User Experience in Libraries

Applying Ethnography and Human-Centred Design

Andy Priestner, Matt Borg, Andy Priestner, Matt Borg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781472484727
• eBook ISBN: 9781317003120
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Modern library services can be incredibly complex. Much more so than their forebears, modern librarians must grapple daily with questions of how best to implement innovative new services, while also maintaining and updating the old. The efforts undertaken are immense, but how best to evaluate their success?

In this groundbreaking new book from Routledge, library practitioners, anthropologists, and design experts combine to advocate a new focus on User Experience (or 'UX') research methods. Through a combination of theoretical discussion and applied case studies, they argue that this ethnographic and human-centred design approach enables library professionals to gather rich evidence-based insights into what is really going on in their libraries, allowing them to look beyond what library users say they do to what they actually do.

Edited by the team behind the international UX in Libraries conference, User Experience in Libraries will ignite new interest in a rapidly emerging and game-changing area of research. Clearly written and passionately argued, it is essential reading for all library professionals and students of Library and Information Science. It will also be welcomed by anthropologists and design professionals working in related fields.

1
Uncovering complexity and detail

The UX proposition

Andy Priestner and Matt Borg

Today’s library services are incredibly complex. Long gone are the days when librarians were only questioning how to arrange their stock and have it circulate appropriately amongst their users. Now we also grapple with striking the right balance between print and electronic media, seamlessly serving both physical and remote users, actively embracing technology and research data, and delivering effective teaching and learning. The list goes on, it is only getting longer and rarely, if ever, is anything removed from it. For every new service we offer, we have to consider how it will be implemented, to whom it will be promoted, and from where it will be accessed. In most cases, this means considering myriad approaches, time-consuming tailoring of messages for different platforms and users, and offering a variety of alternative delivery methods. The efforts undertaken are immense and the services we deliver are fiendishly complicated to manage and sustain. Unfortunately, however, far fewer efforts are directed towards evaluating the success and efficacy of the services we provide: how well they meet user needs; whether user experience of them is good, bad, or average; and what values these touchpoints lead our users to ascribe to libraries.

There are probably a number of reasons why user experience (UX) of our spaces, services and products has been so neglected before now. One is simply that for the past 10 years and more many of us have just been trying to keep up with the pace of change, with the demands of ever-advancing technology and opportunity. While focused on these demands and the pursuit of relevance and understanding in an age where our purpose and value has to be constantly proved, we have perhaps paid less attention to the finer details and to the actual day-to-day experiences of the users of our services.

We librarians have always prided ourselves on excellent customer service and putting the user first, but most of us have never been trained to think about users to the level of detail that true UX research methods ask of us. Neither have we actually been trained in these methods. Surveys and questionnaires have been almost the only user research tool that most of us have been (self-)schooled in, and we have come to cling to them as if they were our sole means of gathering data from our user populations – a panacea for all library ills.

And this despite our open recognition that the traditional survey has many inherent flaws, not least of which are the facts that they are largely completed by pro-library users and that self-reporting is commonly understood to be unreliable. Our users have been telling us what they think we want to hear and we have been all too eager to lap it up and promote these results – and why wouldn’t we, when we’re so regularly faced with threats of cuts to our services and increasingly inaccurate perceptions of our value? Surveys aside, through automated means we have slavishly and accurately (we are librarians, after all) measured and collated quantitative statistics on footfall, holdings, loans and renewals, database use, e-book views and downloads and, more recently, social media followers and likes, but rarely have we embarked on any initiatives to look beyond the spreadsheet totals.

Most of us can anonymously follow the user from the start of their information search, see what they have searched for in the discovery system, observe what database they ended up in, and whether they opened a PDF. But we have no idea whether this was a successful search experience. Did that article view answer a pressing research question?

Similarly, a library gate stat does not mean that a user has made a valuable trip to our library space – the resource they needed might not have been available, they may have visited the wrong library, they may even have had a less than satisfactory encounter with a member of library staff, but we just don’t know. And for the most part we have been quite content not to find out. This is perhaps because we have felt confident that our services were generally appreciated and as good as they could be (as evidenced by high survey scores), or conversely because we have not wanted to explore the messy detail as we know some procedures are difficult (some even baffle us librarians – transferring an e-book to a device, for instance!). It could also be because we don’t have the time, staffing, or motivation to uncover yet more problems to deal with. There are no doubt a few of you reading this first chapter who have behaved more intrepidly and run the occasional focus group around a particular topic or undertaken usability studies of your library website, but for the most part, until recently, comprehensive attitudinal and behavioural user research of the type and scale that this book advocates has been almost non-existent. Most of us had zero concept of what taking an anthropological approach might look like or what an ethnographic or participatory research technique might be.

