UXLibs IV: Conference notes

This is a round-up of my notes from the UXLibs IV conference but it’s certainly not a faithful record; just what stood out to me. It might give a sense of the content for people who missed it or want to revisit. Because it’s so freaking long (as usual), I’ve separated out my own reflections on the conference into a UXLibs IV: Reflection & Inspiration post.

The 4th iteration of UXLibs had a focus on inclusion this year and Day 1 kicked off with intros from Andy and Matt and then Christian Lauersen’s great keynote “Do you want to dance? Inclusion and belonging in libraries and beyond.” I didn’t take a lot of notes (perhaps my mind was already on my workshop), so I’m glad Christian posted his talk. A few of the things he said stood out for me:

• Inclusion is a process
• Biases are the stories we make up about people before we know who they really are
• It’s easy to have values but hard to follow them

Christian also used the great quotation by Verna Myers: “Diversity is being invited to the party; inclusion is being asked to dance.” I’m sure I’ve heard that before, but it resonated more, somehow, hearing it here.

After Christian, I did my workshop. Like last year, I was a little too done to visit the UXLabs during lunch. After lunch were the delegate presentations, and although I was happy with the sessions I chose, I was really sad to miss the others. Everything looked so good! Can’t wait for this year’s yearbook so I can catch up.

Session 1, Track A: Danielle Cooper and SuHui Ho

Danielle’s talk was “Decolonization and user experience research in academic libraries” and she spoke about a research project being done by Ithaka S+R and 11 academic libraries about Indigenous Studies scholars. She talked about how indigenous research differs from Western research and how those differences are being reflected in this project. I didn’t capture everything, but here are some differences:

• The interview process includes the researcher talking about themselves and why they’re interested in the project; why do they want to know about the things they’re asking the participants to talk about? We usually don’t do this in our user research, trying to present ourselves, instead, as objective observers.
• Participants get to review the transcript of their interview as well as drafts of the final write-up. They get a voice in how their words are represented and in the findings/results of the research.
• Related to the above, more space is given to the participants’ words in the results. Rather than just short quotations, long passages are presented to let their words speak for themselves.
• Participants can choose how they are acknowledged in the report. They are not anonymous by default. Danielle mentioned that this led to issues with Research Ethics Boards, where anonymity is usually required for research with human subjects.

After Danielle, SuHui talked about her work at the University of California, San Diego in trying to balance majority and minority users of the library website on a very diverse campus. Her team worked with 9 library user personas that were developed at Cornell and decided to focus the on undergraduates who were not experts in library research. People represented by other personas could have their needs met by the website, but might have to dig a bit deeper.

SuHui also mentioned the importance of changing up the images used on their library website. Although only 20% of the student population at her university is white, almost all of the images around campus, including on websites, are of white people. So SuHui made sure the photos of people on the library website reflected the diversity of their users. On this, she said it’s important to “act within our power.” I really liked this phrasing.

Session 2, Track C: Jon Earley, Nicola Walton, and Chad Haefele

I was very excited to hear Jon talk about library search at the University of Michigan, and I geeked out over how they moved away from legacy systems and interfaces and built a new search. The new search takes a bento box approach, which my own users hated viscerally a few years ago, but the UMich implementation seems to fix many of the issues students at Carleton had with bento boxes. The pre-cached results and consistent interfaces are pretty great. I was a bit fangirly about the whole thing.

Jon also mentioned that the UX research that drove this project was done before he started at UMich, and the people who had done this research had all left the library. This could have made things very difficult, but they left great documentation behind. I asked what made the documentation of the UX research so good, and Jon said that having priorities and key points highlighted, and very brief reports helped him grasp what was necessary to move from UX research to product design. They also continued to do user research along the design path.

I liked his lessons learned:

• Include accessibility at each decision …. Rely on HTML and not custom JavaScript widgets
• Be thoughtful about what deserves your time and resources
• Performance is a feature
• Use the words your users use

Nicola Walton from Manchester Metropolitan University was up next with “Behind the clicks: What can eye tracking and user interviews tell us that click statistics can’t?” She was very upfront about the fact that they had done the project backwards: they got an eye tracker first and then figured out how they wanted to use it. She recommended not doing that, but certainly seemed to have no regrets about their experience. She’d found that people get quite excited about eye tracking data, so it was a great way to get in to talk to people who might not otherwise want to talk about UX.

Nicola had lots of videos (though, sadly, not enough time to show them all) which made it clear not only that people struggle to use our library websites, but that what can look like success in the web statistics—people visited the right page—can turn out to be failure—people didn’t actually see what they needed on the page.

Chad Haefele from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was the last in this session and in Day 1. He is looking at possibly funneling people through to different home pages of the library website based on their user type. They are doing a big card sorting exercise with various user types, looking at how often people use specific library services: never, sometimes, often, or always.

Chad was hoping to have data for the conference, but they ran into some difficulty with their Ethics Board over their recruitment strategy. They had planned to use a version of Duke University Library’s “regret lottery” but were not allowed to, so recruitment was delayed.

Day 1 ended with a marvelous conference reception and dinner, terrible 80s music, and dancing. Much fun.

Day 2 started with 3 incredible speakers. I am still fired up from their talks.

Sara Lerén “Inclusive design: all about the extremes”

Sara dove deeper into the notion that users can’t tell us what their needs are. Or in her words:

I’ve always heard that (and seen it in action) but Sara’s explanation of why was a revelation to me. She said that users’ tendency to gloss over difficulties (or, as she put it, “tell us shit”) is likely due to the average brain’s proficiency with cognitive economy. Average brains are really good at minimizing cognitive load through categorization, schemas, automation. (When describing Sara’s session, I’ve said that average brains are really good at sanding down the edges of things; I hope that’s not a misrepresentation.) What Sara called “extreme” brains (non-neurotypical brains) are not so good at minimizing cognitive load in this way. And this is why non-neurotypical users can be better at expressing their real experiences, feelings, and thoughts.

Sara encouraged us to include non-neurotypical users in our research and testing because they will better be able to tell us what’s wrong with our designs. Designing for extremes makes design better for everyone. We see that with designs for physically disabled users: single-lever handles on faucets, curb cuts, and more. Later in her talk, Sara referenced Dana Chisnell’s great work on testing and designing for people with low literacy, and quoted her:

“I came away from that study thinking, why are we testing with anyone with high literacy? Designing for people with low literacy would make it easier for people who are distressed, distracted, sleep-deprived, on medication, whatever. If I could build this into everything, I would.”

Sara’s recommendations for smart user testing:

• approximately 5 users
• include extreme users (extreme in neurodiversity, skills, age)
• test in their natural habitat

Sara also mentioned Yahoo’s vision for an inclusive workplace “for minds of all kinds.” I like this phrasing much more than “neurodiverse,” which sounds a bit clinical to my ear. I’m definitely inspired to see out “minds of all kinds” in my future user research and testing.

Dr. Kit Heyam “Creating trans-inclusive libraries: the UX perspective”

Kit started his presentation with what he called “Trans 101” to make sure we all understood the basics. We can’t work to be trans-inclusive if we don’t understand the multi-facted nature of trans identity. Kit then followed up with examples of experiences trans people have had in libraries.

I didn’t take notes on the exact examples, but one has stuck with me. A student who’s a trans man had an issue with his old name being used in one of the library systems. There was a drawn-out encounter with a library staff member who was not helpful in resolving the problem, and eventually said “It’s so difficult not to offend people these days! You’re not offended are you? It’s an understandable mistake. It’s just so many girls have short hair these days! And your voice…” That student decided it was easier and safer for him to just avoid using library services after that. I found this pretty heart-breaking.

Kit said that what makes the biggest difference for trans folks is not what fits in a policy, but rather the interpersonal relations. He went on to say later that “staff make the user experience.” Great design cannot make up for a terrible encounter with a staff member. And we can’t leave it up to chance whether trans people will encounter welcoming staff; it cannot be what Kit called a “staff lottery.” Some of his specific action recommendations:

• Updating records
  • Work from a checklist
  • Safeguard confidentiality; could anyone work out that this person is trans?
• Describing/addressing people – in person or by phone
  • Use gender-neutral language/descriptors
  • Avoid “Sir” and “Madam” / “love” and “mate” / “Ladies and gentlemen”
  • Don’t make assumptions based on your voice: verify ID another way if necessary
• Signals of inclusivity
  • Pronouns on badges, in email signatures, in meetings
  • Awareness of intersectionality
  • Offer non-binary options (genders/titles) and avoid “he/she” wording
• Recognise that harassment is about effect, not intent
• Toilets
  • Don’t assume you know which toilet someone wants to use
  • Have clear procedures for dealing with complaints which stands up for trans rights

The signals of inclusivity show trans people that you’ve thought about them. Though Kit did have an example of a library that gave mixed messages, with staff having pronouns on their badges, but library announcements starting with “Ladies and gentlemen…” It’s important to be consistent.

Most of all, it’s important to have clarity around these kinds of actions and procedures for everyone who works in the library—not just the library staff but also security staff (perhaps especially security staff).

Dr. Janine Bradbury “Safe spaces, neutral spaces? Navigating the library as a researcher of colour”

I fear I’m not going to do justice to Janine’s talk since much of the time I was sitting, rapt, rather than writing anything down. But I will do what I can.

Janine talked about libraries as a literary symbol of literacy. She talked about this symbol being particularly potent for black people and showed a couple of videos to demonstrate this. One was an ad for Bell’s Whisky (Janine asked us to pretend it wasn’t an ad) that showed an older black man learning to read and making his way through stacks of books at the library, starting with early readers and progressing, finally, to a novel written by (it is revealed at the end) his son. Janine posited that if language is power then literacy is about reclaiming power.

Janine then showed a clip of Maya Angelou talking about libraries. At the end of the clip, Dr. Angelou says “Each time I’d go to the library, I felt safe. No bad thing can happen to you in the library.” Janine then spent some time unpacking the notion of libraries being “safe.” She said, “It’s not safe for white people when Maya Angelou is in a library.” But more to the point, libraries are not always safe spaces because they are very often white spaces. White spaces are not always safe for people of colour.

Janine then went on to chronicle her own experiences in various libraries from the time she was a child to now. She spoke of the tension between this kind of lived experience as a library user and the symbolic potency of the library in black culture, such as we saw in the two video clips. That tension is, at least partly, the result of the library as an institution and therefore a place of institutional racism, institutional sexism, etc. Janine later went on to say that the “stamps, fines, charges, cards, documentation” of the library “echoes institutional practices associated with the tracking and surveillance of black bodies.” I found that incredibly interesting and rather chilling.

