Embedding UX and Ethnography at York

By Ned Potter, Academic Liaison Librarian

Michelle Blake and I presented at the amazing UXLibs IV Conference today, about our approach to trying to move into a more mature phase of UX - something truly embedded in the culture, rather than a bolt-on, a silo, or a fad.

I've adapted the slides below slightly to include more text on screen - hopefully this gives you some idea of how we've gone about things. Any questions, we're very happy to talk about it more...

Embedding Ethnography and UX at the University of York from Ned Potter

UXLibsIII: reflections from a regular

By Martin Philip, Academic Liaison Librarian

I just keep coming back for more!

There have been three UXLibs conferences so far (clue is in the name!) and I’ve been to all of them. For me, there’s no other event, let alone conference, that I’ve been to where I meet so many interesting people from so many different countries. It’s brilliant! And in one sense, as fantastic as the keynotes, delegate presentations, workshops, team challenge are, the international feel to this event brings it to life. It adds something extra. When I think of UXLibs, in addition to UX, I always think of the people I’ve met and the UX stories I’ve heard from all over the world.

The conference this year was in Glasgow, yet again utilising the creative space(s) provided by the studio. (If you need somewhere for an afternoon, a day or two, then try these guys!) The space and structure of the conference was great! Much like the previous two years, the regular coffee intervals and plenty of break-out areas all add to the conference dynamic, creating a relaxed, informal setup which allows you to move about the whole space quite freely.

UX is about living with uncertainty and being ok with that

In opening the conference, Andy Priestner gave a bit of context and set the scene for the event which I think was helpful both for those of us that have been to UXLibs before and any first-timers, of which there were many!  

The first UXLibs in 2015, was, for many, the first time we’d looked in detail at UX principles and techniques or certainly in the context of libraries. At UXLibs II last year, we looked at advocacy of UX in our institutional context, how can we get those in senior management, colleagues and students on board. This year Andy got us to consider UX maturity in libraries and reflect where we are on that journey by introducing his new model of UX Adoption in Libraries. This model looks at the success or not of UX adoption at your institution. After a few years of using UX techniques in quite a few projects at York, I’d definitely say we’re moving in the SUCCESSFUL direction. More and more of our internal groups and projects are keen to use UX techniques in the Library after being made aware of the quality data we’ve been getting and positive changes we’ve been making on the back of it. The challenge I take from this model is to keep progressing - to make UX business-as-usual and part of all that we do, whether it’s projects or the day-to-day activities.

    

Experience map from 'Experience Mapping' workshop with Anneli Friberg & Anna Kågedal.   

Design represents the values of those who created it

For me, a big takeaway from the conference this year was around values, principles and social responsibility. In their keynotes, Matthew Reidsma (Grand Valley State University Libraries) and Meredith Evans (Jimmy Carter Library and Museum in Atlanta) both talked about this in relation to their roles and projects they’ve been involved with.

I like to think of myself as a values kind of person, someone who thinks more than simply about the surface-level interaction with a user. However, both Matthew and Meredith's talks showed me that I probably don’t! Values and social responsibilities aren’t things that just happen, you need to be purposeful and deliberate about them. You need to talk about them with each other and if you have them remind each other of them.

Matthew posed questions such as ‘If our tools only work on the newest technology, what are our values?’ If we are attracted to the bright shiny new thing more than helping, assisting and empowering all our users do what they need to do, then we’ve got things the wrong way round. As best we can, we need to make sure our services are accessible to all, whether they are on a £1,500 laptop or a £300 one. Sometimes it’s unavoidable, there comes a point when folks have to upgrade, however we should not assume everyone has the latest device.

In relation to our Library Catalogue, Matthew asked us ‘What is (our) relevance ranking? Is it about satisfaction?’ The relevance ranking is often controlled by Library vendors, but this got me thinking, perhaps it’s something we should be scrutinising a bit more? Matthew reminded us that behind every algorithm is a human and therefore, despite our best efforts, bias will be in the design. How many other areas of the library are affected by our biases? All of it probably!

Matthew concluded his talk by defining the Library as people and thus our mission is to help people. So in order to do this we need to keep in mind the full humanity of people we design for, always ask if your design is going to limit or create choices for those who use design.

Documenting Ferguson

Meredith talked about the Documenting Ferguson project - a collaborative, community-driven digital repository to preserve both local and national history surrounding the police killing of teenager Michael Brown on August 9, 2014.

