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…). Tell us about how you integrate UX, assessment and/or design thinking in your work.
As a Reference + Instruction Librarian, I am constantly in a mode of revising and rethinking my job to be more conscious of the users’ overall experience. Working at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), our student population tend to be more visual and respond to contemporary issues. For me, integrating their information seeking behavior by adapting sessions to utilize these channels, helping me to to keep students engaged and challenge their notions of who librarians are. I aim to not only use reflection in my own practice, but to help create a culture in the library where reflection is encouraged at all levels of the library. Do you have a specific project you would like to share? Within the last few months my colleagues and I have started a few initiatives to get Flaxman Library up to speed in terms of current UX + Assessment practices. This includes taking more rigorous statistics, thinking more strategically about our place within the larger institution, and ensuring we are reflecting on our current policies and procedures with diversity and equity in mind. One especially exciting new collaboration is with SAIC’s department of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion to think more holistically about student and faculty experiences with the library and librarians, especially in terms of instruction. As our instruction program is becoming more defined and integrated within SAIC, we can serve as a good example of how necessary and important this collaboration is! How has Library UX Chicago helped you? The community of librarians and other UX professionals that participate in the events at UX Chicago makes this group really unique. I think that it has helped me to really consider the intentionality that UX brings to the table, but has also exposed me to fields of inquiry and professions that I didn’t even know existed! Or even better, the melding of two fields into something new and interesting, such as Dr. Kate McDowell and her work with Data Storytelling! Have you learned a new skill lately? Non related library skill: Embroidery Library related skill: Re-learning the newest Camtasia for making video tutorials! What tools or methods have made the most difference in your work and why? This may sounds cheesy, or dated, but I recently was able to relocate my office to be in the same space as my colleague Alison Rollins. Being in a space in which collaboration is fluid and open really changes how I work on a daily basis. I was really excited when she joined our team last April as she has such a different experience from my own in terms of librarianship - coming from teaching at a preparatory college, being successful poet, as well as a person of color. I really value all that she brings to our library as a colleague and friend. What’s the best part of your work day? Studio visits! Studio visits are essentially a reference interaction but in graduate students’ studio spaces. Getting out of the library and into a space in which the students feel comfortable and we can look at their work together, talk about their research practice, and what other ideas they might consider is one of the most interesting and rewarding parts of my job. Perhaps the other difference with these visits is that they are not usually focused around a specific question, but more organic, like research itself. Plus, it allows me to learn so much more about what students’ needs are in terms of resources! Tell us about how you integrate UX, assessment and/or design thinking in your work.
We are lucky enough to have a full-time User Experience Librarian on our team. With her help, we take my HTML design mockups and test them with patrons. The results from her testing are then assessed and used to update the mockups. After getting approval from the responsible Task Group, the mockups are handed-off to the developers to code. Since my mockups are created with html and Sass, my front-end code is easily transferred into production. This workflow allows us to test new layouts and features while they are still malleable and “inexpensive” to change. Since the mockups look like “the real thing” they also create a more realistic item to test with. Do you have a specific project you would like to share? We recently updated how our patrons request Interlibrary Loan/UBorrow/BorrowDirect materials. In the past when a patron wanted a book that we didn’t own, we asked them to make a choice as to which of the three services to get the item from. This meant that they had to go through each service themselves until they found the item they wanted. With the upgraded service, this choice is made on the backend. The patron just makes a request with a link from either WorldCat or our Catalog, and the materials show up in a few days. This project incorporated testing that was done years previously when we were first considering how we could improve upon our requesting services. This previous data informed the new user interface testing and was reiterated in the final report. I appreciated that we were able to dig into past testing and reuse that valuable data to inform our preliminary layouts and items to test with users. What have you read lately? My reading list has been eclectic lately, mainly because I am in a book club with two other coworkers. Every year, we choose a reading list to select books from and read one book a month from that list. (This year we are reading from The Lady Library curated by The Strand.) We get together over a lunch to discuss the book and decide on the next one to read. I would highly recommend starting a book club with coworkers; it is a great way to have an outside of work activity with your team and forces you to take at least one break a month to focus on non-work topics. What tools or methods have made the most difference in your work and why? My new favorite tool is one for project management rather than something UX specific. Since my job has me working on projects from different Library departments, I need a way to show how “expensive” a project was or that I am staying within the estimated hours. The web app Toggl has helped me easily track my hours by project and department. With this data, I can help prioritize upcoming feature requests or projects. My project manager uses this data to create a project plan for the quarter so that our team, and administration, has a general idea of the projects and features we will be releasing that quarter. How has Library UX Chicago helped you? Library UX Chicago has connected me with like-minded peers that I enjoy talking and seeing at each meetup. I appreciate the variety of topics covered and that different expertise levels are represented. It has also given me a platform to discuss and present projects I’ve worked on or are still working on. Additionally, as a presenter and an audience member, Library UX Chicago holds a space for me to talk about project failings or hang-ups without judgement (and sometimes I even get recommendations or solutions).
Tell us about how you integrate UX, assessment and/or design thinking in your work.
Due to the nature of my position, I think about design thinking within the context of instructional design. I try to focus on how I create an engaging, meaningful activity that achieves set learning goals and resonates with students beyond the duration of the class. The book Understanding by Design by Wiggins and McTighe was helpful to me in becoming more intentional about how I design a learning experience, particularly the idea of backward design. Do you have a specific project you would like to share? It wasn’t a major project, but I recently redesigned a scavenger hunt activity for a first-year class in an attempt to make it more student-centered (the old activity had become, or truthfully always was pretty staid). The class was based on the idea of Placemaking (you can learn more about the idea at http://www.placemakingchicago.com/). I had students explore the physical and virtual spaces of the library in small groups and devise their own “top ten” lists of how the space was useful, as well as how it might fall short in meeting their needs as community members. They then posted their lists on Padlet. It was interesting to see that students collectively discovered most of what I would’ve told them in a more controlled activity, and they provided useful feedback/assessment data on how website and the library space failed to meet their needs in certain respects. What have you read lately? I’m reading a few instruction books this summer in preparation for our summer instruction discussions and planning: Critical Library Pedagogy Handbook 1&2 and the 6-part series Framing Information Literacy: Teaching Grounded in Theory, Pedagogy, and Practice, which devotes a volume to each frame of the ACRL Framework. Both are published by ACRL. I’m also currently reading The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy and Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History, by Tori Telfer, a Chicago author. How has Library UX Chicago helped you? As a coordinator of teaching and learning services, I facilitate planning of instruction within my department and participate in planning library wide conversations about various teaching-related topics. I’ve Have you learned a new skill lately? I’m learning how to build tutorials using Captivate. I’m starting by watching a bunch of tutorials on Lynda.com. What tools or methods have made the most difference in your work and why? Methods: When working with librarians, I like brainstorming using lots of post-its that can be categorized and rearranged. It’s a good way to include lots of voices and ideas. When working with students, I enjoy mind-mapping as a method for brainstorming keywords, breaking down topics, and making associations between ideas. Tools: Google Docs is pretty great. Collaborating is very seamless, and I like how the spreadsheets app is more visually appealing than excel as long as you’re using it for something basic. I also love how easy it is to create and embed slides, documents and forms in a lib-guide for instructional purposes. I often use Google forms to collect some information from graduate students before an instruction session. |
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