Related to the recent movement in the UK for decolonising the curriculum, Janine suggested the following actions for decolonising the library:

Janine called out the work by Harinder Matharu and Adam Smith from the David Wilson Library at the University of Leicester as a good example of decolonising the library. Harinder and Adam presented on Day 1 of the conference on their work with Black History volunteers to unearth hidden histories of their institution and the impact of those histories on students’ sense of belonging. I can’t wait to read their chapter in this year’s yearbook so I can learn more.

Team Challenge

The remainder of Day 2 was mostly taken up with the Team Challenge. I did like that the challenge was not a competitive one this year; the emphasis was on sharing experiences and it took some of the pressure off. Particularly since it came at the end of the conference and I was pretty beat.

Maybe it was just because I was tired, but I didn’t really enjoy the team challenge. We were to use UX research techniques to reflect on our own individual experiences of doing UX research and then pull those individual experiences into a cohesive team presentation. I was really glad my job had recently taken a positive turn, otherwise I would have found it a very grim afternoon. Still, I didn’t find it very inspiring. But that could be because I’ve done quite a lot of self-reflection in the past year and, when working with a group of UXLibs people from around the world, I’d rather spend the time looking outward and trying to solve actual user problems.

But on the plus side, it was nice to get to know the people on my team. And, in the end, it is always the people that make UXLibs for me. More on that in my Reflection & Inspiration post.

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UXLibs IV: Reflection & Inspiration

These are my personal (perhaps too personal!) reflections about UXLibs IV and where I found inspiration this year. You may just want my Conference Notes.

This was my fourth time at UXLibs. I was actually thinking of giving it a miss this year. I was having a crap year and was feeling uninspired, hopeless, useless. Why would I want to go to a conference and be surrounded by people who were doing interesting things? Wouldn’t it just make me feel worse? Turns out, no. Quite the opposite.

But back to that feeling of being uninspired, hopeless, useless. Since last summer, I hadn’t been working on any projects at all, nor did I feel much interest in starting any. I had hit the gaping maw of a professional low and couldn’t get myself out. I looked into not just leaving my job, but leaving libraries period.

I noticed a couple of things, compared to times when I felt more engaged:

• I hadn’t done a scary thing in a while
  • First off, I’d rather stick pins in my eyes than reference those stupid Lululemon bags with sayings like “Do something scary every day” on them. But. Many of the things that I have loved doing started with me cringing while I hit “Send” or “Submit.” Pitching to WeaveUX? Cringe and submit. Sending a very rough first draft to Kristin Meyer? Cringe and send. Pretty much any conference proposal? Cringe and off it goes. I hold the fear and lack of confidence at bay for the second it takes to do a thing I can’t undo. I hadn’t done that in months.
• I stopped tweeting
  • Partly, I didn’t feel like I had anything useful or interesting to say. Partly, I was disengaging from most contact with people. But I did miss it. Look, I know that the little dopamine lift I get with a like is programmed to keep me addicted to the app and we should all put down our phones and blah blah blah. But I’m not a social media star; my follower and following lists are small and I have met and like most of the people on them. So getting a like is getting a little smile from them, or a touch on the arm: “I know you and I see you.” It makes me think of them, and reminds me that I’m glad to know them. How can this be a bad thing?

So that was where I was when I decided I would come to UXLibs again this year. And then, three weeks before the conference, I got a new boss who managed to restore some of my hope. I no longer felt useless. All that was left was to get inspired.

Cue UXLibs.

Some inspiration I found, in no particular order:

• I am inspired to heed Sara Lerén’s call to do user research and testing with users on the extremes: “minds of all kinds,” people with low literacy, perhaps students struggling with English as their second (or third or fourth) language, students with disabilities. I have happened upon users in these groups during user testing, but now I will seek them out.
• I am inspired to heed Kit Heyam’s call to make our library as inclusive and welcoming to trans and non-binary students as possible (within my power). I’ve started looking at our website for gender-neutral language. But that’s just a first step and I hope I can spiral upward from there. Perhaps try to do something to minimize the “staff lottery” for our users.
• I’m inspired to heed Janine Bradbury’s call to decolonise the library (again, within my power), perhaps with the model of Harinder and Adam’s work on Black History at the University of Leicester.
• I’m inspired to heed Andy Priestner’s call to think bigger about UX in my library. In many ways, I feel like I’m stuck at first steps and want to start to get to embedding and influencing.
• I’m inspired by Chad Haefele to keep thinking of new ways to make the library website better, and by Nicola Walton to keep finding new ways to test it. I’ve been letting our site stagnate a bit.
• I’m inspired by Jon Earley to write better documentation! To streamline spaghetti systems, to improve performance, and to always trust the words of our users.
• I’m inspired by Danielle Cooper to learn more about indigenous research and look at better supporting indigenous students in my library.
• And I’m inspired by the people I met and the conversations I had at the conference to keep doing the work, to stay in libraries, to do scary things, to stay connected.

SuHui Ho’s idea that we “act within our power” to improve inclusion turned out to be really inspiring to me. On first blush, it seems a suffocatingly small idea if you feel like you have very little power. However, when I thought about it more I realized that by acting, I can expand my power, which then gives me more scope to act, and it can turn into a wonderful upward spiral. I think it can also be inspiring for those times I’m feeling daunted and overwhelmed, for when I’m uninspired, hopeless, useless. I don’t have to fix everything, I don’t have to do everything, I just have to act within my power.

So, in the spirit of acting within my power, I’d like to invite you to collaborate with me on UX work. Or perhaps invite you to invite me to collaborate with you. I have a sabbatical coming up in July 2019 and I know I’m not suited to spending an entire year working on a project all by myself. So I’m seeking collaborators, co-conspirators for projects large or small. I’ll be staying in Ottawa, so the collaboration would likely be at a distance but I’m definitely open to some travel. I’ve been very vaguely thinking about looking at student help-seeking, or whether we can improve the UX of being a library worker. But I’m completely open to other ideas. It’s still a year out, so there’s lots of time to think and plan.

It feels slightly ridiculous and not a little scary to do this. But dammit, I’m going to cringe and hit “Publish” anyway. Please do do do get in touch.

 

UXLibs Workshop: Adding Useful Friction to Library UX

This is a version of the content I presented as part of my workshop at UXLibs IV in Sheffield on June 6. Clearly, I talked way too much.

This is very much an exploratory workshop. I’m going to talk for a bit about an idea or concept and then you’ll have time to reflect and explore how that might apply in your own library. Then I’ll talk some more, you’ll reflect some more, and so on. We could easily do a lot of “think, pair, share” but I know that model doesn’t work for everyone – some of you need quiet time to think, some of you need to talk to think, and there are people in the middle. I’d like you to be able to think and explore in the way you need to. So, if you prefer to talk through your ideas with other people could you write a big T on a sticky and stick it on yourself? And if you prefer to think quietly to yourself, could you write a big Q on a sticky and put it on? If you don’t care, just label yourself a talker. When we get to the time when we’re reflecting and exploring, if you’re a talker, please seek out other talkers and let the quiet folks do their own thing. You can also change your letters as we go.

On to friction!

What do I mean when I talk about friction? Some people define friction in UX as anything that frustrates you, but I think of it more as something that slows you down – like in physics. You have an object sliding down an incline – more friction makes it go slower. And yes, heat or frustration can build up, but I am primarily talking about the slowing effect.

When people talk about friction in UX, it’s usually in the context of wanting to remove it. Because we don’t want to slow people down unnecessarily; we want to help them do what they need to do with the least amount of fuss. But often libraries do slow people down. We see buildings with a jumble of signage. We see websites with a lot of text and jargon. We have a lot of processes with way too many steps.

And I think that’s why many of us are drawn to UX. We see things like this and we want make things easier for our users. Some of you may be familiar with Steve Krug. Don’t Make Me Think is a classic in web usability. Essentially, Krug says: People don’t want to think about your website, they just want to do what they need to do. When you go to the library website, you shouldn’t have to think too hard to find the hours. When you come into the library, you shouldn’t have to think too hard to find a toilet. It should be clear, it should be easy. I love Don’t Make Me Think.

But, today, I want to explore the idea that there may be times when we do want our users to think.

An example, though not from libraries. Some of you might remember from earlier this year, an alert went out to people in Hawaii. “Ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii. Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill.” But it was a drill.

A shot of the screen the employee who made the mistake saw made the rounds almost immediately. 

You can definitely argue that there was too much friction on that screen. But, as many argued in the days that followed, there was clearly not enough friction in the design of the system to prevent errors. It seemed so obvious that people designed a bunch “are you sure” pop-ups that they thought could have helped slow down the employee. To help make him think.

Now, what on earth does this have to do with libraries? Our users are not going to be sending missile alerts from our library catalogues. But have a look at this example:

I do a search in Summon for user experience friction, limited to journal articles, full text, and in the last three years. I look at the results and see one from Journal of Documentation. What happens if I click that link? Let’s assume I notice this: Search within Journal of Documentation. I don’t want to do that. Let’s clear and get back to my results. I didn’t want to clear everything! Okay, I’ll use the back button. Got back to search within the journal, so back again. I just want to get back to my original results. But they’re gone. Once I click that link, I can’t go back. And okay, losing your search isn’t the same as triggering a missile alert. But it’s not great. This definitely needs a little more friction before a single click wipes out my search.

So friction can come in the form of preventing people from making mistakes. Slow them down, maybe give them some extra information, so they don’t do something they don’t mean to do. But friction can have other

At the Interaction17 conference, Christina Xu talked about friction in UX design in China. While she was working there, she found that sometimes she had to engage in a conversation by phone or chat with someone at a business before she could complete an online transaction. Even when she used the equivalent of Uber in China, called Didi, her driver would call to confirm her location. She found this weird but realized that this kind of friction was being used to establish accountability or trust; to help build a relationship. In an academic library context, maybe a student has to contact a subject liaison as a step in their research assignment. That could make it more likely that the student contacts their liaison again. My local public library makes users come in to a branch at least once a year to renew their library card. So friction can definitely be in the physical world as well.

(At this point, I asked workshop participants to think of their own libraries and where there may be spaces or services or interfaces where users could be helped by being slowed down a bit. They could brainstorm with others or think on their own, and they wrote their ideas down on post-its.)

