 So, not because I love talking about myself, but just thought I'd give you some context of what I do professionally here. So I consult full time, I've worked in libraries for the past 15 or so years, and I started off as a cert clerk, and I've done YA stuff, reference stuff. I was a library director of a small library outside of Portland, and worked for the public library in D.C. for a while, and had the opportunity to work with a bunch of different libraries on a consulting basis, and it's been pretty fun. I get to see a lot of different libraries. I miss being in a library every day sometimes, but it's nice to get to visit places like this. So, my partner, Manon, and I wrote a book on website user experience, and we wrote this book more recently about a holistic user experience design, and it's a pretty fun read. I'll reference this book a couple of times, it's a good tool for you to use. And I write a column in the library journal. I have taken a little break from that, but we'll get back to that before too long, all about user experience issues. And if you haven't seen this resource, I highly encourage you to. It's slightly academic in nature. This is an open access peer review journal about library user experience. We have eight issues out now. There is peer review stuff. There's some more practical, not peer review stuff, but it's called Weave. And I'm on the editorial board of this. It's a really, really cool resource. And I teach for San Jose State just north of here. So I teach a class on information communities, and I teach a seminar on library user experience. It's really a fun thing to do. And we do website work as well. So we have a pre-designed library website template called Prefab. And one library in California is using it. We've got about 50-some libraries using it. San Rafael is using it. I'll show you their site later, but it's a pre-designed website template that we host for folks. And I do a lot of user experience reports for different libraries. Here's a report that we did for an academic library in New Jersey, and we've been working with them to modernize their situation. And we're doing some pretty cool digital stuff for them. We are creating a campus-wide app to encourage library use that will beam and push library information to students. And we're hooking this up with our student information system so that when, say, the library gets a new chemistry source, all the chemistry students can learn about it. It's a pretty interesting thing. And recently, I worked with the library in Chapel Hill, the public library in Chapel Hill. I'll draw on some work that we did in this project a couple times throughout our time together. But we did a lot of different research projects, a lot of different studying, and left no stone unturned. Wrote a view for them as well. Here's just an example of some of the products we got up to. It was a pretty busy thing. We did their website as well. OK, so enough about me. That's kind of the stuff that I've been getting up to recently. But what are we doing here today? I really think from a strategic planning, kind of high-level situation, libraries are here to support our communities. That's a vague statement, I think, but one that's usefully vague. And we can do this, in part, by making our libraries awesome. And today, we can learn about some library user experience concepts. And maybe even we'll have some time to practice some techniques. I'm not sure about that, but it's always a good thing to get some hands-on experience, right? So here are topics we can cover today. What I've been using this term, user experience, a lot. Let's get into what that is, why it's important for libraries, talk about some techniques. I want to talk a little bit about the concept of design. And lastly, let's end on a positive note with some examples of good user experience in libraries, because I've got some real clunkers to show as well. But before we get into that, let's talk about the Hollywood Theater. This is a couple blocks away from me in Portland. It's one of my favorite places. I've just kind of recently determined that this is sort of like my third place. I go here frequently in the last month. I saw six movies here. Big fan, great place. Cool building, right? Let's say, for instance, that you were put in charge of the website for the Hollywood Theater. Tell me some of the things that you would put on the home page of the website. Neon. Pardon me? The neon. The neon. OK, nice design element there, sure. What's playing? Showtime's what's playing, yep. Location. Location. Anything else? History. History. Buying tickets, yep. Who works there? Yeah, about us. Who works there, that's great. Photos. Photos, so, OK, good. Along with the neon, good visual elements. Contact. Contact, yes. OK, we nailed it. I mean, this is exactly right. And I mentioned this to illustrate that the concepts behind creating a good user experience are pretty intuitive. Now, implementing that can be challenging, and it can be difficult. But this core concept of, let's anticipate what people need. And you've done this with this little experiment. And then we'll make that available to them. It is kind of one core lesson that user experience really is all about. And you have created some task-focused elements here. So you figured out, I mean, it's not that hard to figure out, but at least you anticipated that people are going to want to know what's playing at the theater. Pretty intuitive. How to buy tickets. This is a critical action item for this homepage. There were elements of good visual design, putting the knee on there, and putting photos. There was a comment about who was working at the theater, so creating a personal connection here as well. So we're seeing a well-rounded homepage here. Action items, making it desirable, making it pretty, anticipating the needs, and some history. So this is a way to show you that this is not rocket science, but the implementation of it can be more difficult. I don't know exactly what all of your roles are at the library, but you are helping create user experience no matter what it is you do. Policy decisions, customer interactions, creating programs, creating flyers, all these things create a user experience. So no matter what your role is, you really do help inform the user experience at your library. So it's relevant to you, I think. All right. What is a user experience? Let's talk about this. It's not just for technology. We've talked about technology just a very little bit so far. We've talked about other things, and there are buildings. We have buildings. We've got flyers. We've got customer service interactions. All those things are important for creating a user experience, and it's not just tech fixes. Boy, I sure wish that there was just some sort of tech widget that libraries could buy to create a good user experience, but it's not so simple. And importantly, it's not just customer service. When I ask folks to talk about a good user experience that they've had recently, nine times out of 10, maybe, they mention a customer service interaction. This makes sense to me because we're social creatures, and we know that a customer service interaction can really make or break an experience. When a server is nice to you, that just puts the whole restaurant experience in a good light. And conversely, when you get rude service somewhere, maybe your food won't taste quite as good, right? OK, so all these different touch points in the library that I mentioned are buildings, are parking lots, are flyers, are posters, the way the library looks, the light, customer service, all these things add up to an amazing animation and a user experience. So you can really consider all these things. And ideally, these things would all be in alignment, creating a good user experience. So here's an example of that and one of the most striking examples that I've experienced. So I needed to fly from Chicago to Toronto. And I heard that this airline had an inexpensive flight. So I went to their website and noticed immediately that their website looked a little bit different than other airline websites, right? This is slightly more fun, a little more friendly. There is a cartoon raccoon on it, which was pretty cool. Searched for a flight, and indeed I found an inexpensive flight to get to Toronto. And booked the flight, got to the airport. Everyone I dealt with from Porter Airlines was very friendly, they had nice uniforms on. All their computers were really big, new, shiny Macs, which I just noticed and was a little bit different. The flight boarded on time. The flight, the airplane was clean and new, which doesn't always happen, right? What else can I tell you about this? Their in-flight magazine is called The Journal of Porter Airlines, which maybe is taking themselves a little bit too seriously, but I liked it. It was actually interesting and it was