Meredith’s talk focussed on social responsibility and community archiving. She explained that these kind of collections tend to be built without the input of the people represented in the collection but instead the faculty and donors. The goal of the project was to make sure that a diverse range of perspectives and core communities related to the event was represented in the collection.

To make sure the communities involved were represented in Documenting Ferguson the project team made a way for original documents to be uploaded to a website. This seemed really innovative to me - a great way to capture different types of media in a relatively straightforward way. The project had no money either so Documenting Ferguson was done using open source software (Omeka).  

This kind of approach, however, began raising some interesting ethical questions, questions that had not really been considered before. Did the people who tweet give consent to their tweet being archived? How should they deal with this?

Meredith passed on a helpful practical tip that came out of this project - she often did things without the support of senior leadership for various reasons, however she got their support it in the end and ultimately, the project was a hugely rewarding achievement for all involved.  

Meredith concluded her talk by challenging us to listen to your users and not necessarily your administration. Shake it up, be open to change and try something new. Social responsibility can be implemented by strategic vision and specifically, community archives have ability to alter public understanding of events if they do something like this. By making sure they represent the people involved.

Personas

The final big takeaway for me from UXLibs III was around personas. At York, over the last few months, a few of us have been trying to come up with Customer Profiles particularly for different customer groups however, after receiving some feedback from an academic at York (UX expert), we've subsequently shifted our thinking to personas. He explained to us that personas are best when developed from UX and other sources of data, which we have lots of, so we plan to develop these over the next year.

Despite this feedback, I shared our customer profiles during the UXLabs session on the first day as I was really keen to get some input and advice from others at the conference who might have some experience in the area of personas.

Deidre Costello (EBSCO) recommended a fascinating read by Indi Young which provided me with loads of things to think about regarding personas. Like others, Indi believes that creating and making use of personas enables staff to develop empathy for their users. Indi also feels that creating personas is easier than you think however, make sure you slow down and try to understand what’s beneath a person's statement or question rather than try to solve problems immediately. You cannot collect this information via survey but rather more open techniques.

Indi’s post provides some really useful tips for when you design personas. Writing descriptions of the Persona in the first person can help however Indi argues that generally, including demographic information in your personas can distract and limit your creativity when considering your users however there are times when they may be essential (for context). They can probably be removed by default.

I also found it interesting that, in Indi’s experience, the names and descriptions of personas can trigger anti-empathy so it’s best, if possible, to do this in a way which aligns with how staff would describe themselves. Eg. The Frustrated is better than The Grumbler.

I also had a great conversation with Lauren Ray from the University of Washington (UW) during UXLabs. Lauren explained to me that UW created Libraries Patron Personas in 2009 as a tool to initially support website design however since then, these personas and other tools have been used to facilitate a variety of design work and brainstorming activities, as well as provide a useful framework for discussing how customers use the library.

This is how UW broke down their Libraries Patron Personas: Brooke the Beginner: undergraduate student (66% of student makeup), Paul the Professional: professional online student (3.6%), Richard the Researcher: graduate student (22.4%), Sharon the Scholar: faculty (7.7%) and Vincent the Visitor: alumnus.

UW thinks of their personas as archetypal library patrons and are meant to be used as a tool for framing their services and information to ensure they are user-centered and evidenced-based.

In 2013, the personas were updated: the format simplified, statements were validated by more recent research, and the scope broadened to facilitate use beyond just designing for the web, but for use in a variety of design thinking scenarios to improve web content, library space, library services, outreach, and communication.

UW thinks of their personas as archetypal library patrons and are meant to be used as a tool for framing their services and information to ensure they are user-centered and evidenced-based.

Lauren informed me that UW are currently in the process of updating these personas again, they definitely see personas as a continuously developing thing something that you need to be prepared to regularly look at and reflect if they still match your user groups.

Sharing UX findings: a strategic approach

By Ned Potter, Academic Liaison Librarian 

This is the 30th post in Lib-Innovation, to it seems appropriate to celebrate the milestone by talking about dissemination of our UX work at York. Although this blog covers lots of other things too, the topic of UX was the main reason we created it in the first place.

We've tried to take a strategic approach to dissemination, proactively looking to share what we're doing with as many different types of audience as possible rather than just hoping it will happen. We're excited by what we're learning both from and about the ethnography, and the design, that we're undertaking, so we want people to know about it. In the ideal scenario, we'd spark ideas off that others take on and apply in their own contexts. And we want feedback and ideas to improve our own work. So we're telling people about the work across multiple platforms, and in this post we'll explore some of the ways we're doing it, and why.

