Ethnography at York

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How do you truly embed UX at an institutional level?

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At the glorious UXLibs IV Conference (more on which below), Michelle Blake and I presented on embedding UX at York. By this we mean, attempting to move the ethnography and design ideas / techniques / methods which sit under the User Experience in Libraries umbrella, from novel and niche to mainstream and, if you'll forgive the management-speak, Business As Usual. Part of the culture. 

We're not all the way there yet and don't profess to have completely nailed it, but it is something we've consciously tried to achieve in the Library and we're having come success with it. Some of what we've done is outlined briefly in the presentation below, to which I've added an explanatory sentence to most slides so they make more sense without us talking over the top of it.

I'd reccomend this post from Shelley Gullikson which nicely summarises several talks and sessions from UXLibs IV, and Andy Priestner's 50 Photos post gives a nice flavour of the conference as a whole.

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Library blankets for the win

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Reblogged from Lib-Innovation

I've had a number of emails recently asking after our blankets in the library at the University of York, so I thought I'd blog about them.

Getting blankets for the library is probably one of the best things I've ever done in libraryland, honestly.  It took almost no effort and very little money. The students LOVE them. Everyone's a winner.

The quote in the title is from our feedback board where we asked students for tips for their peers. Here are some other quotes from the Graffiti Wall and from Twitter:

A plethora of positive feedback for the blankets

A plethora of positive feedback for the blankets

So the tl;dr of this post is, get blankets in your library! It's 100% worth doing.

Practicalities 

We bought 30 blankets for each of our sites. We get them from a local laundry who also launder them for us - but you can also buy perfectly serviceable and cheap examples from for example IKEA if you have your own laundry service to hand. They're laundered termly unless there's a reason to bring that schedule forward...

They sit in a bucket near the entrance of each library, and people can help themselves to them as they come and go. Here's a picture of the main campus library blankets: 

Library blanket bucket

You'll notice the blankets are a fairly drab grey - this is deliberate, to make them less tempting to abscond with...

Origins

Like all academic libraries, our number 1 complaint for users is about the temperature - and it's equally split between too hot and too cold most of the time. We don't actually control the temperature anyhow, so we adopted the UX mentality of 'if you can't fix the problem at least make the user experience better in any way you can' and tried to improve things in what small ways we could. 

We'd heard at UXLibs I that a college in Cambridge had given out blankets and that this had reduced their complaints about the cold. Some students of mine from the History of Art Department came to me as part of Library Committee and told me it was basically too cold to work in Kings Manor, our town centre site which is in a building several hundred years old, so I immediately thought back to what Cambridge had done and resolved to steal their idea... (Sonya Adams and Libby Tilley at Cambridge were both really helpful to me in advising on how to set this whole thing up.) 

The students involved were really pleased but the great thing is EVERYONE was really pleased. 

So as we head into the colder months, see if you can do this for your library. Or even better, get your students SLANKETS so their arms are still free for reading. :) 

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Sharing UX Findings: York's strategic approach

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Reblogged from Lib-Innovation, updated with some new statistics and links.

For the 30th post on Lib-Innovation it seemed appropriate to celebrate the milestone by talking about dissemination of our UX work at York. Although the Lib-Innovation 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 presented at UXLibs III, the biggest conference in this area, in June. You can see her slides here. My colleague Martin Philip also solicited 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, four months later. As such they've now been viewed just over 400,000 times, which is ridiculous. Clearly only a small fraction of those people are relevant to us at York.

However, 2,400 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.

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UX-led changes at York and beyond

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Reblogged from Lib-Innovation

As anyone who has embarked upon User Experience work will have learned, ethnography is actually the easy part. For all its messy, complicated, time-consuming complexity, getting the go-ahead for fieldwork and undertaking it is relatively straightforward compared to designing (and getting approval to put into place) changes to our services. It is vital to have a cut off point where we as UX practitioners stop collecting data, bite the bullet, and move on to phase 2 of the process. After all, it's the design and service tweaks that make this UX - otherwise all we're really doing is ethnography.

