Ask yourselves, libraries: are surveys a bit bobbins?

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We all agree we need data on the needs and wants of our users.

We all agree that asking our users what they want and need has traditionally been a good way of finding that out.

But do we all agree surveys really work? Are they really getting the job done - providing us with the info we need to make changes to our services?

Personally I wouldn't do away with surveys entirely, but I would like to see their level of importance downgraded and the way they're often administered changed. Because I know what it's like to fill in a survey, especially the larger ones. Sometimes you just tick boxes without really thinking too much about it. Sometimes you tell people what they want to hear.  Sometimes you can't get all the way through it. Sometimes by the end you're just clicking answers so you can leave the survey.

I made this. CC-BY.

How can we de-bobbins* our surveys? Let me know below. Here are some ideas for starters:

1. Have a very clear goal of what the survey is helping to achieve before it is launched. What's the objective here? ('It's the time of year we do the survey' does not count as an objective)
    
2. Spend as much time interpretting and analysing and ACTING ON the results as we do formatting, preparing and promoting the survey (ideally, more time)
    
3. Acknowledge that surveys don't tell the whole story, and then do something about it. Use surveys for the big picture, and use UX techniques to zoom in on the details. It doesn't have to be pointless data. We can collect meaningful, insightful data.
    
4. Run them less frequently. LibQual every 2 years max, anyone?
    
5. Only ever ask questions that give answers you can act on
    
6. Run smaller surveys more frequently rather than large surveys annually: 3 questions a month, with FOCUS on one theme per month, that allows you to tweak the user experience based on what you learn
    
7. Speak the language of the user. Avoid confusion by referring to our stuff in the terms our users refer to our stuff
    
8. [**MANAGEMENT-SPEAK KLAXON**] Complete the feedback loop. When you make changes based on what you learn, tell people you've done it. People need to know their investment of time in the survey is worth it.

Any more?

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*International readers! Bobbins is a UK term for 'not very good'.

The problem with peer review (by @LibGoddess)

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I am ridiculously excited to introduce a new guest post.

I've been wrestling for a while with the validity or otherwise of the peer review process, and where that leaves us as librarians teaching information literacy. I can't say 'if you use databases you'll find good quality information' because that isn't neccessarily true - but nor is it true to say that what one finds on Google is always just as good as what one finds in a journal.

There was only one person I thought of turning to in order to make sense of this: Emma Coonan. She writes brilliantly about teaching and information on her blog and elsewhere - have a look at her fantastic post on post-Brexit infolit, here.

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The Problem With Peer Review | Emma Coonan

Well, peer review is broken. Again. Or, if you prefer, still.

The problems are well known and often repeated: self-serving reviewers demanding citations to their own work, however irrelevant, or dismissing competing research outright; bad data not being picked up; completely fake articles sailing through review. A recent discussion on the ALA Infolit mailing list centred on a peer-reviewed article in a reputable journal (indexed, indeed, in an expensive academic database) whose references consisted solely of Wikipedia entries. This wonderfully wry PNIS article - one of the most approachable and most entertaining overviews of the issues with scholarly publishing - claims that peer reviewers are “terrible at spotting weaknesses and errors in papers”.

As for how peer review makes authors feel, well, there’s a Tumblr for that. This cartoon by Jason McDermott sums it up:

Click the pic to open the original on jasonya.com in a new window

- and that’s from a self-proclaimed fan of peer review.

For teaching librarians, the problems with peer review have a particularly troubling dimension because we spend so much of our time telling students of the vital need to evaluate information for quality, reliability, validity and authority. We stress the importance of using scholarly sources over open web ones. What’s more our discovery services even have a little tickbox that limits searches to peer reviewed articles, because they’re the ones you can rely on. Right? …

So what do we do if peer review fails to act as the guarantee of scholarly quality that we expect and need it to be? Where does it leave us if “peer review is a joke”?

The purpose of peer review

From my point of view as a journal editor, peer review is far from being a joke. On the contrary, it has a number of very useful functions:

·        It lets me see how the article will be received by the community

The reviewers act as trial readers who have certain expectations about the kind of material they’re going to find in any given journal. This means I can get an idea of how relevant the work is to the journal’s audience, and whether this particular journal is the best place for it to appear and be appreciated.

·        It tests the flow of the argument

Because peer reviewers read actively and critically, they are alert to any breaks in the logical construction of the work. They’ll spot any discontinuities in the argument, any assumptions left unquestioned, and any disconnection between the method, the results and the conclusions, and will suggest ways to fix them.