an appealing thing to flip through. They served a beverage in an actual glass tumbler. And this is an economy airline, so that was an interesting touch point for sure. The flight and plane did not crash. This was really important, probably the most important touch point in this whole experience, right? On the return flight, at Toronto City Airport, they have a whole gate situation there. It is decorated with their little raccoon mascot. They had free wireless, which wasn't always happening at the time when I flew this airline. Their wireless network was called Mr. Porter, which is the name of their little raccoon. That maybe is the least important part of the journey and the least important touch point. But it illustrates to me that they had considered pretty much everything from clean plane, friendly customer service, inexpensive flight, cartoons. They had thought about all this and they tried to entice users and give people good experiences so they would fly them again. So just a quick example of something that I observed as a holistic good user experience from my perspective. OK, so why do we care about this in libraries? And here is where I get to take libraries to task for a little while. And I want to talk about two different levels of user experience here. And I think they're both crucial. They should work in tandem with each other. We're going to start at a small scale thing here, interaction design. And this is arranging things, physical things in our building, and we have a lot going on. So here are 13 steps that someone might go through to learn about a book from a library, place it on hold, and check it out from the library. We see a lot of different types of touch points here. We see something in print. We see some physical building things. We see some electronic things. We see a customer service interaction. All of these things are working together or not to make this a good user experience, hopefully. And there are a lot of different pieces of the puzzle here, right? User experience design can help us get a grip on all of this and analyze it, figure out what's working and what's not, and make sure that people are happy and having a good experience throughout this journey. And this is just one thing, right? This is just a simple learning about a book and checking it out. We do a lot of different things. So if you multiply these 13 steps by however many things go on in a library, we've got a lot of spinning plates to deal with, right? So here's one type of interaction design in libraries. We've moved beyond this, thankfully, but here is a design that someone came up with to prevent or to encourage a certain behavior, right? This was to prevent people from removing books and to keep books safe. We're not doing this anymore, thankfully. Here's another form of interaction design in the past. Here are some old, some of the original library cards, kind of a cool thing. Another form of interaction design that we've moved beyond, mostly, the card catalog, we expected people to go like this. This was the best that we could come up with at the time. Thankfully, I think we moved beyond this, although, of course, there's always the nostalgia for this, right? Seems like kind of an interesting article, too. Talk about signage quite a bit. This is an important form of interaction design in libraries, and this is one of my favorite examples. I've been using this example for a long, long time. It's really horrible, right? It's mean. It's ugly. It's grammatically questionable. And it's totally patronizing. Look in the bottom right-hand corner. Thank you, right? That's horrible. Someone was really angry when they made this sign. So I do think that signage is usually a symptom of, bad signage is usually a symptom of larger problems in a space. And we'll talk about that more. Here are some other examples. This is like the lowest common denominator, the least amount of effort you could do, and is this really enticing people to sign up for summer reading programs? I doubt it. Here's a sign that is just saying something that's pretty commonsensical when you're speaking. Someone can hear you. Also, we've got some accessibility issues on this sign with green and red. Those are hard colors for people that see differently. And comic stands, which we can make fun of. But to be fair, it's supposed to be actually a pretty legible typeface, so there's that. OK, here's an interesting story. I was working with some libraries in Florida. And this library, beautiful Art Deco building, around since the 20s or 30s, when you walked in the entrance of this building, this beautiful space, you could see five of these signs just in the entrance. And it was really cluttering up the space, and also saying something kind of commonsensical. If the alarm goes off, get out of the darn building, right? The piece of work I did with them essentially amounted to decluttering their library space, which was like a dream job. It was amazing. And it looked a lot better afterwards. Some more commonsensical signage. Don't post it on social media. Just get out of the building, please. Here we have three labels and some clip art. Mysteries, mystery, mystery. Maybe not necessary. So there's that. There's probably a story behind this one, right? Very specific mandate here. Chips ahoy. Totally cool. Oreos, not so much. So does this look familiar according to your library space? This was the result of a little bit of a signage audit and pulling down a number of signs in a library space. This adds a significant amount of visual clutter in a small space or a large space. Some of these signs have really good intentions. Signage can have different purposes, right? It can identify spaces. It can help instruct people. It can help regulate behavior or at least try to regulate behavior. Some of these things are meant to be really helpful. Like pay for print is here. And instructions how to use the printing. But no one reads these things. And they add a level of unpleasantness in a space. And I'm gathering more and more data about this. I've just had my fourth example. And it's not a huge sample set. But fourth time, I've worked with the library that we have pulled down 100% of the signage in the library. All the things hanging from the ceiling, all the things taped up, all the NCAP displays. And basically nothing changes. And if anything changes, people ask fewer questions somehow. It's a really weird thing. But it's a really, really interesting experiment. And it's a really great way to kind of reset signage program in a library. And then figure out how to be intentional and not put up ugly, mean signs. So there's that. What about this sign? I know, right? So bad. OK, I made this one up. But it's not because I hate babies, all right? I don't hate babies. But babies can be loud and annoying. Let's be honest, right? They can be cute, but they can be loud and annoying. So can people on cell phones. Cell phones users can be loud and annoying. But people do so much more on their devices than yack away and be loud. But so many no cell phone signs in libraries all over the place. And when we put up those signs, I think we're regulating a technology when if we should be regulating anything, it should be behavior, loud and annoying behavior, right? So we wouldn't put up a sign like this for many reasons. And I don't think we should put up no cell phone signs either. OK, the language we use in libraries is also a very important touch point. We can be pretty jargony, right? So this was at the library where I was a director, and I saw this sign. And one of the first things I did was replace it. And cookery is a word that cooking nerds and librarians use, but not many other people. And luckily, the official Library of Congress subject heading has changed since. And it's now cooking, which I think is a bit more human and a bit more normal, right? So jargon I think is something we need to pay attention to. OK, the classic reference desk fortress. Here we have one that is meant to separate librarians and people. And this one has a computer that's fallen over on it for some reason. Let's talk about our service points and service models, because this is a really important touch point, I think. This one is lower. So you could say if maybe it's a bit better, but it's got a lot of stuff on it. We have some things blocking major sight lines. I think it leads to an error of not being approachable. What about this one? This is an interesting one to me, because it looks good, looks smaller, but do they really expect someone to sit in this chair? Please help me, help me, Mr. Librarian. I'm hoping that they just put that chair there to stage it for the photo, because if that chair wasn't there, I think this is actually much closer to ideal desk situation, one that might be easy for someone to come around and look at the computer screen and for some collaboration