It can be tricky to think about slowing users down, when we usually try to streamline things for them. So, I’m going to introduce another way to add friction in your library without slowing down your users. Instead, you can add friction for library staff.

At my library, we redesigned our online subject guides to try to make them less overwhelming for students. We moved from a tabbed design to accordions. In our user testing of this design, we found that more than 5 accordions was a little much for students to quickly scan. So, on the back end we built in a little barrier: 

The button to add more section is disabled when you get to your 5th accordion. Staff are allowed to have more but they have to make a request. And we’ve only had one person make requests for more accordions. That little bit of friction in the back-end design has been enough to keep people to 5 accordions which, ultimately, makes a better front-end design for our users.

On the physical side, at my library, we used to make students bring us the call number of books they wanted from our Reserves Room (a closed stacks area). If students came to the desk with just a title they were sent away to look up the call number. Now, we have a computer at the Reserves Desk and staff are encouraged to help students find what they need. They don’t have to, but since the computer is right there, they look like jerks if they don’t. Adding friction for staff can be a way of aligning staff work with user needs. You want to make it easy for staff to act in ways that support users. Or, to put it another way, you want to make it difficult for staff to act in ways that don’t support users.

(At this point, I again asked people to think about adding friction for staff in their libraries in order to encourage user-centred behaviours—though no electric shocks or trap doors, please. Again, they wrote their ideas on post-its.)

We’re going to change gears again and think about adding friction to improve inclusion. Many of my examples and ideas around this come from the wonderful book Design for Real Life by Eric Meyer and Sara Wachter-Boettcher. The book is about how a lot of design assumes a pretty narrow range of demographics or life experience. One of the driving forces behind the book was Eric’s experience of getting a Year in Review ad from Facebook, full of happy clip-art people dancing around a picture of his young daughter who had died from brain cancer that year. Definitely not a year for dancing. Eric doesn’t say this directly, but this kind of thing tells a user “our product, our service, it’s not for you.” And I don’t think we ever want to tell our users that the library is not for them.

So where does friction come in? Well, sometimes trying to cut down on friction in processes and interfaces can create a design or service that leaves out certain people.  Maggie Delano describes using the period tracker Glow, that only gives these three options for why you’d want to track your period:

• Avoiding pregnancy
• Trying to conceive
• Fertility treatments.

Maggie says, “It’s telling women that the only women worth designing technology for are those women who are capable of conceiving and who are not only in a relationship, but … in a sexual relationship with someone who can potentially get them pregnant.” This left out Maggie and it leaves out a lot of people with periods. But three options fit so nicely on the screen! Adding more options is going to create complexity, it’s going to slow things down. But it’s also going to be more inclusive.

Another example is the radio button for selecting gender on a form. Even when it’s expanded beyond a binary choice, it’s problematic:

From Sabrina Fonseca “Designing Forms for Gender Diversity and Inclusion”

Do you really want to make people self-identify as “other”? Is “Prefer not to say” the safest choice? But what if you’re actually quite happy to say but you’re not represented here? I would question whether you really need this information. But if you do, make it a free form question for everyone. Don’t just make people who don’t fit the binary write in their answer; give everyone that same friction of choosing what to enter. And explain what the information will be used for, so someone doesn’t get outed unexpectedly. Yes, this will make your form wordier. Yes, it will slow people down. But this friction is worth it to make sure that you’re not telling groups of your users that the library is not for them.

(At this point, I asked participants to think about where in their libraries they could add a little friction—on the user side or on the staff side—that could help with inclusion; that could implicitly or explicitly let a group of users know that they are welcome. Again, ideas were captured on post-its. After this, participants posted all of their ideas and spent time looking at others’ ideas.)

Now I want to talk for a little bit about friction and user research.

Remember that Hawaii missile warning and people saying that there should have been an “are you sure?” pop-up? It seems like a no-brainer. We see them everywhere for even trivial things. But because we see them everywhere for even trivial things, they don’t always work. In a book about the use of technology in medicine and hospitals, Robert Wachter reports that at one hospital, of 350,000 medication orders per month, pharmacists received pop-up alerts on nearly half of them (The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age). That’s a pop-up alert about every 18 seconds. Pharmacists, unsurprisingly, learned to click past those alerts without even looking at them. You can’t just add friction, you have to test it and test it in your users’ context. Is the friction creating a useful pause, or is it just frustrating?

Another aspect of friction and user research is what happens when users bring friction with them. Design for Real Life has a whole chapter on what they call stress cases – not edge cases but stress cases – and how stress depletes our cognitive resources. A stressed brain simply does not function as well. And for those of us in academic libraries, we can be certain that our users are coming to us stressed.

A 2016 survey of students in universities in my home province of Ontario found that 65% had experienced overwhelming anxiety in the past 12 months. 65% had experienced overwhelming anxiety. Some libraries are trying to include resources on their websites to help stressed students.

But how can you make sure your sites and services are usable by people under stress? Users who agree to participate in research or testing are generally not those who are experiencing overwhelming anxiety. And certainly you don’t want to create overwhelming anxiety for your participants! But you can generate a little bit of cognitive stress by having them remember a sequence of 8 letters and numbers or a sequence of 8 symbols, or you can have some conversational noise in the background. These fairly simple activities can mimic a stressed brain and let you know if your designs work okay for people under some stress.

Although we generally want UX in libraries to be smooth and easy, there may be times when we want to slow people down a bit. To give them a bit of space to think: to help them avoid mistakes, to help them make connections. Or we might want to slow down our library staff to help them act in ways that serve users well. There might be ways friction can help our libraries be more inclusive, more welcoming. And we might want to add friction to our user research in order to mimic some of the stress our users are under when they come to us. We definitely should test any friction we add to our services, spaces or interfaces to make sure that we’re not actually creating frustration instead of that useful pause.

(Before people left the workshop, I promised to share the ideas generated in both workshops. There were so many post-its! But here are all of the ideas generated by the participants.)

UXLibs III: Conference Thoughts

(This was a difficult post to write and ended up being quite personal. You might just want my UXLibs III conference notes.)

I was really really looking forward to UXLibs III. I love the UXLibs conferences and this year, I was presenting with Kristin Meyer. Kristin and I wrote an article for WeaveUX last year and it was an absolutely amazing experience. We had never met and yet the partnership was so easy; we had similar ideas about deadlines and effort, and we had similar writing styles. With UXLibs III, we were able to work together again and would finally meet in person. Exciting!

And the conference was great. The content was absolutely and completely what I’m interested in. Meeting Kristin in person and presenting together was fabulous. The other people I met were really great. The people I already knew were completely lovely. Plus, there was ceilidh dancing!

And yet… coming home, I don’t feel as fired up as I have in previous years. Is my love affair with UXLibs over?

During the conference, I had a great conversation with Bernadette Carter from Birmingham City University about the Team Challenge. She was struck by how most of us wanted to fix all the problems identified in the research documents, even the things that weren’t our responsibility—like broken plugs. She loved that we all cared so much that we wanted to fix ALL THE THINGS. But we also talked about how, back in our own libraries, it can be incredibly frustrating when we can’t fix things outside of the library’s control.

I wonder if the implicit promise of the first UXLibs was that we were learning how to fix everything for our users. We just needed to observe behaviour, ask the right questions, read a number of love letters and break-up letters and we would understand what our users needed. Then it would just be a matter of designing solutions, taking them through a few iterations and voilà! Fixed!

But we can’t fix everything for our users—for any number of reasons—and that’s hard. But UXLibs is also now a community where we can talk about it being hard.

In Andy’s opening address (partly replicated here), he talked about his struggles with having UX work either ignored or undermined at his previous workplace. I didn’t take any notes during Andy’s talk, and I think that was because I was busy thinking about how similar his themes were to what I was about to say in the presentation Kristin and I were doing immediately after Andy’s talk.

In that presentation, I talked about a UX project that didn’t go well, mostly because of the organizational culture in my library. When I look at Andy’s model of UX adoption (below), I think my library would rate even worse than his—all in the red. On top of our not-great org culture, we are going through a tremendous amount of change. I don’t see (yet) how the UX work I want to do fits. I don’t see how I fit.

This year has been difficult for me professionally. I’ve felt uninspired. I’ve felt useless. I still feel a bit adrift. UXLibs was a shining beacon in my calendar that pulled me through the winter. It was supposed to save me, I think; to help me feel inspired and useful and full of purpose again.

Having been pretty open about challenges in my library on the first morning of the conference, many of the conversations I had during the rest of the conference were related to that. So I guess it’s not surprising that, post-conference, I’m not feeling fired up with inspiration. It was incredibly helpful to share feelings of struggle, but it hasn’t created momentum for what I might do next.

Thinking about the conference keynotes, my takeaways weren’t so much ideas for doing things, but rather cautions to be more careful with, and more thoughtful about the things I do. This is not at all a negative; I think it’s a sign of maturity.

In the Question Time panel on the last day, one of the questions was whether UX was a fad. I thought it was a bit of a silly question at the time and of course none of panelists agreed that UX is a fad. But thinking about it a bit more deeply now, I think for me UX was not a fad but a new lens—a shiny one! It extended my long-held interest in human-computer interaction and usability to the larger library: physical and virtual space and services. My intro to UX coincided with a change of job, and with that change, I had newfound freedom to pursue UX work. It wasn’t a fad, but it was a new love—a great and glorious infatuation. The love isn’t gone, but I’m starting to notice the snoring and farting, and really couldn’t someone else cook dinner once in a goddamned while?

UXLibs has matured in three years, and most relationships do lose a bit of fire after the first while. My more muted reaction to the conference this year is not a reflection of anything that’s wrong with UXLibs. I’ve just got my own stuff to work out. But I’m in this for the long haul. I’ll be back next year, as excited to attend as ever. These are my people. This is my place.

UXLibs III: Conference Notes

As usual (and I love that I have an “as usual” with UXLibs), I’m going to break my experience into two posts: this one with my notes on the specific sessions I attended, and a second one with my overall thoughts about the conference. These notes aren’t a record of the conference, just the bits that stood out most for me.

Ethical UX (Matthew Reidsma’s keynote)

I am a huge and ridiculous fan of Matthew Reidsma. I love his work, I think he is a lovely and delightful person, and he is a great keynote speaker. So I feel particularly bad that my notes on his talk are a bit scanty. I think I was too absorbed to write much.

