This one is for the subscribers...

Hello all. My feedburner RSS feed has finally given up the ghost (after a valiant 14 years of serving my blog!) so I have shifted the delivery method for subscribers to be direct from my website. If you’re reading this in your inbox, it’s worked!

I wanted to flag up a couple of quick things:

• Nothing else will change externally. It’s just an internal change to how the blog gets sent out, not to how I do things. Same old ‘once in a blue moon’ service, I’m afraid. The posts may look a little different but that’s it.

• I’ve only transferred across ‘confirmed’ subscribers. There were 70 or so names on the subs list which weren’t confirmed, and I’m terrified of spamming people who don’t want emails, so I thought it better to leave addresses off. If you were on that list and wish to resubscribe then obviously I’d love you to do so!

• The email subscription has been broken for a few posts so if you want to catch up on what you missed, here’s three people liked: one on UX insights from our recent massive library website redesign, a post on where libraries can go now Twitter is becoming a wasteland, and finally a beginner’s guide to Insta Reels, Stories and the Grid.

So there we go. I very much hope people who want the emails are getting them, and people who don’t are not! It’s amazing that several hundred people still subscribe to this blog after all these years, especially considering how seldom I actually blog - if you’re a subscriber, thank you very much.

(If you’re reading this on my site and you’re not a subscriber, you can become one below. Cheers!)

5 UX insights for library web-design

For the last few months I’ve been leading a project to completely redo my library’s website from scratch. It has been full-on, and rewarding, and most importantly the new site is live as of midday today.

I’ll post about the project process later, but for now I want to focus on what the UX fieldwork with our users told us, as these insights will hopefully be useful for anyone redesigning their org’s website.

I’d love you to go to york.ac.uk/library (opens in a new window) and take a look, then come back here and tell me what you think!

This post focuses on the organisation of the site; part 2 will be on the content.

Use colour with intention

As you can imagine, we’re working within the limits of the University CMS (Content Management System) and don’t have a lot of control over colours - most of the content types are white, but several can be set to cream, teal or dark blue. I must admit when I first started designing the pages, I just used colour to mix things up a bit and add some visual interest - a strip of colour here, a nice accent there. But the users told us in the UX sessions that they wanted the colours to mean something - they expected consistency across the pages (for example opening times always one colour, as shown below; quotes from students always another colour) and in particular they wanted the darker colours to signify something especially significant - a call to action, or really essential information.

The teal strip showing opening hours. The fact the Help Desk opening hours are on there too, and the fact that the Easter vacation is explicitly mentioned even though the hours aren’t changed, are both as a direct result of student suggestions during the UX.

Topic based organisation beats audience based navigation

A perennial debate for designing anything for users, websites included, is: do we organise things by theme, or by who is accessing information? Do we say ‘PGs go here, UGs go here’ or do we talk about space on one page, resources on another?

In a literature review carried out at the start of the project, my colleague Alice Bennett wrote, on the topic of a particular study finding topic-based organisation to be significantly preferable: “This is potentially a more inclusive approach, as it better allows for intersectional user identities and better accommodates search behaviour, with users typically searching for specific information, rather than looking to find themselves in the menu.”

This was really borne out by the UX. I asked one distance-learner where all the distance-learning information should sit in the new structure. They said “I wouldn't separate it. Because you don't like to treat yourself as a second class [citizen] and just look for, okay, where is the info for the distant learner people?” And to Alice’s point about intersectionality, we also had an International Students guide - many of our distance learners are also international students, so where do they look? And of course the contents were extremely similar. In the end we have a nice ‘basic introduction to the library essentials’ page which is for everyone: universal design wins again.

Your users will tell you which compromises are worth making

Compromise is inevitable in this sort of process - library websites have too much complex information and too many responsibilities to our users to just make a super slick, neat website. The top-level navigation is one of the biggest changes between the old site and the new - the old site had about 15 overlapping ways in to the info down the left of the screen; the new one has just six top-level landing pages.

