Quick iterating and testing is such a great process if you can make it work.

Next steps: menu interactions and interior pages.

User Research: Beautiful Websites?

My University Librarian has asked for a refresh of the library website. He is primarily concerned with the visual design; although he thinks the site meets the practical needs of our users, he would like it to be “beautiful” as well. Eep! I’m not a visual designer. I was a little unsure how to even begin.

I decided to attack this the way we attack other problems: user research! Web Committee created a set of Guiding Principles a few years back (based on Suzanne Chapman’s document). Number one in that list is “Start with user needs & build in assessment” so even though I was having difficulty wrapping my head around a beautiful website as a user need, it made sense to move forward as if it were.

Background

How does one assess a beautiful website? I looked at a whole bunch of library websites to see which stood out as particularly beautiful and then discern what it was that made them so. Let me tell you, “beautiful” is not a word that immediately leaps to mind when I look at library websites. But then I came across one site that made me give a little exclamation of disgust (no, I won’t tell you which one). It was busy, the colours clashed garishly, and it made me want to click away instantly—ugh! Well. We might not be able to design a site that people find beautiful but surely we can design something that doesn’t make people feel disgusted.

I had an idea then to show users a few different websites and ask them how they felt about the sites. Beauty can mean different things to different people, but it does conjure a positive feeling. Coming up with feeling words can be difficult for people, so I thought it might be easier for me to come up with a list they could choose from (overwhelming, calm, inspiring, boring, etc.). Then I decided that it might be better to have users place the sites on a continuum rather than pick a single word for their feeling: is the page more calming or more stressful? Is it more clear or more confusing? I came up with 11 feelings described on a continuum, plus an overall 🙂 to 🙁.

I wasn’t completely confident about this and assumed others had done work in this area, so I did some reading on emotions, aesthetics, and web design. (Emotion and website design from The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd ed.; Aesthetics and preferences of web pages from Behaviour & Information Technology (2000); Assessing dimensions of perceived visual aesthetics of web sites from International Journal of Human-Computer Studies (2004); and Measuring aesthetic emotions: A review of the literature and a new assessment tool from PLOS ONE (2017).) Turns out my method was in line with the research in this area. And although the wording sometimes differed, the 11 feelings I had come up with were all represented. Onward!

There had been some talk of the library website perhaps needing to mirror other Carleton University websites a little more closely. However, there is not uniformity of design across Carleton sites, so I wanted to show users a mix of those sites to get a sense of which designs were most pleasing. I also wanted to show a few different library sites to get a sense of which of those designs were most appealing to our users. I worked with Web Committee to come up with a list of 7 library sites and 5 Carleton sites.

There was no way I was going to ask someone to give us feedback on 12 different websites; I decided a selection of 3 was plenty for one person to work through. Since I was looking mostly for visceral reactions, I didn’t think we needed a lot of people to see each site. If each site was viewed 5 times (with our own library site as a baseline so we could measure improvement of the new design), we needed 30 participants. That was three times what we often see for a single round of UX research, but still doable.

Method

I planned a 10-minute process—longer than our usual processes where we test one or two things—and wanted to compensate students for this much of their time. That fell apart at the last minute and all I had was a box of Halloween mini-chocolates so revamped the process to remove a few pre- and post- questions and cut the number of continuums from 12 to 9 (8 feelings plus the overall positive/negative). That cut the time down to about 5 minutes for most people, and I was comfortable with a 5-minutes-for-chocolate deal. So in the end, these are the continuums we asked people to use to label the sites:

Welcoming ↔ Off-putting
Disorganized ↔ Organized
Clear ↔ Confusing
Up-to-date ↔ Old-fashioned
Calming ↔ Stressful
Useful ↔ Useless
Inspiring ↔ Discouraging
Ugly ↔ Beautiful
🙂 ↔ 🙁

We set up in the lobby of the library and saw 31 people over four time slots (each was 60-90 minutes long). There were 31 participants instead of 30 because the last person came with a friend who also wanted to participate. Happily, the only person to have difficulty understanding what to do was one of these very last people we saw. He had such trouble that if he’d been the first person we’d seen, I likely would have reconsidered the whole exercise. But thankfully everyone else was quick to understand what we wanted.