Internal audiences

Our rule of thumb is that anyone who gives their time to take part in our ethnographic fieldwork should be the first to hear what we've done with the information. So for the last major UX project we did, the 100 or so participants go an interim report (along with library managers), and they will be the first to see the final report, before it is more widely circulated within the University. 

The Library industry in general

The blog is open and anyone can read it, but it is aimed primarily at those in the library industry. (There's a separate blog which we aim at staff and students who use the library.) We hope to reach as many people as possible this way. Not everyone will end up caring too much about UX but hopefully for some it will stick. We put pretty much everything on here - the idea is you don't have to be at a certain event or to speak to any of us in person to learn everything there is to learn about what we're doing.

I tweet about it, we ask the people in the University's Central Marketing who deal with the library to tweet about it, and I sometimes reblog UX articles on my own website.

We've been pleasantly surprised by how much people have read the posts: the most popular article on this site (Vanya Gallimore's overview of our Understanding Academics UX project) has been viewed over 1800 times at the time of writing, which is more than the readership of the majority of subscription journals. What we've not had, however, is comments! I love blog comments. There was a period around 2011 or so when everyone left comments on each other's blogs, and as an author of a post it was so gratifying to be able to interact with people reading. That doesn't seem to happen any more (or maybe that's just our blog!), which is a shame.

We've also presented at a couple of non-UX related library events, for example at the Libraries, Archives and Museums Marketing Awards organised by the Welsh Government.

The Library UX community in particular

An obvious avenue for sharing our UX findings is conferences aimed wholly at libraries interested in UX. With that in mind I presented an overview of our UX activities so far at the Northern Collaboration Library UX event earlier in the year, and Vanya will be presenting at UXLibs III, the biggest conference in this area, in June. My colleague Martin Philip will also be soliciting feedback on our work so far during the UXLabs part of that conference, where delegates share work in progress.

UX Specialists from outside the world of libraries 

We've only done one talk in this category so far but it's been incredibly beneficial. I presented to the Human Computer Interaction research cluster in York's Computer Science Department. There is a huge amount of knowledge and experience in the area of UX there, not just in terms of academic research but a lot the academics spend time in industry too.

They have a regular seminar series so we asked if we could take a slot in it. We approach this opportunity a bit like we'd approach a UX project: we didn't have a specific agenda or goal in mind but we were pretty sure we would learn something useful. My talk was very much 'here's what we've done, what would you advise we do next?' and it turns out they had a lot of extremely useful advice. I ended up writing pages of notes from the discussions that happened during the talk and afterwards.

A slide from the Computer Sciences presentation

Among many positive outcomes, that particular day ended up shifting our future approach to UX to a less generative and more evaluative research process, to us changing the way we deal with customer profiles and personas entirely, to us putting together a bid (still in progress) for an intensive design workshop, and to the Department kindly offering to allows us use of their eye-tracking software for future projects. We hope to speak to more non-library audiences in the future. Talking of which...

Audiences outside HE and libraries entirely

I was invited by the Good Things Foundation, a charitable organisation who do a lot of work around digital inclusion and with public libraries, to talk to their staff at their Sheffield HQ. It was a great opportunity to exchange views and experiences with a completely different group of people, facing different challenges. 

And finally: Slideshare 

I used to love Slideshare as a dissemination method. Recently however it's gone from being brilliantly useful to rather more hit and miss. It's always great for uploading your slides for others to find, and that can lead to all sorts of opportunities. But until recently Slideshare would 'feature' around 10 slidedecks each day on its homepage - if your slides got selected for this it would boost the views by 20,000 or so. Because of this it has a reach that we can't hope to match by any other channel. We have a lot of methods listed above which are about reaching quite specific audiences; Slideshare was our way just to reach far and wide and hope some relevant people were among the inflated audience.

In the last year or so Slideshare have stopped regularly updating their homepage, so the chance to get featured has reduced almost to zero. The overview of our UX activities so far hich I presented at Northern Collaboration has not been featured, but nevertheless 3,200 people have viewed it at the time of writing. My slides from the LAM Awards event mentioned above DID get featured however, and in fact as still there on the homepage of Slideshare, three months later. As such they've now been viewed just over 285,000 times, which is ridiculous. Clearly only a small fraction of those people are relevant to us at York.

Slideshare stats

However, 1,751 people have downloaded the slides, suggesting they want to study what we've done a little closer. And these slides led directly to the invitation from the Good Things Foundation, as well as a visit to York from librarians overseas to discuss our UX work - so although Slideshare's reach is unfocused, it's still been relevant and useful for us.