to happen. OK, another desk. And I have this illustration because it's very similar in size and shape to this one. And this is an interesting one, because it looks cool, right? And this adds some aesthetic value to the situation. And that shouldn't be discounted, because our spaces should look great. But I think functionally this desk is probably the same as this desk, right? And so we need to sort of divorce or at least understand that aesthetics does not equal functionality. We should have things that look great and add visual appeal, yes, but we should also understand that we can't just make something look cool. We need to have some deeper design going on and design functionality as well. So I call this design washing, and we need to be careful of this. And we see examples of that quite a bit. Our desks haven't changed for a long, long time, for the most part. And I think the way people do information is changing and has changed. And the way we do information has changed. I think our service model should evolve as well. So how many of you are dealing with the traditional big reference desk? Probably half or more. And how many of you have moved to a smaller, modular situation? OK, three, four people. It can be a big switch for folks. People are really comfortable behind something. Like when I'm out here, I'm more exposed, right? And it's maybe slightly less comfortable. Same with library workers, but I think a model where librarians get from out behind the desk is an interesting way forward. OK, some more example of aesthetics taking priority over functionality and deeper design. This is an interesting website, because at first glance, it's more designy than your typical library homepage. They have paid attention to typography. There are some, I guess, interesting colors. There is a designed logo. But if you spend any time with this site or homepage, you see some pretty serious usability and functionality problems. Like the menu, I won't go into a full dissection of this, but the menu on the left-hand side is not standard. Standard navigation is more horizontal in nature. All those things on the left are links, but they all look different. And I think the most important thing to note is this homepage is literally library-centered. Look at all the screen real estate, just taking up the library logo, which gives pretty much zero functionality to that important real estate. There's a search box on the homepage, which is necessary in a good step, step in the right direction. But really, why not swap that logo into the upper left-hand spot, which is a standard place for a logo to be on the web, right? And make that search box really big, because that's why 99% of people are coming to the website. So, just because something looks nicer doesn't mean it's necessarily creating a good user experience. Might be contributing aesthetic value, but that's not enough. I think this happens at the post office, too. I find the post office super perplexing. There are so many different options, and I'm like, ooh, I don't know what to do. And also, the promise of this, you know, pretty nice design-looking package doesn't always live up to the reality. So, we need to be mindful of that as well. Rules and libraries, another important form of interaction design. So, this one, Magic School Bus is totally cool, but everything else, not as much. Here is a website. We help this library redesign their page. It looks super ancient, much older than it should have. And certainly, our websites are an important form of interaction design. Many people go into them all the time, every day. And here, to me, is a great example of a library-centered solution and a library website design. And this is an interesting one to me because the library's heart was in the right place. They said, hey, libraries can be hard for users to navigate. We use a lot of jargon. So, you know what we'll do? We'll create a glossary and put it on the webpage because maybe people wanna learn all about the library. And I mean, how many people do you think are viewing the library ease glossary on this homepage, right? This is another library-centered solution, trying to turn users into miniature librarians. And again, I don't wanna give them too hard of a time because they're trying to be helpful here, but going about it in my mind the wrong way. Instead, why not just start using words that everyone else uses? That's probably a good way forward. So, another website example here. Here, we have one from an academic library. And this is an interesting one to me because they have sort of done no design work. And again, their intention is good here. They said to themselves, we have a lot of good resources in the library. Students need to see this stuff. Let's put it all out there. And so they've exposed so many different choices, but in the process they have de-emphasized anything that is most important, right? So that is sort of the design work that they have missed out on. And they have had an opportunity here to better anticipate the needs of their users and make that stuff more prevalent and more obvious so people could find that stuff faster. I have sort of the opposite version of this in later examples of a library, an academic library that has made some good choices and really narrowed it down for library users. Okay, our catalogs. Certainly an important touch point. Here I've done a search for John Steinbeck. I get no results. What's up with that? Pretty poor, right? And this is a tough one because out of pretty much many, many different things we're gonna talk about today, we have sort of least control over our OPAC interfaces, don't we? And this puts us in a tough spot because it's such an important touch point. So what's the answer to that? Well, I mean, I think there are a few. They're sort of technical in nature but I think we should pay a lot of attention to our catalogs. All right, staplers. I guess a very minor important, minorly important touch point but I wanna talk about the stapler because this is sort of a stapler caused me to be interested in creating good interactions in libraries. So I was working a reference desk in a library outside of Chicago and multiple times a day, every day someone would ask me for the stapler we kept behind the desk. I'd get it from the drawer, I'd give it to them and they'd use it and then I'd have a small interaction with them, put it back. And finally I said to myself one day, why are we even bothering to put the stapler away? Not that I'm mind getting it, not that it's not a good thing to have a small short 30 second interaction with someone and be friendly and chat people up and maybe you get a reference question out of it but it would probably be easier for everyone if we just put the stapler out, someone could use it and it would be more convenient. And we did that and stapler didn't get stolen and even if it got stolen every six months what's the big deal? It's seven bucks, it's cost of doing business and that's that. So this was a small thing for me but it sort of triggered something in me and I became interested in thinking about these issues of making libraries as easy and pleasant to use as possible. Okay let's talk about some bigger picture UX stuff next. Okay so purpose, what is it that we're doing here in libraries? We have helped support our communities through being a place of access to information whether it's printed books, whether it's these databases that no one knows the name of or barely use, right? Unfortunately. We have helped solve the problem of information scarcity in our communities and this is how we have largely interpreted our mission but what's the problem with the problem of information scarcity? Information isn't scarce in the same way, right? So I think we are largely set up to solve this problem and it's not as much of a problem or it's not the same problem anymore and that to me is a little bit of a red flag. Now we do do more in libraries than just provide access to content. We provide some social experiences too and we add value to the community in many different ways. Classic example of this is story time, right? This is not just about content, it's about gathering around content and adding value in this way and I think that's important and I think that's good. However, we're really, really known for being a place with books, right? And OCLC every few years asks people, hey what is it that you think of when you think of the library? And people increasingly say books. OCLC thinks this is a strategic advantage and that we have a strong brand of books and we should play that up. Now Tinfoil hat me says maybe OCLC has a vested interest in keeping libraries in the book business. I kid, I kid, kind of. So what's up with this? Well we know that reading is changing and I'm not here to say that the sky is falling because of eBooks, I don't think that's true at all