·        It suggests new literature or different viewpoints that add to the research context

One of the hardest aspects of academic writing is reconciling variant views on a topic, but a partial – in any sense – approach does no service to research. Every argument will have its counter-position, just as every research method has its limitations. Ignoring these doesn’t make them go away; it just makes for an unbalanced article. Reviewers can bring a complementary perspective on the literature that will make for a more considered background to the research.

·        It helps refine and clarify a writing style which is governed by rigid conventions and in which complex ideas are discussed

If you’ve ever written an essay, you’ll know that the scholarly register can work a terrible transformation on our ability to articulate things clearly. The desire to sound objective, knowledgeable, or just plain ‘academic’ can completely obscure what we’re trying to say. When this happens (and it does to us all) the best service anyone can do is to ask (gently) “What the heck does this mean?”

In my journal’s guidelines for authors and reviewers we put all this a bit more succinctly:

The role of the peer reviewer is twofold: Firstly, to advise the editor as to whether the paper is suitable for publication and, if so, what stage of development it has reached. [ ….] Secondly, the peer reviewer will act as a constructively critical friend to the author, providing detailed and practical feedback on all the aspects of the article.

But you’ll notice that these functions aren’t to do with the research as such, but with the presentation of the research. Scholarly communication always, necessarily, happens after the fact. It’s worth remembering that the reviewers weren’t there when the research was designed, or when the participants were selected, or when the audio recorder didn’t work properly, or the coding frame got covered in coffee stains. The reviewers aren’t responsible for the design of the research, or its outputs: all they can do is help authors make the best possible communication of the work after the research process itself is concluded.

Objective incredulity

Despite this undeniable fact, many of the “it’s a joke” articles seem to suggest that reviewers should take personal responsibility for the bad datasets, the faulty research design, or the inflated results. However, you can’t necessarily locate and expose those problems on reading alone. The only way to truly test the quality and validity of a research study is to replicate it.

Replication - the principle of reproducibility - is the whole point of the scientific method, which is basically a highly refined and very polite form of disbelief. Scholarly thinking never accepts assertions at face value, but always tests the evidence and asks uncomfortable, probing questions: is that really the case? Is it always the case? Supposing we changed the population, the dosage, one of the experimental conditions: what would the findings, and the implications we draw from them, look like then?

And here’s the nub of the whole problem: it’s not the peer reviewer’s job to replicate the research and tell us whether it’s valid or not. It’s our job - the job of the academic community as a whole, the researcher, the reader. In fact, you and me. Peer reviewers can’t certify an article as ‘true’ so that we know it meets all those criteria of authority, validity, reliability and the rest of them. All a reviewer can do is warrant that the report of a study has been composed in the appropriate register and carries the signifiers of academic authority, and that the study itself - seen only through this linguistic lens - appears to have been designed and executed in accordance with the methodological and analytical standards of the discipline. Publication in a peer-reviewed journal isn’t a simple binary qualifier that will tell you whether an article is good or bad, true or false; it’s only one of many nuanced and contextual evaluative factors we must weigh up for ourselves.

So when we talk to our students about sources and databases, we should also talk about peer review; and when we talk about peer review, we need to talk about where the authority for deciding whether something is true really rests.

Tickboxing truth

This brings us to one of the biggest challenges about learning in higher education: the need to rethink how we conceive of truth.

We generally start out by imagining that the goal of research is to discover the truth or find the answer - as though ‘Truth’ is a simple, singular entity that’s lying concealed out there, waiting to be for us to unearth it. And many of us experience frustration and dismay at university as a direct result of this way of thinking. We learn, slowly, that the goal of a research study is not to ‘find out the truth’, nor even to find out ‘a’ truth. It’s to test the validity of a hypothesis under certain conditions. Research will never let us say “This is what we know”, but only “This is what we believe - for now”.

Research doesn’t solve problems and say we can close the book on them. Rather it frames problems in new ways, which give rise to further questions, debate, discussion and further research. Occasionally these new ways of framing problems can painfully disrupt our entire understanding of the world. Yet once we understand that knowledge is a fluid construct created by communities, not a buried secret waiting for us to discover, then we also come to understand that there can be no last word in research: it is, rather, an ongoing conversation.

The real problem with peer review is that we’ve elevated it to a status it can’t legitimately occupy. We’ve tried to turn it into a truth guarantee, a kind of kitemark of veracity, but in doing so we’ve shut our eyes to the reality that truth in research is a shifting and slippery beast.