Most people saw one Carleton site, one library site, and then our own Carleton library site. Because we had more library sites than Carleton sites, a few people saw two library sites then the Carleton library site. I had planned out in advance which participant would see which sites, making sure that each site would be seen the same number of times and not always in the same order. Participants looked at one site at a time on a tablet with a landscape orientation, so the sites looked similar to how they would look on a laptop. They filled out the continuum sheet for one site before looking at the next. They could refer back to the site as they completed the sheet. I had a note-taker on hand to keep track of the sites visited and to record any comments participants made about the sites (most people didn’t say much at all).

Partway through, I discovered a problem with the “Up-to-date / Old-fashioned” continuum. I was trying to get at whether the design felt old and stale or contemporary and up-to-date. But many people assumed we were referring to the information on the site being up-to-date. I thought that using “old-fashioned” rather than “outdated” would mitigate this, but no. So this was not a useful data point.

Usually with these kinds of processes, I have a sense of what we’re learning as we go. But with this one, I had very little idea until I started the analysis. So what did we find?

Results

I had purposely not used a Likert-type scale with numbers or labels on any of the mid-points. This was not quantitative research and I didn’t want users to try to put a number on their feelings. So, when it came time for analysis, I didn’t want to turn the continuum ratings into numbers either. I colour-coded the responses, with dark green corresponding to one end of the continuum, red to the other and yellow for the middle. I used light green and orange for less strong feelings that were still clearly on one side or the other.

In determining what colour to code a mark, I looked at how the person had responded to all three sites. If all their marks were near the extremes, I used light green/orange for any mark tending toward the middle. If all their marks were clustered around the middle, I looked for their outer ranges and coded those as dark green/red (see examples in the image below). In this way, the coding reflected the relative feelings of each person rather than sticking to strict borders. Two marks in the same place on the continuum could be coded differently, depending on how that user had responded overall.

The circled mark on the left was coded light green even though it’s quite close to the end. The circled mark on the right was coded red even though it’s not very close to the end.

After coding, I looked at the results for the 🙂 ↔ 🙁 continuum to get a sense of the general feeling about each site. I gave them all an overall assessment (bad, ugh, meh, or ok). No site got better than ok because none was rated in the green by everyone who saw it. Then I looked at how often each was coded green, yellow, and red across all the continuums. Unsurprisingly, those results corresponded to my bad/ugh/meh/ok rating; participants’ 🙂 / 🙁 ratings had been reflective of their overall feelings. Our site ended up on the high end of “meh.” However, several participants made sure to say their ratings of our site were likely high because of familiarity, so we are really likely firmly in “meh” territory.

Now that I’d looked at the overall, I wanted to look at each of the continuums. What was our current site doing really well with? I was happy to see that our current site felt Useful and Organized to participants. “Organized” is good because it means that I feel confident about keeping the structure of the site while we change the visual design. What did we need to improve? Participants felt the site was Discouraging and Ugly. “Discouraging” is something I definitely feel motivated to fix! And “Ugly?” Well, it helps me feel better about this project to make the site beautiful. More beautiful at least.

After this, I looked at which sites did well on the aspects we needed to improve. For both the Carleton sites and the library sites, the ones felt to be most Inspiring and Beautiful were the same ones that were rated highly overall. These same sites were most felt to be Welcoming, Clear, and Calming. So these are the aspects that we’ll concentrate on most as we move through our design refresh.

Next Steps

Now, Web Committee will take a closer look at the two library sites and two Carleton sites that had the best feeling and see what specific aspects of those sites we’d like to borrow from. There’s no big time squeeze, as we’re aiming for a spring launch. Lots of time for many design-and-test iterations. I’ll report back as we move forward.