• Your values get encoded in your work, whether you intend it or not. So we should intentionally code our values into our services and software
  • Ask “What happens in the world if we make this thing? How will it affect people?”
  • Think of Mike Monteiro: “We need to fear the consequences of our work more than we love the cleverness of our ideas” (watch the talk that this quotation comes from)
• Matthew recommended the book “Design for the Real World” by Victor Papanek, and its call for social and moral judgment to come before design
• When we use personas, are they always smiling? Shouldn’t some of our personas be cranky? Or sleepy? (I didn’t note down all of Matthew’s wonderful examples of real-world personas)
• What does your library or library website look like to a student in crisis? (I can’t remember if Matthew referenced the book “Design for Real Life” by Eric Meyer and Sara Wachter-Boettcher, but it’s all about this and is really really great)
• When we rank search results by relevance, are these actually relevant results or results that look relevant?
• Related searches or items (such as Summon’s “Topic Explorer” feature) can create reckless associations and whether these are intentional or not they can cause real harm to our users. (Matthew’s article “Algorithmic Bias in Library Discovery Systems” goes into a lot more depth on this)

Matthew’s presentation slides are now available.

How White is Your UX Practice? Inclusion and Diversity in Critical UX Research (Karine Larose and Simon Barron)

Karine and Simon worked on UX research for Imperial College that was nicely documented in reports they shared online, but this talk was about what didn’t make it into the reports: what they did wrong.

Essentially, they failed to attract a representative sample of their student body, which is diverse across lines of class, gender, race, and disability.

New to me was their use of a social model of disability, where it is the social environment that makes people feel disabled (see Penny Andrews’ chapter “User experience beyond ramps: The invisible problem and the special case” in the book “User Experience in Libraries: Applying Ethnography and Human-Centred Design” for more). I really like inclusive design and this seems to make it even more imperative; we can design environments that work for people or we can design environments that make people need to look for or ask for accommodations.

Karine and Simon also made the point that UX as it is often practiced can lead to majority rule; an averaging out that can erase the experience of people on the margins. They didn’t say this bit, but it would definitely be useful to explore our edge cases and determine if we’re consistently ignoring the same group(s) of people when we choose to ignore these edge cases.

Recommendations to address diversity in UX research in:

1. Recruitment: be aware of unconscious bias when we recruit research participants, particularly when we approach users in person for quick, guerrilla-style research. Sending messages for recruitment might be a more inclusive approach, but we still need to make sure messages are visible to the full range of users and that our language is not alienating anyone.
2. Research design: our research question needs to be clear – “the labour of understanding should be on the researcher, not on the user.” Jargon and complex methods can increase cognitive load.
3. Actions: we should be ready to challenge non-inclusive UX research in our institutions (brava to Karine, who did just that at Imperial!). We need to seek out more and different voices in the UX world when we’re doing our own learning.  [I also have a note of “UX inclusivity framework” but no further explanation and I’m not sure exactly what that means. Perhaps creating a structure or plan for making our UX research inclusive?]

Text of Karine and Simon’s presentation is now available.

 

Sponsor presentations

Deirdre from EBSCO consistently gives a presentation that I find relevant and interesting. This year, she talked about her user research group and how it’s evolving within her organization.

• “Year of Yes”: Deirdre and her colleagues said yes to every request for user research for a year. This was part of evangelizing UX throughout the organization and creating buy-in. But it was only one year, because once the word spreads, you have to make decisions about how to best use your time.
• As her team evolved over 3 years, there were some lessons learned: 

I don’t have a team, but much of this resonates as an individual trying to do UX in my library.

My favourite bit from Deirdre’s presentation was when she talked about how draining it can be to do one-on-one research with users. She said “shared vulnerability is exhausting” and wow, that resonated with me a LOT.

Serena and Stephen from ProQuest talked about user research with their customers.

• I didn’t find this as interesting because I know what kinds of features my colleagues ask for, and they’re often not in our users’ best interest! But of course there are features in these products that are geared toward library staff, so it’s good that library staff are involved in this part.
• “Avoiding negative impact is as important as creating positive impact” is a great point and very relevant to Matthew’s keynote. I think we often focus on making changes that will help without also looking at whether they can harm.

Unmasking the Authentic User Experience (Amy Kimura and Heather A. Dalal)

Amy and Heather used Open Hallway to be able to conduct unmoderated user research with students. The research was my favourite kind: they asked students to search for something they needed for an assignment. They did want students to start with the library’s discovery tool, but other than that, it was completely up to the student what they searched for and how. I love watching users do searches they’re invested in; it’s so much better than forcing them through questions that library people come up with.

With Open Hallway, the students were able to record their searches on their own so they could search when and where it was convenient for them (often 1am in their own room). The students were asked to think aloud as they searched. Amy and Heather showed some video clips that seemed to indicate that students were pretty good at thinking aloud without a moderator prompting them.

The students were quite frank with their comments, and Amy and Heather said it “captured the human aspect of student research.” A few findings that caught my attention:

• Students have an extremely low tolerance for friction. This is not new to me, but I always welcome the reminder. Students have an extremely low tolerance for friction. Especially at 1am.
• Many students did not understand the “Get it @ [library]” links. These links lead to a link resolver that will bring them to an online version, but it was misinterpreted to mean they had to go to the physical library. (I’ve not witnessed this confusion with students at my own institution, but we do use the phrase “Get it @ Carleton U” so I’m wondering if we should look into this.)
• When students did make it to the link resolver, they had a lot of problems understanding how to get to full text, or even if they could. (Here, I felt super smug about deciding to use Matthew Reidsma’s 360Link Reset to make our own link resolver much more user friendly. Always steal use open source solutions from Reidsma!)
• Amy and Heather said it’s reasonable to have high expectations for our students, since they are at university, but we don’t have to make it harder for them than it has to be.

I find this last point interesting, and it reminds me of discussions about how learning about accessing information is an important part of their education and that we shouldn’t “dumb it down.” To what extent is it a valuable learning experience for students to navigate our systems to find information? We don’t want them to have to become mini-librarians, but is there really learning value here? Or is this just a convenient excuse for libraries with shitty systems (i.e. pretty much all of us)? If students could easily access articles and books and other information, would that really be a detriment to their education? I can’t see that it would.

User Experience… Our Experience (Lorna Dodd filling in for Laura Connaughton)

Lorna and Laura work at Maynooth University Library, which had a big renovation 5 years ago and they wanted to learn more about how the space is being used now.

They used students in the Masters of Anthropology program to conduct ethnographic work, and they used a variety of methods (that I did not take careful note of!). The MA students (researchers) observed and interviewed 30 research participants (students). The researchers looked at the spaces where the users study, and they also looked at how the students interacted with the library space. It was interesting to me that “where they study” and “the library space” seemed to be separate entities for most of the students.

They found that users were interpreting the space differently than library staff. The renovated space included a beautiful, open entryway that is used for events and exhibits and staff were very proud of this space. Students didn’t understand why it was there:

(I was happy to see this particular finding, but maybe that falls under confirmation bias.)

They also found that although spaces had been created to be noisier (as part of being a “modern library,” Lorna explained), this was not necessarily appreciated by students, who want more quiet space for studying. I talked about this point later with Diane Granfield from Ryerson, who is currently working on designating more quiet library space after opening a very modern, noisy library space on her campus last year. My own library’s silent spaces are very popular with our students. Quiet space can be hard to find in the world, and those who want it – or need it – value it highly.

Team Challenge

For the team challenge this year, we received reams and reams of raw data from UX research carried out at the University of Lanarkshire Library and were asked to come up with next steps.

I was getting pretty tired by this time, but even though there was a LOT of information to go through (or maybe because there was so much), the Challenge seemed easier to grasp this year because it was clearly bounded. Then again, I was obviously not thinking as creatively as the winning Exxilon team who took a step back from all the data and looked at the bigger picture (which, apparently, included Roxette).

It’s interesting (and hard!) to work so intensely with people you’ve mostly just met. I felt bad because I got a bit testy by the end of the afternoon (see: tired!), but it’s all part of the process – working as a group on a short deadline. I think we did quite well; I didn’t have any sense of panic about presenting the next morning. And we even won our heat!

No Fear: Social Responsibility and Community Archiving — Pushing Boundaries of Archival Theory: Privacy, Preserving in Real Time (Meredith Evans’ keynote)

First off, Meredith joked about the many titles of her talk. I can’t remember which was the original and which she decided suited the talk better, but I’m guessing that “No Fear” was the one she really wanted to use.

I loved Meredith’s keynote. The work she does is really inspiring – from the LGBTQ archives at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, to Documenting Ferguson at Washington University, DocNow, and as head of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library.

• Look for gaps and fill them in, particularly around services for and collections about marginalized people.
• Connect with your community most of all; if you aren’t being supported by senior management, maybe support from your community will help bring them around.
• Be bold, be brave. In the Documenting Ferguson project, they decided to let people upload whatever items they wanted, with whatever description they wanted. There was no gate-keeping, no professional selection process. This is not how archives usually work!
• The Ferguson archive was originally created for the Washington University community, but became the voice of the larger community (Ferguson was about 8 miles away from campus). Users of the archive included journalists and law enforcement, and this created a lot of discussion around protecting the creators of the content in the archive. My notes are a bit vague here, but it seems like those discussions helped lead to the creation of DocNow: Documenting the Now.
• DocNow has a board that includes archivists, librarians, academics, IT folks, activists, and journalists. They talk about ethics a lot. Just because Twitter is public, is it okay to preserve tweets? To preserve handles with those tweets? Is saying something in public (speaking out loud or on Twitter) different than making a public statement (explicitly creating a public record)? Should those things all be treated equally in an archive?
• The creators of DocNow wanted to build the tool with their users, not just for them.
• The work can be tiring and discouraging and you have to figure out how to get yourself through and beyond this.
• Meredith spoke a lot about the importance of ethics and protecting your users / creators. With most of her work, wanting to protect the users / creators makes the project an activist project. There is a strong sense of social responsibility.
• The overarching message, similar to Matthew’s keynote, was the need to be (more) conscious and to take (more) care when creating tools and services for our users.

Inward UX: Workshop with Matthew Reidsma

Matthew led us through a great exercise where we paired up to plan a party. One person made suggestions and the other responded to each with “yes, but” and filled in what was usually a concern or reason why the idea wouldn’t work. After that, we did exactly the same thing, except that this time the response started with “yes, and.” “Yes, and” created a totally different, much more positive atmosphere in the room. It’s a small thing, but it made a big difference. Although of course – as someone in the room pointed out – there are times when you really have to say “yes, but.” Still, it’s good to be conscious of whether you’re but-ing or and-ing when you’re reacting to someone else’s ideas.