Ultimately, we don’t get to outsource evaluation: it’s up to each one of us to make the judgement on how far a study is valid, authoritative, and relevant. As teaching librarians, it’s our job to help our learners develop a critical mindset - that same objective incredulity that underlies scientific method, that challenges assertions and questions authority. And that being so, it’s imperative that we not only foster certain attitudes to information in our students, but model them ourselves in our own behaviour. In particular, our own approach to information should never be a blind acceptance of any rubber-stamp, any external warrant, any authority - no matter how eminent.

This means that the little tickbox that says ‘peer reviewed’ may be the greatest disservice we do to the thoughtful scepticism we seek to help develop in our students, and in our society at large. Encouraging people to think that the job of assessing quality happens somewhere else, by someone else, leads to a populace which is alternatively complacent and outraged, and in both states unwilling to undertake the critical engagement with information that leads us to be able to speak truth to power.

The only joke is to think that peer review can stand in for that.

UXLibs II: This Time It's Political

I'll never forget #UXLibs, for reasons beyond the excellent content and camaraderie pic.twitter.com/u6KQfo10os

— Emma Thompson (@LibraryEmma) June 26, 2016

At 9am on Day 2 of the UXLibs II conference, 154 information professionals sat in a large room feeling collectively desolate. I don’t want to be glib or melodramatic but the feeling of communal sadness at what had happened in the EU Referendum overnight felt to me akin to grief, like someone close to the conference had actually died the night before.

Was there anyone present who voted Leave? Possibly. But it seemed everyone was devastated. There were tears. UXLibs is, as Library Conferences go, relatively diverse (although it's still something we need to work on), not least because well over a third of the delegates - 60 this time around - are from outside England. Our North American and Singaporean friends felt our pain, our European friends were sad our country had chosen to leave them, and for the Brits it was already clear what an omnishambles the vote had caused.

The committee had met for an early breakfast to process how we should proceed. We agreed on two things: first that however we all felt, organisers and delegates had to deliver the best possible conference experience in the circumstances; and second that this was not time for neutrality. (In fact I was talking to Lawrie Phipps from JISC a little later that morning and we agreed that perhaps if so many libraries and educational institutions generally weren’t so neutral by habit, people might have a better idea of when they were being systematically lied to by politicians.) Conference Chair Andy Priestner was due to open the conference: say what you want to say, don’t hold back, we agreed. There had been a lot of jokes the day before - humour is an important part of the UXLibs conference as it leads to informality, which in turn most often leads to better and deeper communication, proper relationships – but there would be no attempt at making light of this. Don’t gloss over it. Don’t be glib. Don’t be neutral. But do be political.

So he was. You can read Andy’s reflections on his opening address here, and this is what he said:

“Today is not a good day.

I’ve worried for several months about this moment in case unthinkably it might go the way it has gone. I am devastated. Everyone I speak to is devastated. This is a victory for fear, hate and stupidity.

But as Donna said yesterday when describing her experiences in Northern Ireland – ethnographers have to get on with it. WE have to get on with it. Perhaps it’s a good thing that we will all have less time to dwell on what has just happened. Perhaps it’s good that we’ll be busy.

What I do know for a fact is that we have to be kind to each other today however we might feel. Let there be hugs. Let there be understanding.

For me one of the most precious things about UXLibs is the networking and sharing we enjoy from beyond the UK. The collaboration across countries, the realisation that despite the different languages, cultures and traditions that we are all the same and can learn so much from each other.

But it’s too soon to be cheerful. It’s too soon for silver linings.

Today is not a good day.’”

I was proud of him.

And then Day 2 happened, and I was proud of EVERYONE. What an amazing group of people. Shelley Gullikson put it like this:

“Last year I said that UXLibs was the best conference I’d ever been to. UXLibs II feels like it might be the best community I’ve ever belonged to.”

Everyone found a way to help each other, support each other, make each other laugh, and work together – after Lawrie’s keynote the first thing on the agenda was the Team Challenge so no one could spend any time sitting in dejected silence, there was too much to do… Collectively everyone not just got through the day but made it brilliant. It wasn’t a good day overall – a good conference doesn’t transcend political and socio-economic catastrophe. But it was the best day it could possibly be.

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I attended the first UXLibs conference in 2015 and I was blown away by it. It felt like the organising committee had started from scratch, as if there were no legacy of how a conference should be, and designed it from the ground up. They kept some elements, the ones that work most, and replaced others with new and more engaging things, especially the Team Challenge. It was the best conference I’ve ever attended.