but we should recognize that being a place of access to content is a little bit shifting sands right now. So really interesting confluence of interaction design issues and this digital content issue is found in this web comic and this guy tried to download an audiobook from Cleveland Public Library and he got so mad that he wrote a comic about it. And if you've ever done frontline staff or tried to use frontline staff work for digital books or ever done it yourself you'll recognize a lot of these things like step eight, get cryptic error. Not cool, especially when step 19 give up on stupid library, right? Not the kind of experience we want to be promoting in our spaces. Now to be fair, I think our digital interfaces from these vendors have gotten better in the past couple years for sure, so that's good but I still think they can be difficult to use and not as easy as other digital content products out there that aren't library related. So let's pretend for a minute that we have a lot of money and a lot of resources and we could create something like this and we have an amazing interface, great content that people want. Should we double down on being a place of access to content and focus on creating something like this or like this? I mean should this be the library homepage? But let's be honest, it would probably end up looking more like this. Because we just can't help ourselves. You know, I'm hesitant to get excited about being a place, just a place of access to content because I think if we do that, we are sort of letting our competition define us in a certain way and many content needs are being met outside the library and I think that can be okay. I'm not saying we should get rid of content in libraries, I don't think that's the case but we've got some pretty major players in the digital content realm, don't we? And libraries, especially when we collectivize can be extremely powerful but we don't have the budget of these folks and I think that kind of puts us at a strategic disadvantage if we are trying to just be a place of content and I don't think we're necessarily doing that and that's good. It also reinforces what Joan Fry Williams has called the grocery store model of librarianship where someone comes into the library, gets an item and goes home and uses it there. This is a very transactional approach and I think it is one that does not capture the richness of what's happening in our libraries and the fact that we can really transform people's lives. So instead of a grocery store model, there's a kitchen model of librarianship where stuff is getting made, there's collaboration happening and that to me is a much more appealing picture. So there are some canaries in the coal mine for places of houses of physical copies of content and again, I'm not trying to say the sky is falling because of digital content, I don't believe that but we do see places that housed physical content that are no longer with us and something to think about. I also think that the way we communicate the story of our libraries to stakeholders is unsustainable in the long run. We know that there is only one good kind of circ stat and that's one that is higher than the month before, right? If your circ stats are on the decline, that's bad news. If circ stats are flat lining, it's also not great news. We're trying to push and pump up those circ numbers and I don't think that's the right way to go about proving the worth of libraries. So quick survey, Judgment Free Zone, how many of your circ stats are skyrocketing or trending upward? We got one, two, four, maybe four, okay. And if you remove DVDs, yeah, is it digital books or what's, oh yeah, okay. Nice children, yep, makes sense, good. And how many are more flat in nature? Okay, a few more. So that by process of elimination means the majority of you should be raising your hand if you're participating in this quick survey that your circ stats are on the decline. Okay, I see more nods of agreement. Like I said, Judgment Free Zone, it's cool. I think it's totally typical. This is a pretty much the response that I get across the country asking libraries this question. So what are we to do? What's up with that? You know, here's one sort of potential solution for trying to pump up circ stats and making circulation more convenient. And I think this is a cool project. I think it's convenient for people to be able to pick up our return books throughout the community, not just at a library, physical library space, but what's the problem with this library? It's not a library, okay, yeah. There are no staff, there are no people, right? There are some people behind the scenes making this happen, right? But there are no humans to interact with and I think a library space plus humans is probably our biggest strategic advantage. So I wouldn't want us to get boiled down into red box like kiosks in our communities. The UK has had some library funding problems for a long time now and we see some public libraries retreating back into cafes and pubs. And hey, I'm all for books in those spaces or library services in those spaces, great. But maybe from more of a library outreach perspective rather than like retreating back into these spaces. And they have done their best to try to combat this with some real showcase buildings in their communities and some of those are more effective than others. There's a really interesting new space called the Story House, which you can look up. They have acting and I think movies and a collection there. So can we innovate our way out of this problem with circulation and search stats in libraries? Well, I think we can but I think that innovation in libraries has been a little bit weak in the past 10 years or so. I think we're looking to see what's happening out there in the larger tech space and like hoping that if we use these tools it will make the library relevant. And to me that's a very weak form of innovation. It's actually to me just using tools that are available to us and we should do that. I'm not up here being a Luddite at all but I think we can go deeper with our innovation rather than just hoping that some new product on the web will be our savior. So instead of focusing on people's motivations for using all this stuff online we're more focused on the tools but I think UX, user experience design would have us go deeper and look at people's motivations and listen to people. So instead of being seduced by a cool tool, measuring cup isn't necessarily all that cool, right? Let's focus on the end result and this to me is a little bit more appealing. We can find some more natural fits I think for this. So as part of doing this UX work we need to in a certain way distance ourselves from our library users and we need to realize that we are different from the people that we're trying to serve. We are the information pros, we get it, we breathe this stuff, live and breathe it every day maybe more than we want to sometimes but our libraries should be designed for them, not us. So when we realize that people are different than normal people are different from librarians we can learn more about them and learn what makes them tick and design spaces and services to better meet their needs. So here we have the Holy Trinity, useful, usable and desirable. These things are not mutually inclusive. Something can be very useful without being usable. For instance maybe the library catalog, right? User experience design would have us create stuff that is in the middle of this Venn diagram. We can consider all of these aspects of a product or service or new program to see where it falls and make sure that it is some more near the middle. Now I think that we should consider emotional design as part of this process and here are some examples of emotional design and some interesting things I think in this area. This neuroscientist tells a story in this book of a guy who had a brain tumor and he got the brain tumor removed and as part of the process the doctors removed this guy's, not on purpose, part of his brain where a motion was located. And this guy lost the ability to emote at all. He wasn't happy, he wasn't sad, he was just pretty neutral and an unexpected consequence of this is the guy, poor guy, had basically no ability also to make choices. So he couldn't even decide what color pen he wanted to use to write something, let alone anything higher level than this. So there's this link that scientists have found between emotion and choice and I want all of our communities to be enthusiastic choosers of our libraries and I think we can do this in part by not playing on people's emotions but considering the impact, subconscious impact most likely of the way we're designing things on them. You know, we have this story that we tell ourselves that we're these highly rational creatures and we have this calculus in our head for making decisions and we