Whatever the explanation as to why we librarians have chosen not to delve too deeply into how our users are ‘experiencing libraries’ – in terms of actually employing anthropological and design research methods – there is a strong argument that this gap cannot be ignored for very much longer. In the academic environment ‘student experience’ is talked about more and more as central administration seeks to explore all aspects of university life through student eyes, identifying barriers and inconveniences and moments at which their experience is less than satisfactory. In the UK even the behemoth that is the National Student Survey now claims to want to assist institutions and student unions to ‘better understand the experience of its students and to help inform change’ (NSS, 2015). This does not get away from the fact that it is a survey and therefore limited in what it can hope to reveal, but it speaks at least of a wider appetite for experiential data. The student experience boom is an opportunity for librarians to prove their worth, not just in terms of services and resources, but in a pastoral and social sense too. UX methods can help us collect the evidence that reveals our crucial role in student lives that we have always known but rarely shared formally.

This deeper interest from universities in student experience is naturally in part monetary, due to competition to fill university places, but a shift in societal expectations of service has also played its part. The choices that new technology, online retail and social media have given us has markedly increased all of our expectations, not only of how much better a service should be and the range of products available to us, but also of our ability to influence and interact with service providers. It is more than just a shift from writing letters of complaint to writing reviews on TripAdvisor or sending disgruntled tweets; it is a fundamental change in how individuals perceive their power and how they expect to be treated. The opportunity to have one’s voice heard is now actively anticipated, as is the immediacy and seamlessness of the platform through which one can do that.

Today’s users are incredibly complex. Their information-seeking behaviours have changed, and their engagement with and perception of our services are vastly different. By adopting UX research techniques (by which we chiefly mean ethnography, usability, and service design) we can uncover the sort of users our libraries have today: users who do things in ways that we do not understand, that we find frustrating, or even condemn. The crucial point is that we are not our users, and just because they carry out tasks in a way that is alien to us does not mean that their way is wrong or broken. Instead, we need to see their approach as an opportunity to learn and discover. A user choosing to sit and photograph a 300-page reference-only book with a smartphone, thereby effectively creating their own unwieldy e-book, might seem ludicrous to us when they alternatively could sit and read it in the library or photocopy it (within legal limits, naturally). However, it is a scenario that bears some analysis and would reveal significant issues around convenience and preferred study environments were follow-up explorations to take place.

It is precisely scenarios like this that UX can help to inform, leading us in turn to better delivery solutions that accept rather than question user practices. In this way these research methods are as much about a mindset as a practical approach, as they prompt us to acknowledge what is rather than how we think things should be or how people should behave. As this is the case, there is inherent in these methods a necessity for us to be less precious about the services we manage and less tempted to assume we know better than the user. This is not to say that sometimes the user could be approaching a library research need in a better way – a way that we could have a hand in influencing – but that we should accept and learn from the behaviour we observe.

Observing other people, the crux of ethnography, is an activity at which many of us are naturally adept. Indeed, if you ask a roomful of librarians whether they enjoy people-watching, inevitably the hands of around three-quarters of the audience shoot up, and yet it does not naturally occur to us to undertake it as an illuminating research option in our libraries. Concentrated observation can uncover fascinating insights into how our users relate to library spaces, other users, and our resources. Of course as natural people-watchers we have to be careful not to record activities too subjectively, creating wild love affairs between users or back-stories suitable for soap operas, but rather seek to objectively note activities, users’ preferred study styles, use of facilities, and other crucial behaviours.

It is our assertion that exploration of user behaviour of our spaces and services stands as perhaps the most completely neglected aspect of libraries today. And yet it is an endeavour that promises riches and insights that multitudinous library surveys could never seek to offer – detailing as it can how broken our signage and wayfinding is; how poorly laid out our spaces are; and, perhaps most significantly, what users are actually doing rather than what they tell us they are doing – and much, much more.