The follow up, UXLibs II, had something of an advocacy theme – as I put it in the conference, if UXLibs I was ‘how do we do UX?’ then UXLibs II was ‘how do we actually make it happen?’. As communication and marketing is something I do a lot of work around and, as Andy so kindly put it, he wanted to see if we’d actually get on and not hate each other if we worked together, I was invited to join he and Matt Borg as the main organising committee (although we had a huge amount of input from several other people in planning the event). This was in September last year; Andy and Matt had already been planning for a while and by October we had our first provisional programme in place.

Andy and Matt...

Matt and me...

I find organising events approximately three trillion times more stressful than speaking at them, and hadn’t got fully involved in putting on a conference since 2011 when I swore ‘never again’. But I couldn’t resist the chance to work with Andy and Matt because we are pretty much on the same page about a lot of things, but disagree on a lot of the details, which makes for an interesting and productive working arrangement. So, around 400 emails later, a couple of face-to-face meetings later, many online meetings using Google Hangouts later, we were in thestudio, Manchester for the event itself. At the end of the two days, despite the dark cloud of Brexit hanging over us, everyone seemed exhausted but fulfilled. We’d built the event around the community and what that community said it needed, and I think it worked. It’s a great community and I felt excited to be part of it – challenged, stimulated, and I’d echo the delegate who came up to me at the end and said she’d never laughed so much at a conference: it was FUN.

Several things made this conference different, for me, apart from just the content. There's the fact that all the delegates have to be active participants (they were 'doing doing' as I put it, somewhat to my own surprise and certainly to my own mortification, when introducing the team challenge), there's the mixture of keynotes, workshops, delegate talks and team challenge, there's the informality and fun but with the Code of Conduct to ensure people can work together appropriately, there's the fact we individually emailed 100 delegates from UXLibs I to find out what their challenges were so we could help shape the conference, there's the fact that 150 people got to choose which workshops and papers they attended, there's the blind reviewing process for accepting papers, there's the scoring system for the best paper prize that was far more complicated than 'highest number of votes' because different papers were seen by different sizes of audience... There's the fact there's less fracture and division than in most conferences: I truly feel we're moving forward together as a UX in Libraries community. There's the fact that the venue was not only excellent but had a trainset running around near its ceiling that you could stop and start by tweeting at it!

Turns out it's quite easy to avoid All Male Panel. What you do, conference organisers, is you don't put all males on the panel. (Pic by @GeekEmilia)

There's the fact that Matt made completely bespoke badges with individual timetables for all 154 attendees! I can't tell you what mine said (let's say Matt was experiencing some remorse at saying he'd do the badges by the time he got to 'P') but so many people commented on the good-luck messages he put in to all presenters for their slots...

For all who think THE UXLibs Conference is a jolly :) #UXLibs pic.twitter.com/KaThDgLQXQ

— Sonia Wilson (@sonia_wilson1) June 23, 2016

This is very cute :-) #uxlibs pic.twitter.com/CrpH3Zyxcb

— Rachel Claire Walker (@phys_librarian) June 23, 2016

So it was pretty great, overall, despite everything. Thank you everyone invovled.

UXLibs III planning has already begun.

A UX Intern writes... Emma Gray on ethnography

This is the second post in a series about Embedding Ethnography at York. The introductory post is here; the next post will be on the same project as this one, but written by me and focusing on the logistics of organising the whole thing, rather than undertaking the ethnography.

This is Part 2, written by Emma Gray, who was our first UX Intern. At the time of her work with us she was a 2nd year undergraduate at another institution. She did an absolutely brilliant job here, and we learned a lot through her work - about our students but also about ethnography itself. Here's her take on the project. It's a great intro to what we think of at York as the Big Five ethnographic techniques in libraries. There are plenty more, but so far we've focused on these ones, in various combinations, across all our UX work.

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UX TECHNIQUES IN A LIBRARY SETTING – INTERNSHIP REFLECTION

In August 2015, I began an intern project looking into how several ethnographic UX techniques can be applied to a library setting and used to investigate possible improvements of the library user’s experience in the University of York library. As the project took place outside of term time, there was a focus on the experience of postgraduate students, who were still using the library over the summer break. The techniques covered over the internship include cognitive mapping, love/break-up letters, interviews, behavioural observation and touchstone tours.