weigh the pros and we weigh the cons and make this best decision and go forward, right? I mean, it turns out that story is kind of not true and it's a story we tell ourselves to bring some sort of order to our lives but choices happen in a different way. And as part of this emotional design, I don't think we should focus on shouting at people and trying to message to people to use the library. I think there's a conversation that's been happening actually probably as long as I've been in the library game that says, hey, we have all these cool things going on at the library, if we can just let people know about it then they'll come to the library and I'm not here to say we shouldn't be advertising because clearly I think that's part of it but I don't think we can really shout loud enough to convince people to use the library. I think we need to take a complimentary route as well and that route is listening to folks instead of shouting at them. I mean, we get messaged to all day every day and we're really good at shutting that off I think hence like the blindness to some digital signage, right? So user experience design says, sure, advertising can work and it's important, gotta market your stuff but listen to users, we need to figure out what they want, we need to learn about them and design stuff that will be useful, usable and desirable to them. So really good article that I want to mention here is called What's a Library Worth? And at that URL, I'll post a PDF that you can download and it's from 2009, the article is written by Eleanor Jo Rogers and it's a great article about advocacy in libraries and user experience in libraries even though she doesn't use either of those terms. She says, no library exists in a vacuum, every library exists in an ecosystem and instead of doing what's good for the library, the library needs to turn outward, it needs to listen and do what's good for the host ecosystem. And the library will benefit from this in two ways, one, if the ecosystem is healthier, the library will be healthier because that's how ecosystems work, right? What's more, if the library is seen as a positive contributor to this ecosystem, stakeholders and funders are going to pump more money into the library because it's doing a good job benefiting the host ecosystem. So there's both this kind of direct support and rising ties benefit. I hope you check out this article, it's a really good one and I think it's a nice example of the power of turning outward and thinking about your community, whether it's your town, university, corporation, whatever. Okay, I wanna talk about who should be doing this UX work and talk about some techniques, but I've been up here flapping for about an hour now and I wanna make sure everyone's blood is flowing. So let's have a quick break, let's just do five minutes, I still have a lot of stuff to get through. So let's meet back here in five minutes, get yourself a sip of coffee and we'll continue, thanks. I wanna talk about who should be doing this work in libraries and probably won't be surprised to learn that I think everyone should be doing this work. However, I think it's also useful for there to be some point people in charge of this or contributing a lot to this. Now, in some academic libraries, they have gotten excited about doing UX work and hired a user experience librarian and maybe the institution was not quite ready for this position and that is a really tough place for an individual to be in because part of doing UX work is being critical. Now, you don't need to be a jerk about it, right? And you shouldn't be a jerk about it, there can be all sorts of good ways to do criticism but it can be really hard for one person to say be in charge of changing a user experience in a library because, well, there's issues of territoriality, sensitivity, stuff like that, right? So especially at the outset, when libraries are getting into UX work, I'm a really big fan of assembling cross-departmental user experience teams to do this work. It can help diffuse some of those issues of territoriality. It can give the group a nice breadth of knowledge throughout the whole library if you've got people from different departments and it's a great way for this group to have a good understanding of what's going on, spread the word back out and hopefully make some positive changes. So are any of you a solo UX librarians in your institution? Couple, yeah. I feel for you, I'm just joking. Obviously some places are ready for this organizationally and that's great and of course there's a huge spectrum of libraries that aren't ready and libraries that are totally ready and that's probably more typical but getting partners to beat this drum and help spread the word about UX is a really good way to proceed. So what are some good introductory techniques for people to experiment with in libraries? One of my favorites to get started is called a service safari and this is a great way to do an inclusive user experience activity with an entire library. So in a service safari, people go out, they leave the library. This is actually not about libraries at all. This is about sharpening your critical and analytical skills and learning how to dissect and recognize experiences. So you go outside of the library and you go to a cafe, you go to a museum, you go to a park, you go to take a taxi ride, whatever and you start to consider all the different elements of that experience. And when you do this and your colleagues do this, you can come back together and you can have a discussion about what you observed, what worked, what didn't work and the idea here again is not necessarily to go out into the world to say, borrow ideas and implement them in the library. Now if you happen to come across something that would work really well in your building, great. Go for it. But the emphasis here is to get people accustomed to talking about their experiences and to develop a vocabulary of discussing experiences because when you do this outside the library, you don't have all of your history with the library and you don't need to worry about any sensitivities necessarily. You can do this in a totally fresh, relatable way, get together, have conversations about this and then eventually turn this conversation towards the library. So I have a small background document for doing service safaris and a four or five page service safari worksheet that you can download at that URL which I'll share again at the end of the slides and the worksheet is meant to guide your observations out there doing a service safari and you don't need to answer every question on the list but they're meant to be more like prompts for getting you to think you and your colleagues to think about and consider different aspects of the experience. So there's context, physical space, signage, customer service and these can help generate some talking points for you all. So a number of libraries I've worked with have taken this exercise very seriously and expected people during work hours to go out and have a service safari. So the libraries thought it was important enough to pay people to go out and get a coffee which I think is great. And this was a way to signal to them, hey, we are really wanting to pay attention to experiences in libraries. We think it's important to go out and do this. We're all gonna talk about it afterwards and get better at describing experiences. So UX audit is an interesting first thing for a UX team to do. And I really should change this to UX review since audit has some negative connotations, doesn't it? And UX review is a nice way to take stock of your current experiences and it's a nice way to know where you are and to identify opportunities for moving forward. So the book that we wrote, useful, usable, and desirable, is essentially a guide to doing a user experience review. In the book, we list a number of different checkpoints and give information about why this checkpoint is important, how to assess it. If you're scoring lower, then you wanna be scoring how to improve this different checkpoint. And you can use the book in a linear or nonlinear fashion pop in and out to read some stuff about these different aspects, these different touch points, and gauge where you are. In the process, you likely will identify some low-hanging fruit to improve. You'll identify some big projects to improve and you can prioritize those as needed. And you can do a user experience review without the book, so I'm not trying to be salesy here, just in your library, I want it. I don't really care if you buy it, but just read it and we try to make it fun and it could be a good guide to going forward. So yeah, you can prioritize these projects, low impact, low effort, high impact, low effort, et cetera, et cetera, and begin to develop an action plan for making some changes. Sort of similar concept in a certain way to doing a service