I think it's really important to a) push as many small tweaks through as possible, and then learn from them and assess their impact, and b) make details of the changes publicly available so others can get not just inspiration but a use-case to push through their own change.

So - what have institutions been doing as a result of what they've learned from ethnography? I have several examples from the University of York and some from further afield too.

I thought it might be useful to group the examples of UX-led improvements into categories. In all these instances ethnographic fieldwork has either instigated the change or supported the change - it's interesting that often UX can be the trigger to get something done which library staff and users have been considering and / or suggesting for a while. Often the fieldwork is one source of feedback alongside a couple of others in the examples below, which combined to be a strong enough argument to make a change.

Catalogue improvements

At York we've made several small changes to Yorsearch, the (Primo-based) library catalogue, in addition to the full user-interface change which will arrive shortly.

  • The classmark for books now appear in the search results screen, rather than the user needing to click on a title to reveal its location. It's only a small change but we get around 25,000 views a day for Yorsearch - that's a lot of people now having to make one less click to get what they need. This particular change came from our first UX project with Postgrads, along with work from the Discoverability Group, and from seeing that that Imperial had successfully achieved the same thing with their Primo interface already, following their own UX work...
     
  • Talking of Imperial, they've made the full report of their 2016 UX work available for anyone to download [*applauds*] - have a read, it's fascinating and useful material.
     
  • We changed the terminology in the catalogue on the buttons you press to access books and ebooks - from Get It and View It, to Find in Library and View Online. Again this came out of several sources of feedback, including the Discoverability Group, and front-desk staff reporting that users simply didn't seem to get it when it came to View It and Get It.

Library space and environment improvements

  • We made a hot-water tap available 24/7. Our UX work revealed that particularly in winter  students from Asia like to drink hot water in the way that in the West a lot us like to drink chilled water; this gave more context to previous requests for a hot drinking water tap. One has now been installed alongside the chilled water fountain.
     
  • We made the Burton Library accessible 24hrs a day. Our library is open 24 hours, but previously only the main Morrell Building (the one with the books) and the Fairhurst (lots of study space) stayed open all the time; the silent reading room in the Burton closed at 10pm. Our UX work constantly demonstrated that the Burton was not as highly valued as we imagined it was - for example several students left it out of their congnitive map of the building, almost no students included it in their touchstone tours, and in our behavioural mapping we even observed students wandering up to the entrance, peering in to the stairwell that led up to the reading room, then just turning around and coming back, apparently not feeling like they wanted to cross the threshold. As part of the UX unstructured interviews we discovered that even some students who knew about the Burton didn't like using it because even if they had no intention of working past 10pm, they loathed the idea of setting up all their work and devices etc and then having to move them to another building at 10pm if they were still there at that time after all.

    So we upped our promotion of the Burton, it had a very nice re-design (although that wasn't directly related to anything we'd done with UX, it was happening anyway) and we made it accessible 24 hours a day. We're now monitoring the space as part of a new UX Project and the initial impressions are that it's already busier.
     
  • We've given the students blankets. A pile of blankets in a basket near the entrance - people can help themselves and deposit the blankets back there when they leave. I cannot tell you how popular this has been... There are examples of effusive tweets and feedback on our graffiti wall in the presentation below - it's so nice to do something simple but effective! Temperature is always a problem in libraries, and there's often a more or less even split between people who are too hot and too cold. My History of Art students came to me to say they found working in King's Manor (our City-centre site which is nearly 500 years old so not overly warm) really hard when it was so cold. So we managed to get Estates to get some more heaters, and we bought blankets - this idea came from some UX work undertaken at Cambridge in 2015. We also bought blankets for our main library and the Minster library too. 

    (Top tip: buy really drab and unexciting looking blankets. They keep people just as warm but are much less likely to go missing...)
     
  • Thanks to Ingela Wahlgren and Andy Priestner who gave me examples of their (current or former) institutions having changed the locations of digital screens as a result of behavioural mapping, in order to put the screens somewhere people will actually look at them. This could be displaying key info in areas where people have to queue, or it could be as simple as putting them in the direct line of site as students move forward through a space, rather than off to the side in people's peripheral vision.
     