We then each came up with some “how might we” questions to get at issues in our organizational culture. But instead of trying to come up with ideas on our own, we gave our partners our question and they had to come up with possible answers. Working on solutions for someone else’s problem was a great way to reframe and get a new perspective. I also found it easier to generate possibilities because I was less precious about the problem and didn’t immediately discount options as unworkable.

After this, we then created a rapid prototype for one of the solutions we came up with. Rapid prototyping can help you quickly see if something might work or not, and can lead you to see what other questions still need answering.

My partner and I seemed to have a bit of an issue with a language barrier (I think we each misunderstood the other’s original question/problem), but we stayed open to each other’s ideas and in the end I was surprised to have an interesting possible solution despite the fact that it was created to solve a totally different problem! It seemed to reinforce the power of “yes, and.”

The slides for the workshop I attended are now available (also available are the slides for round 2 of the same workshop)

Experience Mapping: Workshop with Anneli Friberg and Anna Kagedal

My expectations for this workshop were unfairly high, given that it was only one hour. I was hoping for complexity that, in retrospect, could not possibly have been achieved in one hour! But Anneli and Anna were lovely and positive and their instructions were clear and I think it was a pitch-perfect intro session. Apparently I know more about experience mapping than I had thought! Which was also a useful thing to learn.

Anneli and Anna led us through completing an experience map. Once we were done, they asked us to evaluate the session using love letters/break-up letters and a technique that was new to me: the 4L method. With the 4L method, you write down what you Liked, Learned, Lacked, and/or Longed for in the session. It’s a variation on other evaluation methods I’m familiar with but I liked it quite a bit.

Panel: Question Time

I really didn’t take many notes on the panel. (So tired! Brain full!) I liked Andy talking about the need to get better at writing short summaries of our work, rather than pages and pages of reports. Meredith validated this by saying that, as a manager, she only reads the first 3 lines, so you have to have a good subject line (or title) and then make that first bit really count.

I think this was where Matthew jumped in with the very pithy “The point of the work we do is not to do the work.” The work has larger purpose: to improve things for our users. So we have to get past the documenting stage and get to the doing stage.

Andy made a comment that you don’t have to transcribe everything you record and this generated further discussion on Twitter that seemed to center around UX as practical work vs UX research (and the concomitant librarian-as-practitioner vs librarian-as-academic/researchers). Fraught! Honestly, I see and understand both sides. I think the most important thing is to be clear from the outset what your own objective is – practice or research – and then conduct yourself accordingly. Certainly not all UX work needs to be academic research, but when it is we have to do it right.

 

I have a lot more thoughts about the conference, beyond these notes. I’ll write those up in the next few days.

Delight in the Research Process: Student Perspectives

In 2015/16, I interviewed 10 undergraduates and 7 graduate students, asking them very broad questions about their research process – how they got started, what they did when they got stuck – as well as some specific things about our website and subject guides. I did follow-up interviews with 7 of the undergraduates and 6 of the grad students on an even more amorphous topic: as they were engaged in a research project, what were the moments that made them really excited? What brought them delight in their research? Other projects then intervened, but I’ve finally got around to analyzing what students told me about delightful research moments.

As an aside, let me say how wonderful it was to listen to students reflect on what brought them joy. So much nicer than subjecting them to a frustrating usability test! It was a glorious way to spend my time.

Overall, a few themes emerged:

• Having a sense of progress
  • Many of the students talked about either making steady progress or having breakthroughs. Finding the right article, or search terms that then broke the topic open for them. Brainstorming with someone to solidify or advance their ideas. Realizing that they had something to write about; that they were actually going to be able to complete the assignment or project.
• Working with, or getting feedback from, other people
  • Brainstorming was a common theme, as was having someone read a draft and provide feedback. Receiving and acting on feedback would either help shape their ideas or hone the expression of those ideas.
• Connection
  • Connection came in many forms: having a personal connection to a topic, connecting a topic to real people, feeling a connection with a professor or TA while working on the project, wanting their research to connect with the wider world or seeing how that could happen.

It was in this last point – connection – that I started seeing differences between undergraduates and graduate students, and I find these points of difference more interesting than the overall themes.

Undergraduates spoke more about feeling a connection to their topic; either the importance of choosing a topic of interest to them or the difference it made when their topic was one they were really interested in.

“Knowing that I was interested in that made it… it’s almost like regardless of how difficult it’s going to be, it’s not going to be a pain in my butt. Because I’m actually going to enjoy doing it even if it’s difficult.” (4th year student)

Graduate students spoke more about how their research would connect with the wider world.

“It is kind of also exciting to say, like, OK I think there’s a good chance that if I do this right and put it out, it will cause a discussion.” (grad student)

“I have to take these moments where I come back to where I started and think about who are the actual people involved in this and who, you know, how are these decisions actually affecting lives? And I think those are the moments where I’m like “Ah, yes, this is important. This matters to people.”” (grad student)

In talking about their research projects, undergrads used the word “interest” more while grad students used the word “important” more. And no, I didn’t make a word cloud (ick) but rather looked at word frequency as a way to check on my impressions.

A few themes seemed to be specific to undergraduate students. Although certainly no one used this word, the idea of “mastery” came up with several undergrads. They spoke about internalizing their topics, about getting better at organizing their time and their thoughts, improving their search strategies, getting better at writing, asking more for feedback.

“When it comes to doing an action you have to have a certain level of familiarity with the action, then eventually you say, like, this is what I do now… and feel proud of that. And then that helps you even perform better when you do that action the next time and it makes you that much more efficient and motivated.” (4th year student)

Getting good grades was a theme for undergraduates, always followed up with how getting a good grade made them want to continue to get good grades, so it made them want to work harder. Good grades also increased confidence, and many noted that this increased confidence led to better work habits, which then kept those good grades coming.

“Until that time I never got A in my, any subject. I used to get B, C. So that was so thrilling. And I was so, because I experienced after that, that when you get A, your confidence level just boosts.” (3rd year student)

“That moment I started to like that research because I came to figure out that it’s possible, like, I can do it as long as I work hard.” (4th year student)

Many of the undergraduates talked about how they found joy when writing began to come easily to them. Three students specifically talked about “flow” as they were writing and others described it in other words (and no, no one name-checked Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi). Flow came in different ways and meant different things to them. One student said she could tell that she was interested in a topic if the words were still flowing after writing two pages. Another said the words were “flowing freely” during a presentation because he was so familiar with the literature. Others said that because they had a topic of interest, the writing flowed out.

“The more I read, the more interested I got on it. It allowed me to type more [laughs], like… words flowed freely.” (3rd year student)

Flow was clearly a good sign; a sign of interest, a sign of mastery, an indicator of delight.

So what does this mean for libraries? Well, I’m not sure yet; I want to mull it over a bit longer. If you have thoughts, please share them!

User Research for Everyone: Conference Notes

This was a virtual conference from Rosenfeld Media; a full day of sessions all about user research. Have a look at the program to see what a great lineup of speakers there was. Here are the bits that stood out for me.

Erika Hall: Just Enough Research

First off, Erika won me over right away with her first slide:

I found she spoke more about the basic whys and hows of research, rather than how to do “just enough,” but she was so clear and engaging that I really enjoyed it anyway. Selected sound bites:

• Keep asking research questions, but the answers will keep changing
• Assumptions are risks
• Research is fundamentally destabilizing to authority because it challenges the power dynamic; asking questions is threatening
• Think about how your design decisions might make someone’s job easier. Or harder. (and not just your users, but your colleagues)
• Focus groups are best used as a source of ideas to research, not research itself
• 3 steps to conducting an interview: set up, warm up, shut up
• You want your research to prove you wrong as quickly as possible

Leah Buley: The Right Research Method For Any Problem (And Budget)

Leah nicely set out stages of research and methods and tools that work best for each stage. I didn’t take careful notes because there was a lot of detail (and I can go back and look at the slides when I need to), but here are the broad strokes:

• What is happening around us?
  • Use methods to gain an understanding of the bigger picture and to frame where the opportunities are (futures research fits in here too – blerg)
• What do people need?
  • Ethnographic methods fit in nicely here. Journey maps can point out possible concepts or solutions
• What can we make that will help?
  • User research with prototypes / mockups. New to me was the 5-second test, where you show a screen to a user for 5 seconds, take it away and then ask questions about it. (I’m guessing this assume that what people remember corresponds with what resonates with them – either good or bad.)
• Does our solution actually work?
  • Traditional usability testing fits in here, as does analytics.
  • I kind of like how this question is separated from the last, so that you think about testing your concept and then testing your implementation of the concept. I can imagine it being difficult to write testing protocols that keep them separate though, especially as you start iterating the design.
• What is the impact?
  • Analytics obviously come into play here, but again, it’s important to separate this question about impact from the previous one about the solution just working. Leah brought up Google’s HEART framework: Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention, and Task Success. Each of these is then divided into Goals (what do we want?), Signals (what will tell us this?), and Metrics (how do we measure success?).

Nate Bolt: How to Find and Recruit Amazing Participants for User Research

Recruiting participants is probably my least favourite part of user research, but I’m slowly coming around to the idea that it will always be thus. And that I’m incredibly lucky to be constantly surrounded by my target audience. Nate talked about different recruitment strategies, including just talking to the first person you see. For him, one of the downsides of that was that the person is unlikely to be in your target audience or care about your interface. Talking to the first person I see is how I do most of my recruiting. And it also works really well because they are very likely to be in my target audience and care about my interface. Yay!

One comment of Nate’s stood out most for me: If someone doesn’t like your research findings, they’ll most likely attack your participants before they’ll attack your methods. This is familiar to me: “But did you talk to any grad students?” “Were these all science students?” Nate recommended choosing your recruitment method based on how likely these kinds of objections are to sideline your research; if no one will take your results seriously unless your participants meet a certain profile, then make sure you recruit that profile.

Julie Stanford: Creating a Virtual Cycle: The Research and Design Feedback Loop

Julie spoke about the pitfalls of research and design being out of balance on a project. She pointed out how a stronger emphasis on research than design could lead to really bad interfaces (though this seemed to be more the case when you’re testing individual elements of a design rather than whole). Fixing one thing can always end up breaking something else. Julie suggested two solutions:

1. Have the same person do both research and design
2. Follow a 6-step process

Now, I am the person doing both research and design (with help, of course), so I don’t really need the process. But I also know that I’m much stronger on the research side than on the design side, so it’s important to think about pitfalls. A few bits that resonated with me:

• When evaluating research findings, give each issue a severity rating to keep it in perspective. Keep an eye out for smaller issues that together suggest a larger issue.
• Always come up with multiple possible solutions to the problem, especially if one solution seems obvious. Go for both small and large fixes and throw in a few out-there ideas.
• When evaluating possible solutions (or really, anytime), if your team gets in an argument loop, take a sketch break and discuss from there. Making the ideas more concrete can help focus the discussion.

