UXLibs conference: notes

I’ve been quiet of late, as we’ve not been doing any user testing this term; instead we’ve been taking a step back and thinking bigger about our website. But after attending the User Experience in Libraries conference (UXLibs) last week, I’m excited to move forward with user testing/research and thinking big.

St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge, site of UXLibs

UXLibs was amazing amazing. Don’t believe me? Check out the #UXLibs Twitter stream during the week of the conference. I’m not going to try to capture the essence of the conference (see these posts by Ned Potter, and conference organizer Andy Priestner for that). Rather, I’m just pulling out particular bits from my notes that resonate most strongly with me. Many of these may not make sense out of context, but I’m happy to provide context if you ask.

From the keynote by Donna Lanclos:

• What happens if we decenter staff expertise?
• Find out what users understand not what they want
• Not helping with wayfinding but engagement with creation
• If an activity has intrinsic value, does it need to be assessed?
• We want people to “revel in independent thought” (Revel!)
• If we’re going to do ethnography, we have to be okay with feeling uncomfortable, and with feeling comfortable with ambiguity. We need institutional support for uncertainty.
• A pedagogy of questions involves “a voracious not-knowing” (from @jessifer)
• Do a small proof-of-concept project and use ethnography to see if it’s working

From a workshop with Andrew Asher:

[we explored a couple of ethnographic techniques: cognitive mapping (e.g. asking people to draw a map of the library from memory, or mapping out where they went when and what they did there), and respective process interviews (asking people to draw each step of a step-by-step process as you ask them about that process)]

• The location of mapping exercises (i.e. in the library or away from it) doesn’t seem to influence the content of the maps created
• Mapping can demonstrate where prime real estate is being used for low-impact things
• Commuter campuses [and so probably commuter students] are very different from residential, when looking at mapping journals
• Drawing can help with specificity but don’t get too hung up on the drawing

From the keynote by Paul-Jervis Heath:

• People are fundamentally unable to tell you what will help them (they don’t know or don’t notice)
• Should vs want creates an interesting tension -> how do you help people be the better version of themselves?
• Books are sharks!
• Rules of improv are good rules for ideation
• I really have to read Gamestorming one of these days

From a workshop with Matt Borg and Matthew Reidsma:

[we were introduced to the wonderful world of grouping post-its with affinity mapping (by voice, pain points and then categories) and empathy mapping (by what people say, what they think, what they do, and what they feel)]

• Maybe we should add “games” to our “search books, articles and more” Summon box
• We need to have empathy with our colleagues, as well as with our users
• Add the demographic, etc. metadata to post-its to make it easier to find patterns

From the keynote by Matthew Reidsma:

• All those links on the website – people put them there
• Interacting with things = making meaning
• Usability is beyond functional, it’s making sure people have meaningful interactions with the world
• It’s easy to recover from breakdowns [errors, confusion] when you understand how the thing you’re using/doing works
• Usability could be helping people better understand our tools/services so they can better recover
• Test to learn, not just perfect; learn how people cope

There was so so so much more than this. I have a follow-up post on some bigger picture stuff. But there’s so much more than that too. I’m going to be processing this conference for a while.