safari is developing a user experience partnership with another institution in your community. And it's similar to service safaris in that it helps you take the blinders off, the blinders that you have on, from being in the same space every day, day after day, right? We become blind to the things going on in our buildings and getting a fresh set of eyes on your user experience is definitely invaluable. So it doesn't even have to be a library. If you happen to have a relationship with another school or a hospital or anything else, and it definitely can be another library, invite them in, invite them to walk around your space, make some notes, see what they observe, you do the same for them, have a meeting afterwards, and have a nice discussion. And this again takes some trust, takes some tact, tactfulness, which hopefully we all have, but I think it's a really great way to get a fresh set of eyes and a new perspective about what's happening in your library. Here's a higher level idea, but one that I think is really important to do at the outset of some user experience work, and it's a nice way to create buy-in and frame user experience work, and that's creating a service pledge. And service pledge is essentially a statement of how you want to deliver service in your library, how you will deliver service in your library. Let's make it a bit stronger here. So in the service pledge, you can lay out the spirit in which you will deliver service, and this can act as a high level reminder to folks, especially if you frequently reference this service pledge, a reminder to folks for what you're striving for in the library. So here's some questions that I use to get at some service pledge ideas, and again, I will link to these at that URL, and you can send these out to your staff, have people respond, put the responses in a Google spreadsheet, or spreadsheet of your choice, and do a simple word frequency analysis, see what sorts of concepts people are coming up with, see what's on people's minds in terms of delivering service. Use that stuff to craft a service pledge to be a guide for moving forward. Here are some common words I see in responses to these questions, and they're all very nice touchy-feely words, right? The first one to me is very interesting, patience. Patience is a virtue, we all know that, right? However, it's sort of like a double-edged sword in this case to me, in that if someone is saying patience is important for a library worker, which is hard to disagree with, they're also sort of admitting that there's something to be patient about, right? Like some sort of annoying behavior. So that's one that I really wanna explore more to see really the perceptions of library workers in doing their work. Here's a service pledge we came up with at Chapel Hill down here, and we have this on the about page of the website, knowing probably that not many people are gonna spend time reading this, but we did it anyway. Kind of mostly for staff to show that this is an important statement and some important words. So I liked this one a lot. You are our top priority, whenever, wherever, and why ever, which is a word we made up. You choose to visit us, every moment should shine. We are friendly, helpful, responsive, and engaged. We are focused on meeting your needs and committed to making every visit delightful. I like this statement because it's a strong statement. It's not saying some of the earlier iterations, and oftentimes I see, we strive to provide good service, blah, blah, blah. Well, you know, just be a bit more strong about it. You're not gonna strive, you're gonna do it. This is the deal. We also identified some organizational values as part of this work, and those were the other three words there in statements. And I thought it was really great, this concept of hospitality, especially given Chapel Hill's location in the Southeast. Hospitality is an important concept that everyone, both public and staff, can relate to, could relate to. So I thought that was a really, really nice one. So consider sending out survey questions like this, working with it to rally everyone, and to get input from everyone about what sort of service you want to provide or will provide. Similarly, you can create a user experience vision. You can create a story, create a video. This can take many different forms, and plant the flag out in the future and say, this is what it's like to use the library. So this can take the form of a first person narrative, made up story. An exercise I've done with folks before is called design the box, where you give library staff a cardboard box and ask them to design what the library would look like if it came in a box. And to get people thinking creatively about what is like an ideal state to use the library. And putting that out there in the future, again, can align everyone, can hopefully create some buy-in and help you evaluate choices that you're gonna make. Is it gonna get you closer to this idealized future or is it taking you in a different direction? Okay, let's get into some user research ideas here because it's a really big part of doing user experience work. And here is a simple thing that you can do. You can, maybe some of you have done this, have you kept track of every time you have to tell someone no at the service desk, at service points. This can be an illuminating exercise, not that you have to say yes to everything people are coming to the library for because that's just impossible, but it can give you a picture of what people want and what you're not providing. I highly recommend combining this with every time you have to send someone to a different service point when they have a need. So if you're gonna say yes, but you need to send them to a different place, that's a very important thing to know because oftentimes, depending on the library space, people can bounce around two different service points. It could be on a different floor and this is maybe not a very convenient thing for people and an in-community experience probably isn't a good one. So I'll put this PDF up as well, just as a sample no log and redirect log if you're interested in keeping track of what people are coming for that you can't provide and when you are bouncing people around to different desks. Not that every library task necessarily has to 100% happen at every service point, but I think getting close to that is probably a nice thing. So are any of you experimenting with consolidating service points and cross-training staff to make that happen? See a couple of nods? A little bit, yep, a little bit, okay, cool. It can be a challenge for sure. And again, there are issues unfortunately I guess of territory out, territory out, you know what I'm trying to say. Because, you know, Cirque staff might say, well, reference staff aren't trained on yada yada yada whatever. Staffing things can change, cross-training can happen. Okay, so another technique and a user research-ish technique is journey mapping. Journey mapping is writing out all the steps it takes to accomplish a certain task in the library and what I showed earlier, I don't have that screenshot again, but what I showed at the beginning of the presentation those 13 steps about checking a book out, it was a form of journey map. You can also put it into a spreadsheet. So here is a journey map for card registration in the library. You can see we have this both from behaviors and actions from the staff perspective and patron perspective. We see pain points highlighted in red, things that are inconvenient or otherwise not good. And we see the goal highlighted in green. So the idea here is to move these pieces around, figure out a process for, in this case, registering someone for a card that eliminates steps, eliminates pain points and gets people to that end goal as quickly as possible. So this is a nice way to prototype different solutions. This is a paper prototyping solution or in this case, I guess, screen prototyping, but you know what I'm saying. You don't have to design a whole process and implement it right away. You can come up with different options, play around and see which one the best one is. And it's a really great technique. A lot of resources on the web and books about journey mapping, so you can investigate those if you want to learn more. And it's also okay to come up with a totally pie-in-the-sky idealized scenario. So just as like an ultimate wish list goal, here we came up with, okay, user comes in, gives someone an ID, gives a staff person an ID. The staff already have a database of everyone in the town that they've gotten from the town. They have to basically click a button and then they can give a card to a user. Now getting to that point is a whole different story, right? Okay, usability testing. Here's a digital thing, but it's a really good gateway user research technique because it's easy to do, really