Abby Covert: Making Sense of Research Findings

I adore Abby Covert. Her talk at UXCamp Ottawa in 2014 was a huge highlight of that conference for me. I bought her book immediately afterward and tried to lend it to everyone, saying “youhavetoreadthisitsamazing.” So, I was looking forward to this session.

And it was great. She took the approach that making sense of research findings was essentially the same as making sense of any other mess, and applied her IA process to find clarity. I took a ridiculous amount of notes, but will try to share just the highlights:

• This seems really obvious, but I’m not sure I actually do it: Think about how your method will get you the answer you’re looking for. What do you want to know? What’s the best way to find that out?
• Abby doesn’t find transcriptions all that useful. They take so much time to do, and then to go through. She finds it easier to take notes and grab the actual verbatims that are interesting. And she now does her notetaking immediately after every session (rather than stacking the sessions one after another). She does not take notes in the field.
• Abby takes her notes according to the question that is being asked/answered, rather than just chronologically. Makes analysis easier.
• When you’re doing quantitative research, write sample findings ahead of time to make sure that you are going to capture all the data necessary to create those findings. Her slide is likely clearer:
  
• Think about the UX of your research results. Understand the audience for your results and create a good UX for them. A few things to consider:
  • What do they really need to know about your methodology?
  • What questions are they trying to answer?
  • What objections might they have to the findings? Or the research itself?
• In closing, Abby summarized her four key points as:
  1. Keep capture separate from interpretation
  2. Plan the way you capture to support what you want to know
  3. Understand your audience for research
  4. Create a taxonomy that supports the way you want your findings to be used

I have quite a few notes on that last point that seemed to make sense at the time, but I think “create a good UX for the audience of your results” covers it sufficiently.

Cindy Alvarez: Infectious Research

Cindy’s theme was that research – like germs – is not inherently lovable; you can’t convince people to love research, so you need to infect them with it. Essentially, you need to find a few hosts and then help them be contagious in order to help your organization be more receptive to research. Kind of a gross analogy, really. But definitely a few gems for people finding it difficult to get any buy-in in their organization:

• Create opportunities by finding out:
  • What problems do people already complain about?
  • What are the areas no is touching ?
• Lower people’s resistance to research:
  • Find out who or what they trust (to find a way in)
  • Ask point-blank “What would convince you to change your decision?”
  • Think about how research could make their lives worse
  • “People are more receptive to new ideas when they think it was their idea.” <– there was a tiny bit of backlash on Twitter about this, but a lot of people recognized it as a true thing. I feel like I’m too dumb to lie to or manipulate people; being honest is just easier to keep track of. If I somehow successfully convinced someone that my idea was theirs, probably the next day I’d say something like “hey, thanks for agreeing with my idea!”
• Help people spread a message by giving them a story to tell.
• Always give lots of credit to other people. Helping a culture of research spread is not about your own ego.

Final thoughts

It’s been interesting finishing up this post after reading Donna Lanclos’ blog post on the importance of open-ended inquiry, particularly related to UX and ethnography in libraries. This conference was aimed mostly at user researchers in business operations. Erika Hall said that you want your research to prove you wrong as quickly as possible; essentially, you want research to help you solve the right problem quickly so that you can make (more) money. All the presenters were focused on how to do good user research efficiently. Open-ended inquiry isn’t about efficiency. As someone doing user research in academic libraries, I don’t have these same pressures to be efficient with my research. What a privilege! So I now want to go back and think about these notes of mine with Donna’s voice in my head:

So open-ended work without a hard stop is increasingly scarce, and reserved for people and institutions who can engage in it as a luxury (e.g. Macarthur Genius Grant awardees).  But this is to my mind precisely wrong.  Open exploration should not be framed as a luxury, it should be fundamental.

… How do we get institutions to allow space for exploration regardless of results?

Redesigning our Subject Guides: Student-First and Staff-Friendly

I presented about our Web Committee’s redesign project at Access 2016 in Fredericton, NB on October 5, 2016. We started doing user research for the project in October 2015 and launched the new guides in June 2016 so it took a while, but I’m really proud of the process we followed. Below is a reasonable facsimile of what I said at Access. (UPDATE: here’s the video of the session)

Our existing subject guides were built in 2011 as a custom content type in Drupal and they were based on the tabbed approach of LibGuides. Unlike LibGuides, tab labels were hard-coded; you didn’t have to use all of them but you could only choose from this specific set of tabs. And requests for more tabs kept coming. It felt a bit arbitrary to say no to tab 16 after agreeing to tab 15.

We knew the guides weren’t very mobile-friendly but they really were no longer desktop-friendly either. So we decided we needed a redesign.

Rather than figure out how to shoe-horn this existing content into a new design, we decided we’d take a step back and do some user research to see what the user needs were for subject guides. We do user testing fairly regularly, but this ended up being the biggest user research project we’ve done.

• Student user research:
  • We did some guerrilla-style user research in the library lobby with 11 students: we showed them our existing guide and a model used at another library and asked a couple of quick questions to give us a sense of what we needed to explore further
  • I did 10 in-depth interviews with undergraduate students and 7 in-depth interviews with grad students. There were some questions related to subject guides, but also general questions about their research process: how they got started, what they do when they get stuck. When I talked to the grad students, I asked if they were TAs and if they were, I asked some extra questions about their perspectives on their students’ research and needs around things like subject guides.
  • One of the big takeaways from the research with students is likely what you would expect: they want to be able to find what they need quickly. Below is all of the content from a single subject guide and the highlighted bits are what students are mostly looking for in a guide: databases, citation information, and contact information for a librarian or subject specialist. It’s a tiny amount in a sea of content.

I assumed that staff made guides like this for students; they put all that information in, even though there’s no way students are going to read it all. That assumption comes with a bit of an obnoxious eye roll: staff clearly don’t understand users like I understand users or they wouldn’t create all this content.  Well, we did some user research with our staff, and turns out I didn’t really understand staff as a user group.

• Staff user research
  • We did a survey of staff to get a sense of how they use guides, what’s important to them, target audience, pain points – all at a high level
  • Then we did focus groups to probe some of these things more deeply
  • Biggest takeaway from the research with staff is that guides are most important for their teaching and for helping their colleagues on the reference desk when students have questions. Students themselves are not the primary target audience. I found this surprising.

We analyzed all of the user research, looked at our web analytics and came up with a set of design criteria based on everything we’d learned. But we still had this issue that staff wanted all the things, preferably on one page and students wanted quick access to a small number of resources. We were definitely tempted to focus exclusively on students but about 14% of subject guide use comes from staff computers, so they’re a significant user group. We felt it was important to come up with a design that would also be useful for them. In Web Committee, we try to make things “intuitive for students and learn-able for staff.” Student-first but staff-friendly.

Since the guides seemed to have these two distinct user groups, we thought maybe we need two versions of subject guides. And that’s what we did; we made a quick guide primarily for students, and a detailed guide primarily for staff.

We created mockups of two kinds of guides based on our design criteria. Then we did user tests of the mockups with students, iterating the designs a few times as we saw things that didn’t work. We ended up testing with a total of 17 students.

Once we felt confident that the guides worked well for students, we presented the designs to staff and again met with them in small groups to discuss. Reaction was quite positive. We had included a lot of direct quotations from students in our presentation and staff seemed to appreciate that we’d based our design decisions on what students had told us. No design changes came out of our consultations with staff; they had a lot of questions about how they would fit their content into the design, but they didn’t have any issues with the design itself. So we built the new guide content types in Drupal and created documentation with how-tos and best practices based on our research. We opened the new guides for editing on June 13, which was great because it gave staff most of the summer to work on their new guides.

Quick Guide

The first of the two guides is the Quick Guide, aimed at students. I described it to staff as the guide that would help a student who has a paper due tomorrow and is starting after the reference desk has closed for the day.

• Hard limit of 5 Key Resources
• Can have fewer than 5, but you can’t have more.
• One of the students we talked to said: “When you have less information you focus more on something that you want to find; when you have a lot of information you start to panic: “Which one should I do? This one? Oh wait.” And then you start to forget what you’re looking for.” She’s describing basic information overload, but it’s nice to hear it in a student’s own words.
• Some students still found this overwhelming, so we put a 160-character limit on annotations.
• We recommend that databases feature prominently on this list, based on what students told us and our web analytics: Databases are selected 3x more than any other resource in subject guides
• We also recommend not linking to encyclopedias and dictionaries. Encyclopedias and Dictionaries were very prominent on the tabbed Subject Guides but they really aren’t big draws for students (student quotations from user research: “If someone was to give this to me, I’d be like, yeah, I see encyclopedias, I see dictionaries… I’m not really interested in doing any of these, or looking through this, uh, I’m outta here.”)

• Related Subject Guides and General Research Help Guides
• Link to Detailed Guide if people want more information on the same subject. THERE DOES NOT HAVE TO BE A DETAILED GUIDE.
• Added benefit of the 2-version approach is that staff can use existing tabbed guides as the “Detailed Guides” until they are removed in Sept.2017. I think part of the reason we didn’t feel much pushback was that people didn’t have to redo all of their guides right away; there was this transition time.

Detailed Guide

• From a design point of view, the Detailed Guide is simpler than the Quick Guide. Accordions instead of tabs
  • Mobile-friendly
  • Students all saw all the accordions. Not all students saw the tabs (that’s a problem people have found in usability testing of LibGuides too)
• Default of 5 accordions for the same reasons that Key Resources were limited to 5 – trying to avoid information overload – but because target audience is staff and not students, they can ask for additional accordions. We wanted there to be a small barrier to filling up the page, so here’s someone adding the 5^th accordion, and once they add that 5^th section the “Add another item” button is disabled and they have to ask us to create additional accordions. 
• There’s now flexibility in both the labels and the content. Staff can put as much content as they want within the accordion – text, images, video, whatever – but we do ask them to be concise and keep in mind that students have limited time. I really like this student’s take and made sure to include this quotation in our presentation to staff as well as in our documentation:
  • When I come across something… I’ll skim through it and if I don’t see anything there that’s immediately helpful to me, it’s a waste of my time and I need to go do something else that is actually going to be helpful to me .