  • Sometimes students describe an area as noisy even though it's ostensibly a silent study zone. Truly observing the space can often solve the mystery of why this is happening - Jenny Foster gave me an example of her institution realising the beep of the self-issue machine could be heard four floors up! So they found the volume and turned it down. At Cambridge they discovered there were loud hinges on office doors so they oiled them...
     
  • Like with the noise examples above, small changes really do add up. Carl Barrow told me some of the changes his HEI had made based on their fieldwork: additional signage (both analogue and digital), more printers, phone charge stations (why aren't we all doing these?) and a new coffee cart. Together all those minor tweaks will have a significant impact on the user experience, which is the name of the game after all.
     
  • UPDATE: At the #NCLXUX event I've just heard Carl say they also re-positioned digital screens, having noticed no one looked at most of them. One, which was positioned in the entrance as people came through the turnstiles, DID get looked at - so they used that exclusively to promote the Skills Team's workshops, and as a result saw a much bigger uptake for those sessions... I love this - a great example of the impact UX can have in unexpected ways...

Library service improvements 

  • At York we've moved academic staff onto our part-time package for borrowing books, giving them a little longer to return items without impacting too heavily on the rate of circulation overall
     
  • We've changed the way we run our annual review of subscriptions to allow for more time and stop it clashing with other key things in the academic calendar
     
  • We've changed the way we communicate key information to academics
     
  • We've used academics' detailed views on our current reading list system to inform the choosing and customisation of the new one
     
  • At Cambridge the FutureLib developed a whole app for finding study space

UX and Impact

I'm excited to hear a load more examples of UX-led change at UXLibs III (the third annual User Experience in Libraries Conference). The paper submissions we've had this year are fantastic, and the emphasis of the conference this year is on the impact of UX.

Finally, here are the slides from my Wales talk which mention a lot of the examples above, along with some next steps if you want to try ethnography at your own institution, and introductions to ethnography and design:

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UX, ethnography and possibilities: for Libraries, Museums and Archives

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I spoke about UX last week at a Welsh Government event in Aberystwyth, the annual Marketing Awards for the Library, Archive and Museum sector. It was a rare chance to talk to an audience not just of information professionals, and I had a great time. I'm really hoping some of the User Experience in Libraries movement now spills over into museums and archives too...

My presentation consisted of an introduction to UX, examples of 7 ethnographic techniques, a brief section of user centred design, and then several instances of UX-led changes - things people have done to tweak or change their services, based on ethnographic fieldwork. For this part thanks to Andy Priestner, Jenny Foster, Ingela Wahlgren and Carl Barrow for their examples, and it also has in it a bunch of things we've done at my own place of work. The final section consists of some next steps, for those wishing to dip a toe in the UX waters at their own institution.

I had several interesting conversations after my talk, with some people who were already doing UX (we agreed it can really energise the workplace) and some people who wanted to try it out. Two completely independent and unrelated chats with people from the museum sector were about using UX with people in difficult situations - one was around early onset dementia, and the other was about returning to work after periods of incarceration. I don't know if ethnography is already used in these settings but it sounded potentially fascinating, and an angle to this work I'd never considered.

There was also an absolutely brilliant presentation from Mari Stevens, who is Director of Marketing - Tourism and Business, at the Welsh Government (having started off in the library sector). Her slides were ace and she was a hugely impressive speaker. The scope and scale and ambition of her marketing plans for the country I found absolutely inspiring. The presentation was half in English and half in Welsh with live translation into ear pieces for those like me who needed them - the translator did a pretty amazing job too.

It was great to see the National Library of Wales, which towers over the town like, as Penny Andrews put it, a massive BOOK FORTRESS.

Huge thanks to Jane Purdie for inviting me to Wales (we've been trying to sort this out since 2015 so it was lovely to finally make it happen) and to everyone at the event for being so welcoming and asking insightful questions, and for giving me lots of ideas for good marketing practice to take away with me... And if you DO start doing UX at your institution, please get in touch to let me know how it goes!