For far too long we have been relying on our intuition as information professionals, but our intuition can often be wrong. By participating in library spaces ourselves we can learn first-hand what it is like to be in that space as a library user, irritated by that constantly banging door, uncomfortable chair, or suffocating heat. Participant observation is just one of a wide array of ethnographic techniques that can help us to derive real, and often uncommunicated, user needs and perspectives that otherwise would have remained hidden. Like most other UX research it is time-consuming to undertake if done well (and enough data is gathered to inform changes), but the results – which reveal a more holistic and detailed picture of the study lives of our users – are unquestionably worth the investment.

There is far more to UX approaches and ethnography than observation of behaviour. It also involves seeking user attitudes and opinions, an activity with which we are more familiar and comfortable. However, our current approaches to attitudinal user research do not go nearly far enough. Directed storytelling, contextual enquiry, or unstructured in-depth interviews are all ethnographic research methods which provide a framework for us to listen and learn from our users, to understand why and when and how they do things. When supplemented by methods like diary studies, photo studies, or cultural probes through which students detail their study lives and the library’s place in it, we have the opportunity to possess a more complete picture of user experience than ever before – and crucially, a picture that is evidence-based, gathered through internationally recognised research methods. Many of these methods are, of course, detailed within the chapters of this book.

Our chapters come from a wide range of contributors. When we sat down to sketch out whom we wanted to invite on board, our aim was to create a useful, authoritative book on UX in libraries. We knew there was a fascinating array of UX research and activity taking place; it was simply a question of bringing it all together in one volume. You will find stories from practitioners, library UX professionals, theorists and anthropologists.

The chapters are not grouped by themes as such. Using metrics such as location or type of university or the role that the author has at the institution just did not feel right in a book that exists chiefly to bring together excellent stories around UX in libraries. Some chapters serve as practical case studies, others explore the topic from a more theoretical angle, still others offer advice and information on techniques and processes, but all collectively invite you to join the authors on a journey examining UX from various points of view.

Bryony Ramsden of Huddersfield University starts us off, asking a question that, in some ways, sums up the entire book: ‘As a librarian, how much time do you spend in the library?’ She explains why utilising ethnographic techniques is the best and most appropriate way to learn about the culture of the people using our spaces and can help us understand why they behave in them as they do. Her exploration of ethnographic methods neatly outlines the reasons and rationale for making this a fundamental part of our roles.

Donna Lanclos, Library Ethnographer at UNC Charlotte, North Carolina, explores the ethnographic agenda more widely, presenting it as a means of transforming institutional practices and increasing the role of library voices in shaping them. She calls for an increased openness to an anthropological worldview – a mindset which should lead us to generate and ask more questions. She explains how by gathering stories we can start to speak with ethno-graphic authority about our users’ day-to-day realities, and how collaboration is the key to finding successful solutions to these realities and to forging a new educational agenda.

Matt Borg and Matthew Reidsma examine how leveraging the fetish we librarians have for gathering and curating data can actually help us once we have asked the right questions. They argue that we need to rely less on our ‘expert intuition’ and move to a model of ‘expert listening’, thereby gaining a more holistic view of user needs. It starts with Douglas Adams, ends with the magician Teller (of Penn and Teller), and there are some insightful musings around usability in between.

Designer Paul-Jervis Heath, who joined Matthew Reidsma and Donna Lanclos as a keynote speaker at the UX in Libraries conference, focuses on how we can apply a human-centred design process to the library experience. He details the modes of design that he and his colleagues move between as they explore context, identify opportunities, and develop and experiment with ideas, and also outlines the methods and techniques that can be employed at each stage. He argues that you do not need to be a professional designer to apply human-centred design and design thinking, and encourages librarians to embrace these principles when seeking to develop new ideas for their users.

Academic librarian Leah Emary, from York St John University, explores how using ethnography can contribute to designing improved user experience of libraries. She argues that librarians are well suited to collecting ethnographic data, examines what types of questions are best answered using these methods, and highlights some common pitfalls and ways to avoid them. As well as exploring practical techniques such as cultural probes and participant observation, Leah details the core components of good research design and the importance of objectivity and reliability.