useful, you can always learn things. And I bet out of any UX techniques some of you have some experience with usability testing in here. It's essentially watching someone use your website and you give them some tasks to do. You say, hey, find out when story time is on Tuesday. And you watch them go through the site and try to find that information. This is a good way to demonstrate the difference between how users might think of something related to the library and how the library thinks about this. So it can really help move the conversation from opinions to data because it's easy for a bunch of librarians in a meeting sitting around a table to say, oh, I think we should make that button blue. I think we should put that link there. Fine, maybe, maybe not. And of course, some people's opinions are more right than others. But having some data to back up those opinions is super, super important. So a lot of resources about usability testing online. If you have a website project, consider doing it to be a first step to getting people talking about data and doing user research. Another technique I really, really like is borrowed from the field of anthropology, contextual inquiry. It's basically watching people use your library. And it's something that when I was working in libraries, I'd never spent a dedicated amount of time doing and I wish I had. So essentially, if you have a question about some space in your library, maybe it's your self-check machines, maybe it's your restrooms, maybe it's your lobby space. You sit down for half an hour and you watch people and you record what behaviors you see. You do this for half an hour. Colleagues do it for half an hour. Staff do it for half an hour. You compile all this data and you see patterns develop. You see what people are doing. You see what people are not doing. You can then redesign these spaces to better meet what's happening, what you want to happen in these spaces. So this wasn't exactly a contextual inquiry exercise, but I'll mention this. This is the Central Library in Mexico City, really beautiful, big building, the Vasconcelos Library. If you ever get to visit it, you really should. On every floor in each corner, they have these beautiful reading spaces. In my time there, this was the only time I saw the space being used as the designers intended. The rest of the time, people were using the space like this. Something about the space was not supporting how people envisioned the space being used. Maybe it was the bright light coming in and it was hard to see the screen with that bright light. Maybe people were feeling uncomfortable with the big library space to their back sitting at the desk there. Didn't get a chance to study it further, but seeing people use the library is very important. So, oops, Chapel Hill. Never saw anyone except the occasional library worker use the classic kick step stool to reach for items. The rest of the time, people were using these things as foot rests, which to me indicated an opportunity, right? Let's have some furniture that's more appropriate, more safe, you could even argue. This was clearly the users communicating a need to be more comfortable in the library space and the library can then respond to that. Here are the results of some contextual inquiry exercises. You can see it's pretty simple spreadsheet document with the name of the observer and the time of the observations in each column and then the behaviors that have been observed there. So it can be difficult to not get into the analytical mode right away, but as best you can, just record the behaviors, judgment-free, and then go back with folks and discuss what you have seen. So to compliment these real-time contextual inquiry exercises, something that we've been doing more of is taking time-lapse videos of library spaces, and I mentioned this earlier, I think. So this is the outer lobby at Chapel Hill and you can see it's relatively well-lit, it's a clean space, it was fresh feeling, but it didn't have very much library personality and that's something I noted when I first went in this building. And we observed people using the space, both in real-time, and took time-lapse videos over a number of days and were able to condense a day's worth of behavior down into like a three-minute video to see what people were doing. And we learned, this is really interesting, this is new to everyone at the library, that some people's entire library experience was just in this outer lobby. There's a lot more library than just this space, but some people would come in, sit with their laptop, tutor some folks, study, and then leave. And that was really informative and interesting because the library knew then that they could design this space to better support what people naturally felt like they wanted to do in this space. Similar with the inner lobby. So if you go down this hallway to the left, you see this kind of morass of signage and posters. This is the before picture. And you can see that this space was not functioning as needed. The book drop, they were trying to highlight the book drop because people could not see it. So they have this painter's tape here like, I'm gonna give you all these distractions and then we're really gonna try to... So, intuitively, folks knew that there was very little amount of interaction happening with all these things, but just to double check and just to see what was working what's not, did real-time interactions, time-lapse videos, and then we have the data to say, okay, we can remove a lot of this stuff. No one's looking at it. It's not serving any purpose. In fact, it's detracting from the situation, right? So as part of this process, we exposed the automated materials handling machine, put up steps so children could go up and see and turn this previously not contributing and detracting situation to a positive engaging touch point. And you can see there's still some cubbies with materials and there's still some community information bits and some library advertisements up there. That's fine. I think it's a much more scaled back and much more sensible. And observations happened again afterwards to see. And even just anecdotally all the time, that's the first thing children do when they come up to the library space is look at the books, the book return. Okay, we did the same thing with what we ended up calling the big circle desk in the library. And this is what came to mind when someone mentioned flyers in the library. We wanted to remove all these things but needed to get a little bit of data to make everyone comfortable doing that. We also knew that this big honking circulation and reference desk was too big and not really supporting needs. So we took time-lapse video, learned that there was already some collaboration happening. We saw people come behind the desk which we thought was a really good thing and a step in the right direction. And seeing how people behaved and how staff behaved in this space gave us enough data to say, okay, we're gonna do an experiment. We're gonna take a chainsaw to that circle desk, break it up. And you can see there are small, in this space there are now some small service pods and they're much more approachable, spread throughout the library more so people can get help in different places. And we've changed the way people talk about service in the library from, hey, I'm going to work at the desk to I'm gonna go help some people, I'm gonna go out on the floor. And that was a big win for sure. Something else to note, some prototypes going on here. You can see these pieces of signage on the end caps. So instead of, oh, you can also see some of colors up here which is part of the library's branding scheme and the identification program we came up with. All these soffits were white before and we added some visual interest to reinforce library branding and created an identification signage up there. But before committing to getting a printer to create maybe semi-expensive signs for the end caps just printed out things in paper and saw what happened. So are people looking at these kind of nice graphic treatments? Are they helping people get to what they need? And eventually we determined yes. And so then we moved forward with getting those printed. Now the library has since moved on from having these service points and we have what's called the welcome hub. They're doing something called the welcome hub. I don't have an image of that now, it's just getting assembled. I think as we're speaking. But it's a one centralized, smaller space that has a planter, has benches, it has a spot for collaboration and it should be a really neat thing for the space there. This is Chapel Hill Public Library. Yeah. Susan Brown there is great. She has got a really good perspective on customer service. She has a great presentation about customer service lessons from Trader Joe's and she and her staff