Northern Collaboration User Experience (UX) Learning Exchange 2017

 By Robynne Eller, Assistant Librarian

“What people say, what people do, 

and what they say they do are entirely different things”

- Margaret Mead

The Northern Collaboration UX Exchange took place at the University of Huddersfield's state-of-the-art archive facility at the Heritage Quay. The choice of venue offered the perfect setting for a creative day of discussion and the chance to showcase a selection of what some Northern universities have been up to in terms of their approach to UX in their libraries.

#NCLXUX - Review of the day:

A wide range of UX topics were covered during the Learning Exchange, presentations given by speakers from institutions across the north of England. The day was introduced by UX expert, Andy Priestner, who reiterated the benefits of UX in university libraries, as well as breaking down the barriers of users who believe they are “Not good at libraries".

Some of the topics from other speakers surrounded usability issues of library websites, UX for distance learners, to the use of ethnographic studies used to observe user behaviour and use of space in academic libraries. Some of the talks given on the day can be found on Slideshare, which offers a snapshot of some of the themes and projects discussed. Storify was also used to show all Twitter feeds during the event, which were buzzing throughout the day!

Using social media to keep the UX conversations going!

A major theme that ran through the talks, was how ethnographic survey methods, specifically attitudinal surveys and behavioural mapping was used, in order to help understand users at a deeper level. For instance, at Teesside University, behavioural and cognitive mapping (as well as a Twitter photo competition!) helped inform how library furniture was used, showing furniture was being used in somewhat different ways by users than originally envisaged!

Communicating with users using social media: Teesside’s photo competition

It was also great to see that most of the universities were communicating with users through means of a “graffiti” or “feedback” wall, which have proved to be very responsive and positive in all cases where it has been utilised. Insights from the Open University were also quite useful in terms of their outreach to users who would access their services remotely, rather than visiting their library in person. From all the presentations given, it was clear that even smallest of UX changes held a significant impact for users and one of the key messages in achieving such changes is to not fear failure.

We even created our own graffiti walls to share UX ideas!

Following the talks, one of the most enjoyable aspects of the days was the opportunity to have open discussions with a range of other library staff from other HEI libraries. Seeing different projects from a range of different institutions made for some interesting discussions which enabled us to share ideas, be informed and inspired. We were also given a tour of the archives at Huddersfield, which was an excellent finish to the day!

Strategic Marketing in academic libraries?

It was enlightening to see how academic libraries are viewing UX as a marketing exercise, both in terms of research approaches and consideration of the a library’s long-term marketing cycle. I believe that this allows institutions to showcase what they are really good and marketing services which hold value for its users.

Additionally, such approaches allows academic libraries to keep their services fresh, relevant and exciting whilst continuing to have regular conversations with their users and colleagues to continually improve. Applying such an approach allows for specific questions to be asked and for users to be heard, so a suitable response can be made. As such, from the presentations, it is clear that a range of ethnographic methods are vital in achieving a better understanding in what users need most from their library services.

UX at York: What are we doing?

We've make quite a number of tweaks as a result of ramping up our UX recently, which did not go unoticed during the UX at York talk. But what are we doing now? As a part of the UX Space Project, we have recently been carrying out a series of ethnographic surveys in the Morrell Lounge and Raymond Burton study space. The aim of carrying out this type of survey is to gain a better understanding how spaces within the Library are used, the data of which is hoped to inform further stages of the Space Project.
 


The observations will be carried out over a twelve month period from February 2017 by staff members from IT, IS and CSA teams in 15-minute observations once a week per team. Within each 15 minute slot, user activity is observed and marked on floor plans using the AEIOU framework and changes to activity or new interactions are subsequently noted. Notes and thoughts are typed up later. Further to our observations, we have also asked staff members who notice spaces being used in a particular way at other times to report these to the UX Space Project group.

 

Example of an observation plan

Robynne’s take home messages:

• Even small tweaks to a service can be significant
• There is no such thing as “I’m not good at libraries”
• Attitudinal surveys and behavioural methods are particularly useful when used in tandem with one another
• Do not be afraid to fail
• Ethnographic studies can be used to inform bigger changes

I would recommend anyone interested in UX to attend any collaboration events to keep up to date with what's going on in the world of UX. Seeing how York implements strategies within a Northern context was very informative - it will be exciting to see what the future holds for UX in libraries in the North and the rest of the UK. Huddersfield was also a great host for the event and I particularly enjoyed the tour of their archives too afterwards!