Our next chapter is from Andrew Asher, anthropologist and Assessment Librarian at Indiana University, Bloomington; he was also lead research anthropologist (2008–2010) on the seminal ERIAL (Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries) Project from which his chapter draws its data. Andrew introduces the reader to ‘taskscapes’, advocating that we obtain a broad, holistic view of our users that specifically looks at their social and educational landscapes, with a view to designing a more relevant user experience. He examines how social context affects the academic practice of students in the library and the importance of examining the local realities of a university campus when we design and plan library services.

Two case study chapters follow, which focus on pilot projects that are part of Cambridge University Library’s FutureLib programme, which is seeking to design products and services to answer user needs that were derived from a long period of ethnographic research. Andy Priestner explains the premise behind Spacefinder, a pilot service which aims to match student study preferences with available study spaces and seeks to offers a ‘big picture’ solution to the problems that their research identified. Meanwhile Helen Murphy examines the WhoHas? pilot, a bold attempt to legitimise the practice of peer-to-peer sub-lending of books. Despite being inspired, well planned, and underpinned by user experience research, this prototype service was ultimately unsuccessful. Helen details how failure proved to be a useful experience nonetheless.

Penny Andrews explores good user experience design from an autoethnographic point of view. Her chapter offers a refreshingly honest look at how, in general, we focus on the overall view or ‘best fit’ in terms of library provision – often to the detriment of minority groups or individual cases – the ‘Special Case’ of her title. She argues that everyone is entitled to a good user experience, and no user is any less than another.

In their chapter, Rosie Jones (University of Liverpool) and Nicola Grayson (University of Manchester) explain how the design and development of the award-winning Alan Gilbert Learning Commons at the University of Manchester was shaped by changing the focus of how the library engaged in open dialogue with its students, seeing them as partners who would co-create and take collective responsibility for the space. The pair also explain how library staff now seek to accept and respond to user behaviour and to understand what they value.

Margaret Westbury’s case study of ethnographic techniques carried out at her college library (Wolfson, Cambridge) shows how adopting a UX mindset on a small scale helped her move beyond assumptions and intuition. Her efforts revealed the complexity of her users’ lives and their hidden needs and prompted her to alter many long-standing policies accordingly.

Michael Courtney and Carrie Donovan talk about their work at Indiana University, where they have applied ethnographic methods to library instruction in order to investigate students’ understanding of the processes of information seeking. They reflect on how the experience created opportunities for them to think, and act, like anthropologists in other aspects of their professional practice as well, and how examining the ever-changing variable of students’ behaviour can be challenging and unpredictable, but most of all, rewarding.

The next chapter by Beatrice Turpin, Deborah Harrop, et al. from Sheffield Hallam University, explains how a robust research methodology, incorporating coordinate and photographic mapping and semi-structured interviews, illuminated user behaviours and attitudes towards informal learning spaces ahead of a signifi-cant site redevelopment project. They detail how their research data translated into practical design solutions and how and why they created a typology of learning space preference attributes.

Edge Hill University’s Helen Jamieson contributes a case study which offers a valuable insight into how ethno...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of figures
• Preface and acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• 1 Uncovering complexity and detail: the UX proposition
• 2 Using ethnographic methods to study library use
• 3 Embracing an ethnographic agenda: context, collaboration, and complexity
• 4 Holistic UX: harness your library’s data fetish to solve the right problems
• 5 Applying human-centred design to the library experience
• 6 The why, what and how of using ethnography for designing user experience in libraries (and a few pitfalls to avoid)
• 7 Identifying the barriers: taskscapes and the social contexts of library UX
• 8 Illuminating study spaces at Cambridge University with spacefinder: a case study
• 9 WhoHas?: a pilot study exploring the value of a peer-to-peer sub-lending service
• 10 User experience beyond ramps: the invisible problem and the special case
• 11 Changing the dialogue: the story of the award-winning Alan Gilbert learning commons
• 12 UX and a small academic library
• 13 Understanding our students and ourselves: transformative library instruction through an ethnographic lens
• 14 What makes an informal learning space?: a case study from Sheffield Hallam University
• 15 Spaces for learning?: using ethnographic techniques: a case study from the University Library, Edge Hill University
• 16 Are you sitting comfortably…?
• 17 UX in libraries: leaping the chasm
• Index