And speaking of time, thank you for yours.

UXLibs II: Conference Thoughts

My UXLibs II experience started with the opening reception. There was a bit of a lull at the bar as I checked out the drinks menu, so the bartender said he’d make me a nice garnish while I decided. He then proceeded to carve a couple of limes into a fish(!) and gave it rather smashing strawberry eyes. I was utterly delighted during the entire process and then had a drink that acted as a fun ice-breaker for the rest of the evening, helping me to connect with some lovely people for great conversations.

And that – great connections with lovely people – continued throughout the conference (though I didn’t have my little lime-fish friend after Wednesday).

UXLibs is an intense conference, demanding a level of focus and engagement that I just don’t feel other conferences. The hands-on workshops and the team challenge mean that we’re not just listening and thinking to ourselves, but we’re creating and thinking with other people. Connecting. Collaborating. It’s really rather marvelous.

The conference organizers have thought a lot about the UX of UXLibs. For instance: everyone’s name badge had a personalized program inside, and beside the listing for my own presentation was a little “Good luck!” A small touch but a delightful one, like my little lime-fish. On Friday, the organizers were clearly exhausted and devastated and chose to be vulnerable and open about how they were feeling. The honesty and hard work (and fun!) the team models made it easier for me to be honest and open and to work hard and have fun too.

This year, the referendum loomed, creating low-level anxiety on Thursday and general sadness on Friday. Friday was hard for a lot of people. As a Canadian I’m a bit detached, but absolutely felt the heartbreak around me. First thing in the morning, Andy underlined the importance of us all being kind to each other and it felt like that really happened. Not that people were unkind on Thursday, but Friday felt different somehow. Emotions were definitely heightened and the sense of community felt heightened too. Last year I said that UXLibs was the best conference I’d ever been to. UXLibs II feels like it might be the best community I’ve ever belonged to.

How UXLibs II will have an impact on my work

I took away a lot from the conference, but Andy Pristner’s workshop on cultural probes – while also making my inner 10 year old snicker – has me really keen to try this method for my project on delight in the research process. How can I not try such a delightful method to explore delight itself? I’ll have to finish analyzing the data I’ve already gathered first, but I’m very excited about future possibilities!

When Ned described the team challenge this year, I’ll admit that I wasn’t immediately won over. I was in the Marketing Up category, where we had to pitch to senior management. I feel like my superpower in my job is that I seem to fly below the radar of senior management. Or at least they’re happy enough with what I do that they let me keep doing it, but are not so interested that they want or need to know much about it. (The latter isn’t ideal, but if it leads directly to the former then I’m not complaining. Yet.) So I thought the pitch wouldn’t be all that relevant to me. But my team was wonderful. Everyone was generous in both offering ideas and (this can be less common) letting go of them. People were happy to step up and happy to step back. It reminded me a bit of my beloved Web Committee; we worked hard but it didn’t feel hard. And after creating our pitch, hearing the other teams’ pitches, and mulling over bits from Donna Lanclos and Lawrie Phipps, I’m starting to realize that flying under the radar will not be a superpower for much longer. I will need to step up to not just do the work (and wow oh wow do I ever love doing this work) but I’ll need to start advocating for it to be a larger thing. I think I’m doing some good things in “stealth leadership” mode at the moment, but I need to think about when and how to go beyond, to amp up my swagger and diplomacy (à la Deirdre Costello).

Finally, I’m keen to embark on more collaborative projects. I have a sabbatical coming up in a couple of years, and I don’t think I’m constitutionally suited to squirreling myself away and working on my own. I feel like I could reach out to the UXLibs community (beyond my fellow Canadians) to find collaborators. Perhaps even on a larger-scale project like Donna was talking about in the final panel. It may not happen, but the possibility is exciting.

I’m already looking forward to UXLibs III, reconnecting with this lovely community and making new connections.

My personalized program/name badge plus winning key ring/bottle opener

UXLibs II: Conference Notes

As always with my conference notes, this isn’t a faithful summing up, but rather a few of the points that stuck out most for me. I’ll follow this up with a more reflective piece.

I haven’t added in anything about my own presentation, but have uploaded the pdf version of it: “From user-testing to user research: Collaborating to improve library websites.” I’ve also uploaded the pdf version of my poster: “Cram it all in! Exploring delight in the research process. And Summon. Oh, and subject guides too” in case you’re interested.

Andy Priestner: Opening address

Andy told us a couple of stories about his recent experiences on trains in Hong Kong and Melbourne. Despite the language barrier, he found the Hong Kong trains to be much easier to use, and in fact, made the experience so enjoyable that he and his family sought out opportunities to take the train: “Hey, if we go to that restaurant across town instead of the one down the street we could take the train!”(this isn’t a direct quote)

My notes on this read:

How can we help students not feel like they’re in a foreign place in the library?

How can we help the library feel desirable?

But now that I think about it, that first point is totally unecessary. Feeling like you’re in a foreign place isn’t the problem; it can actually be quite wonderful and exciting. Being made to feel unwelcome is the problem, regardless of whether the place is foreign or familiar. So I quite like the idea of trying to make the library feel desirable. I think my own library does this reasonably well with our physical space (we’re often full to bursting with students) but it’s a nice challenge for our virtual spaces.

Andy also talked about Ellen Isaacs idea of “the hidden obvious” when describing library staff reaction to his team’s user research findings. He also mentioned Dan North on uncertainty: “We would rather be wrong than be uncertain.” These two ideas returned at other times during the next two days.

Donna Lanclos: Keynote

Donna also told us stories. She told us stories about gardens and her mother’s advice that if you plant something new and it dies, you plant something else. With “Failed” as one of the conference streams, this key next step of “plant something else” is important to keep in mind. Failing and then learning from failure is great. But we must go on to try again. We must plant something else. Not just say “well, that didn’t work, let’s figure out what we learned and not do that again.” Plant something else.

Donna’s mother also said, though, that “sometimes the plant dies because of you.” So that maybe, sometimes, it’s not that you need to plant something else. You just need to plant the same thing and be more careful with it. Or maybe someone else should plant it or look after it.

Another point from this garden story was that there are always people in the library who take particular pains to keep lists of all the dead plants. People who say “we tried that before and it didn’t work.” Or who make it clear they think you shouldn’t try to plant anything at all. Or who cling too strongly to some of those dead plants; who never intend to plant again because of it. Don’t keep a list of the dead plants. Or maybe keep a list but not at the forefront of your mind.

Donna told us another story about her fieldwork in Northern Ireland. How she found it difficult to be gathering folklore when there were bigger issues; problems that needed fixing. Advice she got then and passed on to us was that just because you can’t fix problems with your ethnographic work doesn’t mean that you can’t do anything, that you aren’t doing anything. Gathering understanding – a new and different understanding – is valid and valuable work and it’s different work than solving problems.

She argued that ethnographic work is not about finding and solving problems but about meaning. Finding out what something means, or if you don’t know what it means, figuring out what you think it means. The work can help with small wins but is really about much more. This is a theme Donne and Andrew discussed further in the wrap-up panel on Friday.

Finally, I have this note that I can’t at all remember the context for, but boy do I like it anyway:

Not risk, but possibility

Jenny Morgan: UX – Small project/ high value?

Jenny’s was the first of the Nailed, Failed, Derailed sessions I attended and she was a wonderfully calm presenter – something I always admire since I often feel like a flailing goon. She spoke about a project she led, focusing on international students at her library at Leeds Beckett University. A couple of my take-aways:

• They asked students how they felt about the library. I like this affective aspect and think it ties in with what Andy was talking about with making the library desirable.
• Students don’t think of the whole building; despite the library making printers available in the same place on every floor, students didn’t realize there were printers on any floor other than the one they were on. As a consequence, students would stand in line to use printers on one floor instead of going to another floor where printers were available. Of course this makes sense, but library staff often think of the whole building and forget that our users only use, see, and know about a tiny portion.
• The international students they spoke to found the library too noisy and were hesitant to ask the “home” students to be quiet. They didn’t like the silent study areas or the study carrels; they wanted quiet, but not silent.
• International students are often on campus at times when “home” students are not (e.g. holidays, break times). They like going to the library for the community that they can’t find elsewhere, often because everywhere else is closed. This hit home for me because our campus really shuts down at the Christmas break, and even the library is closed. It made me wonder where our international students go for that feeling of community.

Carl Barrow: Getting back on the rails by spreading the load

One of the first things that struck me about Carl’s presentation was his job title – Student Engagement Manager – and that Web is included under his purview. I think I would love that job.

Carl was really open and honest in his presentation. He talked about being excited about what he learned at UXLibs and wanting to start doing user research with those methods, but feeling hesitant. And then he looked deeper into why he was feeling hesitant, and realized part of it was his own fear of failure. Hearing him be so honest about how his initial enthusiasm was almost sidetracked by fear was really refreshing. Conference presenters usually (and understandably) want to come off as polished and professional, and talking about feelings tends not to enter into it. But it makes so much sense at a UX conference – where we spend a fair bit of time talking about our users’ feelings – to talk about our own feelings as well. I really appreciated this about Carl’s talk. A few other points I noted down:

• He trained staff on the ethnographic methods he wanted to use and then (this is the really good bit) he had them practice those methods on students who work in the library. This seemed to me to be a great way for staff to ease in: unfamiliar methods made less scary by using them with familiar people.
• Something that made me think of Andy’s point about “the hidden obvious”: they realized through their user research that the silent reading room had services located in the space (e.g. printers, laptop loans) that made it rather useless for silent study. I personally love how user research can make us see these things, turning “the hidden obvious” to “the blindingly obvious.”
• I just like this note of mine: “Found that signage was bad. (Signage is always bad.)”
• They found that because people were not sure what they could do from the library’s information points (computer kiosk-type things), they simply stayed away from them. At my own library, trying to make our kiosks suck less is one of my next projects, so this was absolutely relevant to me.

Deirdre Costello: Sponsor presentation from EBSCO

Last year, Deirdre rocked her sponsor presentation and this year was no different. I was still a bit loopy from having done my own presentation and then gone right to my poster, so honestly, this was the only sponsor presentation I took notes on. My brain went on strike for a bit after this.