BEHAVIOURAL OBSERVATION

Behavioural mapping is the first technique that I tried out at the beginning of the project. Being unfamiliar with the library before the project began, it was a valuable experience to observe how students behaviour in different spaces in the library. Firstly, I made a grid to record observations over the six week period in different locations within the library, increasingly concentrating on the more busy areas. Using the AEIOU framework, I recorded action (how the students are working in the space), environments (noting atmosphere, for example noise levels), objects (which services are used, e.g. technology and printed resources) and finally users (it is useful to note who is using the space, be it students, staff or external users). Secondly, it was also useful to record pathway maps using coloured diagrams of how individual students move in the space. In the York University library, it was particularly relevant to record pathways in the entrance foyer because the result show which building of the library students head when they enter.

An example of one of Emma's pathway maps

COGNITIVE MAPS

Participants were given six minutes to draw a map of the library, and I asked participants to change the colour of their pen every two minutes so that it could be easily remembered in which order things were drawn. It was a good starting activity because it allowed students to think about how they use the library and its services as whole. This visual representation of the spaces seems to also get the students thinking about how they use the library because I asked them more detailed questions during the interview.

The idea is that students would instinctively begin by drawing areas of the library they area most familiar with. However, I found that most participants started drawing the entrance in detail, maybe because the layout of the library as a whole is quite complex. I therefore encouraged participants to begin by drawing the area of the library they are most familiar with and use the most. This gave stronger results because it showed which objects and areas are most used.

A Cognitive Map drawn by one of the participants of the study.

In order to process the results of these maps, I divided the library into each floor of each building, and for each noted number of occurrences on the maps, its identification index which reflects the percentage of time is occurs (number of occurrences /number of participants), its representative index (number of occurrences / times category is drawn), and its temporal index (3 points for first pen colour, 2 points for the second and 1 point for the third). This process was then repeated for each individual object that is drawn on the maps, which for example included desks, computer areas and other library services. The advantage of this technique is that is gives a visual representation of how the students view the library, and it can also yield quantitative data. However, it is also a very time consuming technique, so the practicality of the data very much depends on the size of the library.

A screengrab of part of Emma's coding of Cognitive Maps

INTERVIEWS

I began the interview by asking the participants to describe and elaborate on their cognitive maps. Many participants elaborated on how they use certain spaces, which provided useful context for the cognitive map. I also asked participants to explain the process of how they use library services when working through an assignment. I asked general questions about the students’ experience with various services that the library provides, and encouraged to give their opinion on how their experience could be improved.

I found that being an intern and a student myself was invaluable to the interview process because the students did not shy away from being honest about their experience and more comfortable being critical than they might have been with a member of staff. Following the advice from Bernard’s ‘Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches’, I occasionally paused after a short answer was given, and often the participant would continue talking in more detail after a few moments, which kept the conversation flowing.

The major advantage of interviews is the breadth of information they yield, especially because things that individuals bring up can be elaborated upon and questions can also be adapted for future participants (e.g. finding out whether students had similar experiences with aspects of the library mentioned by other participants). Having a few standard open-ended questions is key, but participants seem to much more at ease if the interview flows like a conversation, rather than reading off a list of questions.

The only downside is that transcribing long interviews (they usually lasted between ten and fifteen minutes) takes a long time, but is definitely more valuable than making notes at the time because you are free to focus on what the participant is saying.

LOVE / BREAK-UP LETTER

Participants were asked to write either a love or break-up letter to a specific service that the library offers, so that the students can more emotively express how they feel about this service. I encouraged students to write about they feel (either negatively or positively) passionate about.

The participants were given a maximum of ten minutes to complete their letter. I definitely found this technique the most interesting because many participants wrote very imaginative, emotive letters that gave real insight into how library services and staff are perceived, and how this affects their daily university life. I did not find that this technique had any real disadvantages, only that some students preferred to write a wish list on what could be changed in the library. This also gave insightful information, but often did not show the reasoning behind these requests.  

An example of a usefully insightful Break-up Letter... Participants write these by hand but Emma wrote them up for ease of searching / reading. 

And for balance, here's a Love Letter...

TOUCHSTONE TOURS

For touchstone tours, I asked participants to give me a guide of the library. I voice recorded the tours to be transcribed later, so that every detail of the tour could be recorded.

Before the tour began, I usually encouraged participants to give as much detail as they could about how they use the services and different spaces, and also to point out their favourite space in the library. During the tour, I tried not to interrupt the participants or ask any more questions so that they could speak freely. Occasionally, I asked questions after the tour was over if any clarification was needed, or to enquire why the tour hadn’t included a certain area of the library.

