Disclaimer: I put this together for our UX Intern at my place of work - it's publicly available in case anyone else finds it useful but it's not meant to be 100% comprehensive! And will inevitably reflect the biases of what I'm interested in and what we're looking to achieve with UX at York.
User Experience or UX, as it is defined in the library context, is a suite of techniques based around first understanding and then improving the experiences people have when using our library services. It utilises ethnography and design to achieve this. Andy Priestner is a librarian and trainer / consultant who created and chairs the UX in Libraries Conference and works in this area full time. He defines the whole thing as follows:
“At their core, UX methods are all about making sure that the user is at the centre of what you do. They are about accepting that library services should not be built around staff agendas, convenience, assumptions or gut feelings, but instead around what your users really need and really do. This naturally requires that you regularly connect with, empathise with, involve, and understand your users.
A myriad of UX research techniques are available to explore user activities and needs: attitudinal techniques such as semi-structured interviews, cognitive mapping and photo studies; and behavioural techniques such as observation, behavioural mapping and usability testing. These approaches should always be conducted in balance so you are researching both what people say they do and think they need (attitudinal), and what they actually do and really need (behavioural).
The UX Process begins with user research, continues with data analysis and concludes with the ideation and testing of prototypes. The end result should be investment in more valuable and relevant user-centred services and initiatives, which have been generated from, and tested with, your users.”
Posts about puttING UX Into Practice
If you want in-depth on site UX training, Andy is your man - there’s no one better at this. Alongside my regular training offer on social media and marketing, I also run Introduction to UX sessions online; get in touch if you’d like to book one.
Start here
Traditionally the term UX has been used to refer to usability in the online environment. However this is not primarily how we're using it in this context.
The following presentation has been viewed over a million times, and provides a gentle introduction to UX in Libraries and its two key components, ethnography and human-centred design.
The academic library context
As you can see from the slides above, libraries are (mostly) extremely user-focused and always seeking to get a proper understanding of how our users interact with our services, and how they rate them. We have a lot of survey data from the National Student Survey, the LibQual+ Survey, PTES and PRES surveys of Postgraduates, plus our own shorter surveys and focus groups.
Ethnography is not meant to replace these, it's meant to supplement them and ensure we aren't too reliant on any one source of feedback. UX is fundamentally MESSY in comparison with the other ways in which we gather information about our users. It takes a long time to do and even longer to process what we learn (and perhaps longer still to make design changes to the way our services work as a result). We want UX to get to the emotion: how people feel about our services, and what they truly need for those services to be more effective - whether they can articulate those needs at this stage or not.
The process of UX in Libraries, reduced to it's most basic form, is first to seek to understand our users through ethnographic techniques, analyse and process what we learn about them, then to design better services or products based on what we learn. Often libraries use a 'rapid prototyping model' - which is to say when we learn something we could do to improve the user experience, we will do it as soon as possible, see how it works, and if need be change it again quickly after that.
Understanding Ethnography
Donna Lanclos is a name that comes up a lot in this field - she is a library anthropologist working in the US but who has also partnered with UK institutions. She provided a keynote for the UX in Libraries Conference (UXLibs) in 2015; there is a brilliant transcript interwoven with her slides here. I tried to write it up as best I could here.
I also tried to explain 5 ethnographic techniques we learned about at the UXLibs Conference here. It covers Cognitive Mapping, Observation / Behavioural Mapping, and more briefly Interviews, Touchstone Tours and the Love-letter / Break-up-letter. It includes some examples and links to slides - particularly worth a look are examples from Donna Lanclos of congitive maps, here.
A nicely easy-to-digest case-study in ethnography and space design can be found on the UKAnthroLib blog, written by Meg Westbury. Part One is here, which sets it up. Part Two describes the actual ethnography.
On the more technical side, Andrew Preater writes about grounded theory and UX here.
Understanding Design
As well as the report on Paul Jervis Heath's Design keynote (as linked above), Matthew Reidsma also delivered a keynote at UXLibs which centred primarily around Design. I was particularly struck with the need for designs to be self-righting - rather than trying to engineer perfection into everything, we should instead focus on ensuring users can recover from mistakes (user error or design error) without needing to call for help. My report on Matt's keynote is here.
Here is the talk itself - 47 minutes long and worth watching the whole of.
You can also find just the slides on Speakerdeck.
The FIRST UX in Libraries Conference
As you can see from all the links above the inaugural UX in Libraries Conference was very important in establishing UX in a library context in the UK. Matt also curated a list of write-ups of the conference. I've copied and pasted the below from his site - it should provide a lot of insight into ethnography, design, and UX in general.
Hit by the UX Libs Freight Train by Andy Priestner
UXLib 2: The Art of the Keynote: Matthew Reidsma by Ned Potter (blush)
UXLib 3: The Art of the Keynote: Donna Lanclos and Paul-Jervis Heath by Ned Potter
UXLib 5: Ideation, Pitching, and Responsive Study Space ) by Ned Potter
It’s a conference, Jim, but not as we know it. UXLibs, Cambridge 2015 by Jessica Stephens
UXLibs: Part One: A Personal Reflection by Jenny Foster
UXLibs: Part Two: Chop Down the Door by Jenny Foster
UXLib – User Experience in Libraries by Carl Barrow
UXLibs in Cambridge–Keynoting, Dining and Punting, Oh My by Donna Lanclos