In response to COVID-19, many libraries have closed their physical buildings, offered fully remote services, and experienced staffing decreases, amid other disruptions. Despite this, administrators, consortia, and funding agencies will expect the same data that we report each year. This poses an interesting question: how do we communicate the value of what the library has been doing for our communities during these tumultuous times? Join Library UX Chicago for an online event exploring ways to think about data collection and apply storytelling techniques to convey value to administrators and stakeholders. We plan to discuss ways of documenting innovation in the libraries during COVID-19, strategic decision-making and goal setting using data that cannot be meaningfully benchmarked, the short-term impact of maintaining typical data collection methods, and more.
Call for Participation! Library UX is looking for lightning round presenters to share ideas they have for framing library data for administrators, methods for collaboratively establishing a value framework, or experience with applying communication or storytelling techniques to library data. Brief presentations (about 10 minutes) will be given via Zoom followed by an open discussion. If you have ideas, concepts, or lessons-learned to share with the group, please email Abby Annala at [email protected] or Devin Savage at [email protected]. RSVP for the Event Thursday, October 1, 2020 3:30 pm - 5:00 pm Location: Zoom A link to the Zoom session will be provided upon registration. This session will not be recorded. RSVP here Name: Frank Sweis Title: User Experience Librarian Library: Northwestern Libraries You have worked in UX before, but are new to libraries. Have you found any similarities/differences in the work?
Yes! For context my last role before starting at the library was in IT. IT often needs to react to production support and client/business partner needs. These can add constraints to UX work in terms of effort, scope of research, and access to users. The biggest difference in my experience is that a sizable portion of our library staff interact with students and faculty daily, which means there are a lot of folks with a great understanding of the user perspective. In IT a lot of that knowledge lived in the teams doing the research, or our support staff (who were excellent!). I’ve been at NUL for only a few months, but I am excited about the level of expertise about users across teams. I think this allows for greater collaboration, and a proactive approach to problem solving; great ideas for our experiences can emerge from many places. What tools or methods have made the most difference in your work and why? I think the most successful method I utilize is inviting teammates (developers, project managers, product owners, etc.) to observe and/or participate in user research sessions. Having other members of the team with you helps streamline communication, quickly get to insights and solutions, and dispel any uncertainty your team might have about how or why we need to do user research. It’s very motivating to see a teammate, who hasn’t interacted with users previously, take notes, ask questions to participants, and generate ideas on how they’ll implement what they observed into their work. Do you have a specific project you are particularly proud of? Most of my projects for the library are currently in progress. Previous to my time in the library, I was part of a team redesigning a version of Northwestern’s alumni profile and directory. It was a fun project because we had a lot of space to research/design/test, but what I am most proud of is how that research and testing led to privacy decisions that benefitted the user. This included default settings that displayed less information, not more, clear communication about privacy, and a number of ways to control privacy. There was a lot of difference-of-opinion about privacy across the team and stakeholders, but the insight we collected from research helped reach a consensus across the team. The settings weren’t perfect, but the project showcased how UX is more than an easy-to-use interface, and how user research helps with decision making. What have you read lately? I have a terrible habit of trying to collect and read too many books at once, but this summer I thankfully slowed it down. In the UX world, I enjoyed Regine Gilbert’s Inclusive Design for a Digital World which is fairly comprehensive and a great resource to refer back to again and again. On the sci-fi side of things, I just started Martha Wells’ All Systems Red which is about a cyborg and its growing feelings of empathy (go figure…). |
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