The touchstone tours were interesting because the participants were very free to take me wherever they want, and point out anything they want, meaning that the participants brought some things up which I hadn’t thought to mention in the interview. It is notable that the quality of the tour heavily depended on how comfortable the participants were speaking out loud and narrative as we went along.

CONCLUSION

All of the techniques describe above have their own advantages and disadvantages, but they also each contributed to a more multi-faceted insight into how each participant engages with library services. I found the cognitive mapping the most interesting technique because I think it was the most unfamiliar to the participants and therefore got them thinking about how they use the library in a new way. As was the case in this particular library, it also highlights any areas that are being underused. Conclusively, having an intern collect UX data for a university library is a great idea, because the students are definitely more comfortable making their feelings known than they would be with a staff member.

Embedding ethnography Part 1: long term UX in the Library

The User Experience in Libraries Conference is looming next week, and I've got a series of UX related posts (not all by me!) lined up for this blog. (Read post 2, A UX Intern writes... here.) Apart from writing about last year's conference, and creating the UX Resource List for anyone interested in an introduction to the area, I've not really talked much about ethnography on here, but I've been doing a lot.

Apparently someone recently asked Andy Priestner (UXLibs Chair) what 'the next fad in libraries will be after UX'! To me this totally miscasts what User Experience in libraries is all about. Purely and simply, UX is an umbrella term for a suite of methods to help us understand our uses better, and design changes to that service so it works more successfully for those users. That is not a new or faddish need. It isn't going to go away. The methods may be new to libraries (in the UK at least; they're more established in the US and Scandanavia particularly) but there is a growing community of libraries and librarians getting amazing understanding and insight with them, so we'll continue to use them. More and more info pro jobs are starting to get elements of UX in the job description. This stuff is here to stay not because it is fashionable, but because it works.

The posts over the next two or three weeks will cover three projects undertaken at the University of York, including guest posts from UX Interns we had for two of them. The first covered Postgraduate students, the second covered specifically just Postgraduate Researchers, and the third, still ongoing at the time of writing, focused on academics. All of them have been fascinating and rewarding, but by no means plain sailing...

The Fairhurst Building at the University of York, the HQ for all our UX projects. Photo used by permission, copyright of Paul Shields.

UX at York: project overviews

I'll go into more detail in subsequent posts but here's an introduction to each project.

• Project 1: Summer UX. This was a 2 month project with the aim of building a UX Toolkit - essentially understanding the UX techniques and methodologies in a York context, see how they worked, what we could learn etc. We had an intern working part-time during the 2 months, and we used 5 ethnographic techniques across a total of 25 participants. These were all Postgraduates, both PGRs and PGTs, from a mix of disciplines.
• Project 2: PGR-UX. The second project also featured an intern, and was more focused - we spoke to fewer people, and the participants were all Research PGs. We targeted people from specific departments, and really only used three of the ethnographic techniques.
• Project 3: Understanding Academics. This project is absolutely huge and still on-going. It involves everyone in Academic Liaison, will last several months, and involves academics from every single Department at York. We have spoken to around 100 people in total for this, and used two ethnographic techniques. The analysis has just started.

Embedding ethnography

The key to our approach at York has been to try and integrate ethnography into our regular routine right from the start, rather than having a little UX silo where UX projects happen in isolation. We now try and utilise UX wherever appropriate in the Library, although quite honestly we've been better at embedding the ethnography than we have at the design-thinking / human-centred design aspect that completes (or continues) the UX-cycle, but that side of things is coming. We aim to consistently supplement our existing data collection methods with a nuanced UX approach, and because of the amount of work involved in ethnography and the sheer amount of time it takes, we target specific groups and areas we want to know more about and use ethnographic techniques with them. Each time we do, we learn more about that group of users then we've ever known about a group of users before. It's fantastic.

The five of us who attended UXLibs set ourselves up as available to be brought in on any wider projects happening in the library, to provide advice and guidance of if, where and how ethnography might be useful. So although the first project listed above, Summer UX, was primarily a way to try out UX in a York context, the subsequent two have been existing projects which have been deemed suitable for ethnographic input, and we've been brought in to advise on how best to go about it.

Next time will be the first guest post in a very long while on this blog - our first ever UX Intern, Emma Grey, has written about her experiences working with us when completely new to both libraries and User Experience, and the five ethnographic techniques she employed, including how she refined them as she went along. 

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Header pic by the Library Photographer at the University of York, Paul Shields. Used with permission.