Deirdre talked about how to handle hard questions when you’re either presenting user research results, or trying to convince someone to let you do user research in the first place. One of those was “Are you sure about your sample?” and she said the hidden questions behind this was “Are you credible?” It reminded me about a presentation I did where I (in part) read out a particularly insightful love letter from a user, and someone’s notes on that part of the presentation read “n=1”: surely meant to be a withering slam.

Other points I took away from Deirdre:

• Sometimes you need to find ways for stakeholders to hear the message from someone who is not you (her analogy was that you can become a teenager’s mom; once you’ve said something once, they can’t stand to hear the same thing from you again).
• One great way of doing the above is through videos with student voices. She said students like being on video and cracking jokes, and this can create a valuable and entertaining artifact to show your stakeholders.
• Again related to all this, Deidre talked about the importance of finding champions who can do things you can’t. She said that advocacy requires a mix of swagger and diplomacy, and if you’re too much on the swagger side then you need a champion who can do the diplomacy part for you.

Andrea Gasparini: A successful introduction of User Experience as a strategic tool for service and user centric organizations

Apologies to Andrea: I know I liked his session but the notes I took make almost no sense at all. I got a bit distracted when he was talking about his co-author being a product designer at his library at the University of Oslo. The day before I came to UXLibs II, I met with Jenn Phillips-Bacher who was one of my team-mates at the first UXLibs. Jenn does fabulously cool things at the Wellcome Library and is getting a new job title that includes either “product designer” or “product manager” and we had talked a bit about what that means and how it changes things for her and for the library. That discussion came back to me during Andrea’s session and took me away from the presentation at hand for a while.

The only semi-coherent note I do have is:

• Openness to design methods implies testing and learning

Ingela Wahlgren: What happens when you let a non-user loose in the library?

Ingela described how a whole range of methods were used at Lund University library to get a bigger picture of their user experience. She then went into depth about a project that she and her colleague Åsa Forsberg undertook, trying to get the non-user’s perspective.

One UX method that was taught at last year’s UXLibs was “touchstone tours,” where a user takes the researcher on a tour of a space (physical or virtual). This lets the researcher experience the space from the user’s point of view and see the bits that are most useful or meaningful to them. Ingela and  Åsa wanted to have a non-user of the library take them on a touchstone tour. They might see useful and meaningful parts of the library, but more importantly would see what was confusing and awful for a new user. I thought this was a brilliant idea!

Most of the presentation, then, was Ingela taking the audience along for the touchstone tour she had with a non-user. With lots of pictures of what they had seen and experienced, Ingela clearly demonstrated how utterly frustrating the experience had been. And yet, after this long and frustrating experience, the student proclaimed that it had all gone well and she was very satisfied. ACK! What a stunningly clear reminder that what users say is not at all as important as what they do, and also how satisfaction surveys do not tell us the true story of our users’ experience.

Ingela won the “best paper” prize for this presentation at the gala dinner on Thursday night. Well-deserved!

Team Challenge

The team challenge this year focused on advocacy. There were three categories:

• Marketing Up (advocating to senior management)
• Collaboration (advocating to colleagues in other areas)
• Recruitment (advocating to student groups)

Attendees were in groups of about 8 and there were 5 groups per category. We had less than 2 hours on Thursday and an additional 45 minutes on Friday to prepare our 7-minute pitches to our respective audiences. I was in team M1, so Marketing Up to senior management. I’m going to reflect on this in my Conference Thoughts post, but there are a few notes below from the other teams’ presentations.

Andy Priestner: Welcome to Day 2

Friday was a sombre day, with the results of the Brexit vote. Andy has written a lovely post about writing and delivering his Welcome to Day 2 speech. I will have my own reflections in my upcoming Conference Thoughts post. But suffice it to say, Andy’s speech was spot-on, clearly appreciated by the audience, and left me rather teary.

Lawrie Phipps: Keynote

I got a bit lost at some of the UK-specific vocabulary and content of Lawrie’s keynote, but he made some really rather wonderful points:

• Don’t compromise the vision you have before you share it. He talked about how we often anticipate responses to our ideas before we have a chance to share them, and that this can lead to internally deciding on compromises. His point was that if you make those compromises before you’ve articulated your vision to others, you’re more likely to compromise rather than sticking to your guns. Don’t compromise before it’s actually necessary.
• Incremental changes, when you make enough of them, can be transformative. You don’t have to make a huge change in order to make a difference. This was nice to hear because it’s absolutely how I approach things, particularly on the library website.
• Use your external network of people to tell your internal stakeholders things because often external experts are more likely to be listened to or believed. (Deirdre Costello had said pretty much the same thing in her presentation. It can be hard on the ego, but is very often true.)
• “Leadership is often stealthy.” Yes, I would say that if/when I show leadership, it is pretty much always stealthy.
• Finally, Lawrie talked about the importance of documenting your failures. It’s not enough to fail and learn from your failures, you have to document them so that other people learn from them too, otherwise the failure is likely to be repeated again and again.

Team Challenge Presentations

I didn’t take as many notes as I should have during the team presentations. The other teams in my group certainly raised a lot of good points, but the only one I made special note of was from Team M5:

• There are benefits to students seeing our UX work, even when they aren’t directly involved. It demonstrates that we care. Students are often impressed that the library is talking to students or observing student behaviour – that we are seeking to understand them. This can go a long way to generating goodwill and have students believe that we are genuinely trying to help them.

My team (M1) ended up winning the “Marketing Upwards” challenge, which was rather nice although I don’t think any of us were keen to repeat our pitch to the whole conference! We thought the fire alarm might get us out of it, but no luck. (Donna Lanclos – one of our judges – later said that including the student voice and being very specific about what we wanted were definitely contributing factors in our win. This feels very “real world” to me and was nice feedback to hear.)

There were a couple of points from the winning Collaboration team (C4) that I took note of:

• Your networks are made up of people who are your friends, and people who may owe you favours. Don’t be afraid to make use of that.
• Even if a collaborative project fails, the collaboration itself can still be a success. Don’t give up on a collaborative relationship just because the outcome wasn’t what you’d hoped.

Again, my brain checked out a bit during team R2’s winning Recruitment pitch. (I was ravenous and lunch was about to begin.) There was definitely uproarious laughter for Bethany Sherwood’s embodiment of the student voice.

Andrew Asher: Process Interviews

I chose the interviews workshop with Andrew Asher because when I was transcribing interviews I did this year, I was cringing from time to time and knew I needed to beef up my interview skills. I was also keen to get some help with coding because huge chunks of those interviews are still sitting there, waiting to be analyzed. Some good bits:

• You generally will spend 3-4 hours analyzing for each 1 hour interview
• Different kinds of interviews: descriptive (“tell me about”), demonstration (“show me”), and elicitation (using prompts such as cognitive maps, photos)
• Nice to start with a throwaway question to act as an icebreaker. (I know this and still usually forget to include it. Maybe now it will stick.)

We practiced doing interviews and reflected on that experience. I was an interviewee and felt bad that I’d chosen a situation that didn’t match the questions very well. It was interesting to feel like a participant who wanted to please the interviewer, and to reflect on what the interviewer could have said to lessen the feeling that I wasn’t being a good interviewee. (I really don’t know the answer to that one.)

We looked at an example of a coded interview and practiced coding ourselves. There wasn’t a lot of time for this part of the workshop, but it’s nice to have the example in-hand, and also to know that there is really no big trick to it. Like so much, it really just takes doing it and refining your own approach.

Andy Priestner: Cultural Probes

I had never heard of cultural probes before this, and Andy started with a description and history of their use. Essentially, cultural probes are kits of things like maps, postcards, cameras, and diaries that are given to groups of people to use to document their thoughts, feelings, behaviour, etc.

Andy used cultural probes earlier this year in Cambridge to explore the lives of postdocs. His team’s kit included things like a diary pre-loaded with handwritten questions for the participants to answer, task envelopes that they would open and complete at specific times, pieces of foam to write key words on, and other bits and pieces. They found that the participants were really engaged with the project and gave very full answers. (Perhaps too full; they’re a bit overwhelmed with the amount of data the project has given them.)

After this, we were asked to create a cultural probe within our table groups. Again, there wasn’t a lot of time for the exercise but all the groups managed to come up with something really interesting.

I loved this. In part it was just fun to create (postcards, stickers, foam!) but it was also interesting to try to think about what would make it fun for participants to participate.  When I was doing cognitive maps and love letters/break-up letters with students last summer, one of them was really excited by how much fun it had been – so much better than filling out a survey. It’s easier to convince someone to participate in user research if they’re having a good time while doing it.

Panel Discussion (Ange, Andrew, Lawrie, Donna, Matthew)

The next-to-last thing on the agenda was a panel discussion. We’d been asked to write down any questions we had for the panelists ahead of time and Ned Potter chose a few from the pile. A few notes:

• In response to a question about how to stop collecting data (which is fun) and start analyzing it (which is hard), Matthew Reidsma recommended the book Just Enough Research by Erika Hall. Other suggestions were: finding an external deadline by committing to a conference presentation or writing an article or report, working with a colleague who will keep you to a deadline, or having a project that relies on analyzing data before the project can move forward
• Responding to a question about any fears about the direction UX in libraries is taking, Donna spoke about the need to keep thinking long-term; not to simply use UX research for quick wins and problem-solving, but to really try to create some solid and in-depth understanding. I think it was Donna again who said that we can’t just keep striking out on our own with small projects; we must bring our champions along with us so that we can develop larger visions. Andrew and Donna are working on an article on this very theme for an upcoming issue of Weave.
• I don’t remember what question prompted this, but Ange Fitzpatrick talked about how she and colleague were able to get more expansive responses from students when they didn’t identify themselves as librarians. However, as team M5 had already mentioned and I believe it was Donna who reiterated at this point: students like to know that the library wants to know about them and cares about knowing them.
• Finally, to a question about how to choose the most useful method for a given project, there were two really good responses. Andrew said to figure out what information you need and what you need to do with that information, and then pick a method that will help you with those two things. He recommended the ERIAL toolkit (well, Donna recommended it really, but Andrew wrote the toolkit, so I’ll credit him). And Matthew responded that you don’t have to choose the most useful method, you just have to choose a useful method.

Andy Priestner: Conference Review

Andy ended the day with a nice wrap-up and call-out to the positive collaborations that had happened and would continue to happen in the UXLibs community. He also got much applause ending his review with “I am a European.”

Like last year, I left exhausted and exhilarated, anxious to put some of these new ideas into practice, and hoping to attend another UXLibs conference. Next year?