The top-level navigation of the new site

We thought loooong and hard about how to group the information - we spent weeks planning this before we even had access to the CMS. But still we changed it during the UX process, because our users told us the compromise we’d made wasn’t the right one.

Our info for Researchers was split across the Skills & Training page you see listed above, and a Facilities page. The Facilities page has loads of useful info, but no flow and no cohesion - and more importantly when we spoke to Researchers in the fieldwork we set them tasks to find Open Access info, and they couldn’t do it. The split of info which had internal logic for us simply didn’t make sense for the user, and they couldn’t get to what they needed.

So we now have Research and Digital Creativity. This too is a compromise because that pairing isn’t as natural as the others (skills & training, for example) but those are two important aspects of the library offer that are really easy to find, so it’s a better way to go.

KnowING it’s important to invert the pyramid isn’t enough!

We all know about inverting the pyramid, right? I talk about it all the time. But knowing how important it is and ruthlessly acting on it turned out to be two different things… Even when I actively tried to do it with the website, I wasn’t doing it enough. One participant in the UX literally said ‘this page is upside down’… It’s so tempting to try and set the scene and lead people through the information, but they just want the important stuff at the top and that’s what we should be doing.

So: invert the pyramid, and invert it hard. (And then come back later and check it’s still fully inverted.)

Pictures have more than cosmetic valuE

“I’m never going to read that.” This a common refrain from students when faced with dense, lengthy text. We tried to simplify and reduce where possible, but sometimes in libraries there just IS detail - so breaking that up with images really helps. It’s not just that the images can help illustrate what you’re talking about, it’s that they make the user more likely to read even long passages of text because it’s broken up into chunks. It makes it manageable.

We also made sure to use the same image for thumbnail links to pages, as you find at the top of the pages themselves when you click the links. This reassures the user that they’ve clicked the right thing, and creates a sense of familiarity which helps make the info less intimidating.

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A part 2 post detailing what the users told us about the Content of the site will be coming soon!

Library Marketing for Library Marketers Podcast

I had a great time on Katie Rothley’s Library Marketing podcast recently, guesting with Angela Hursh and Mark Aaron Polger, both of whom I’ve read a lot by and been fans of for ages.

Here’s the epsiode.

It was so good to talk with like-minded people about a subject I’m so passionate about, especially as we go on to talking about UX too, which I can talk about forever… Anyway, have a listen if you’re interested and thanks again to Katie for inviting me.

Where should libraries go if Twitter becomes a wasteland?

Elon Musk has bought Twitter, he’s all but guaranteed to make terrible decisions about how to run it, and high-profile users are already leaving the platform due to the already-significant increase in hate-speech and misinformation. Of course this has wider implications for the world at large, but where does it leave libraries seeking to connect with users on the platform? Should we stay, or find a new home?

tl;dr - in a way it doesn’t matter what we want to do, we have to follow the lead of our communites. If they stay put then so should we; if they fragment then it becomes a lot more complicated.

Should we simply leave Twitter on principle?

A quick disclaimer is that I’m focusing on organisational accounts here. When it comes to us as individuals, there’s certainly an argument that we should be getting out - but this post is about libraries, not librarians.

Ultimately, my view is that libraries leaving Twitter on principle is self-defeating and too selective. Facebook is so incredibly problematic and has been for at least a decade, so if we’re leaving Twitter we should probably be leaving FB, right? And they own Instagram so we should leave that too. Which means we’re left with TikTok, which is hardly a bed of ethical roses and is especially problematic around data.

So do we leave all of them on principle? You could certainly make a case for it - but I don’t think most of us will because it would destroy our ability to interact with our communities. So if the answer is ‘no we’re not leaving all of them,’ then leaving just Twitter seems like a misstep: if you’ll forgive the extended metaphor, it’s like cutting off your unethical nose to spite your face, when the cheeks, eyes, chin and mouth are equally guilty.

What are the alternatives? Is Mastodon an option?

There are a few alternatives to Twitter and sadly I’m yet to see any of them as a truly workable solution. The one currently garnering most attention due to a record number of downloads and new members is Mastodon, which is very Twitter-like indeed. Visually and functionally it’s very similar to Twitter but the problem is, we’re not REALLY on Twitter because of the functionality; we’re there because our communities are.

Unlike Twitter’s single giant network, Mastodon is spread across several different servers with different subgroups. There are regional spaces, queer-friendly spaces, climate-activist spaces - and they all stress they welcome everyone (e.g. you don’t have to be from New Zealand to join the mastadon.nz space). The issue with this diffuse approach is no one group is especially big: so there are 5,000 people on the Australian community server at the the time of writing, versus 3.7 million Australians on Twitter. You can interact with people on different servers, but the way it’s set up we could put an enormous effort into Mastadon but not influence enough people in any one place to see any tangible rewards. However I’ve set up an account for myself @nedpotter@mas.to get to know the platform in case it becomes a viable option for the library later.

The same goes for Discord, another platform often cited as a Twitter alternative in recent days - it focuses on several smaller communities, rather than one massive one. This makes it all but impossible to use efficiently as a library.

As things stand, I don’t see a viable alternative to Twitter. That may change, and it will vary according to sector - so for example if a LOAD of health professionals join Mastodon, it could become a useful platform for Health Libraries to have a presence on. But right now, it isn’t.

If we’re staying, what should we do differently?

One of the key things you can do if you haven’t already is mute more. Go to Settings and Support > Settings and privacy > Privacy and Safety > Mute and block and finally Muted notifications. On the resulting screen you can mute default-profile-pic accounts, or unconfirmed accounts, meaning you’ll be less exposed to mass-produced trolling or bots.

Ticking a few of these will probably help

You can of course mute individual words and block accounts too, or even Lock your account - from a comms point of view though that’s a pretty drastic step to take for an organisational account.

One other thing to note is don’t conduct any kind of sensitive conversation via DMs. You can’t trust Twitter with your data, so don’t DM your users and ask for anything you or they wouldn’t want to Twitter to know - just DM them and tell them you’ll be in touch via email instead…

[Hey while you’re in Settings, why not also take the opportunity to revoke access to third-party apps that don’t need access anymore. It’s good practice to do this on a regular basis anyway. And if you’ve got the patience for it, check out this guide for getting rid of a lot really annoying things about the way your Twitter timeline currently works - no more suggested posts, woohoo!]

Should libraries pay $20 a month for the blue tick?

Hell no.

So what happens next?

The slightly frustrating truth is our next steps as organisations has to be: wait. We have to wait and see what our communities do, and be guided by them. If they move en masse, we can move with them. If they don’t, we should probably stay where we are.

In the meantime it’s worth considering things by sector.

• If you’re a law library, pharma library, or other special library, you can potentially use LinkedIn to connect with almost every relevant person in your potential audience, and ditch Twitter if you truly wish to

• If you’re a school library you can definitely get by without Twitter if you choose to

• If you’re a Health Library or an Academic Library keep an eye on the conversations your audience are having on where they might go - Mastadon may become an option worth investigating in time, you never know

• If you’re a public library… I just can’t see any sort of alternative on the horizon for now. At least Facebook is the really key platform in that sector!

If anyone else has advice, guidance, or thoughts on what you might do with your library’s social media presences, let me know in a comment below. Good luck out there, everyone.

Academic Library Social Media: podcast interview

I was invited to be on Andy Hurt’s podcast about libraries recently, and we had a great time discussing library social media in an academic library context. Andy asked such great questions, I really felt like we got onto all the intersting stuff - personality, humour, tone, trends… Have a listen:

You can call me Andy · When Andy Met Ned - Episode 2

One thing we didn't talk about was Mastodon, as that was pre-Twitter-takeover...

Thanks again to Andy for having me on. She works at University of Melbourne Library and their social media is really, really good - check out their Twitter here and their Instagram here.