do a really, really good job. Great anecdote from her. She's a big fan of Trader Joe's and she went to her local Trader Joe's and said, hey, would you be interested in coming to the library and talking about your customer service training because you guys do a really good job and we'd like to get some of that going on in our library. And she reports that the manager there said, oh, we don't do customer service training actually. We take care of all that through hiring and we hire people that we like and then just train them on what they need to know and we go about it that way, which I thought was smart and pretty cool. So even the hiring process impacts user experience for sure, right? Okay, so another physical building idea is to set someone in front of the library and have them go do some library tasks. So this is like physical building user experience, usability testing. So you can say, okay, go make a photocopy please and see what they do, see where they get tripped up, see if they can find the photocopier. One academic library I worked with put some GoPro cameras on their students and have them walk around and record their library use and that was a pretty informative video afterwards. Really good tool. If you have any accurate floor maps or even if you don't, you can create something like this. This is a nice way to piece together what's happening in libraries. Something else that I like to have folks do is hourly sweeps of what's going on in different library spaces. So recording, coming up with a little shorthand and saying, okay, in the reading room we have four people reading books quietly, we have two people working together, we have someone on their laptops, whatever, to get a picture of the sorts of activities that are happening in your library because then you can then know, okay, well maybe we should have some more spaces for X and Y because it's happening a lot and we don't have very many spaces for that or you might learn, boy, no one is ever coming to this space to do these things. What is it about this space that is people aren't visiting? And this is a good way to gather some user data. Okay, so a quote attributed to Henry Ford, he didn't actually say it but it's a good quote so it's worth mentioning anyway. He has alleged to have said, if I would have asked people what they wanted, they would have said I want a faster horse and the idea here is that he sort of came up with the idea for the automobile and went forward with that whereas people weren't coming up with the concept of the car by themselves or on their own and this is why I am hesitant to recommend people ask folks, hey, what do you want out of the library? Now again, I understand the intention there is, hey, we do want to be responsive, we want to learn about what people want but people have a preconceived notion of the library, right? They might not be able to think as big as we need them to answer this question. So I think it's an important question to ask, I think it's data to gather, I think it's a good PR exercise for the library to indicate to show people that you care about what they want but I want libraries to design based on behavior rather than what people say they want because those can be two different things and we see examples of that throughout market research a lot like the whole Pepsi Challenge debacle was a result of that Coke invented new Coke because of the Pepsi Challenge but it turns out that that really wasn't the right question to be asking so they did this whole new Coke thing back in the 80s that was a flop, right? Remember that? Because they thought people were saying one thing when they were really saying another thing so this is why we should listen to folks but we should not necessarily always follow their lead we need different sorts of data we need data about what they're reporting that they want but we need data about how they actually behave as well. And so this is why I'm a little bit lukewarm on surveys in general I think it's a fine tool to use it's definitely one that librarians have the most experience with in terms of user research but I think we need to take the results with a grain of salt because it's really easy for someone on a survey to say oh yeah, I want the library to open at 5 a.m. and close at 2 a.m., right? Is anyone actually gonna come to the library at 2 a.m.? Maybe, maybe not depending on the situation so verifying opinions and reported behavior with actual behavior is the ticket in my mind. So one way you can get a good mix of that is by doing user interviews if they've done a reference interview you have essentially, you have the tools to do a user interview it's having an open-ended conversation with folks about their lives seeing where the conversation goes and learning about their lives so you can learn more about your community. And oftentimes the results from user interviews can be put into personas which I've heard mentioned a couple of times here today already. Here's some example persona documents. So these were the results of conversations with half dozen to 10 folks of different audience demographics for this library and for a medium-sized library in Idaho. And from these conversations we created fictional representations of actual library users that are meant to represent the needs we heard about. So to make this human and to make this relatable we gave these people fake names, fake pictures. We have stories about them. We have basic demographic information about them. We have some quotes. We have stuff about what their life needs are. Maybe a little bit about what their library needs are. But again, this is focused on users, not libraries. And library staff now use these personas and they are hopefully as much as possible living, breathing characters that the library can interact with when they're thinking about new projects and new programs and new services and say, okay, this one obviously is for Zach. Zach will like this. We can make Zach come if we do these things. If they're coming up with an idea and it doesn't relate to any of these people that maybe sends up a little bit of a red flag. Like, okay, we have this idea but who exactly are we designing this for? If you're interested in learning more about personas there's a book called The User is Always Right. It will give you some information about designing personas. And there's also a well-known book in the UX world. It's more focused on software design but I think it's still relevant for persona development in general. And it's titled The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. So, okay, let's talk about design a little bit. We're designers. We're designing this user experience whether we're conscious of it or not. And you don't need a black turtleneck in the square glasses. I mean, maybe it helps, maybe it doesn't. But design is a process, can be a process. And it's just simply arranging things for a certain purpose. So we're doing this stuff all the time whether we are intentional about it or not. This was designed, it was designed poorly but it was designed. Here's a quote from a mid-century furniture designer in general, the Eames House did a lot more than just furniture. They designed museum exhibits and movies and other things but Charles Eames said this. And I think this is a nice way for us to consider people coming into our spaces. If you wanna know more about design there's a great toolkit, design thinking for libraries. This was developed in coordination with IDEO, a big design firm based around here somewhere and Chicago Public Library, worth spending some time with for sure. But the basic ideas, they come in different flavors but the basic idea about the design methodology is understanding what problem you're trying to solve, observing behavior around this problem, prototyping solutions, evaluating something, all these potential solutions and then finally implementing something. So some of this should seem familiar already with what we've been talking about. Looking at people, coming up with ideas, don't implement them full scale right away, try it out, see what happens, learn from it and do it again. So a great example of this was someone asking the question, why is this vegetable peel or hurt my hands? It doesn't have to be this way. This is a question that they're asking and they're trying to solve and this was the results from this basic question and I bet many of us have this in our drawers or have had it at some point. This company does a lot of user research to design their stuff and they prototyped different solutions working with biologists, human factors people. So it wasn't a straight line from this to this. They tried different things out. A great user experience vision is this video from the smoke alarm company Nest. They make the thermostats and smoke detectors. Check out their product video for their smoke detector on YouTube. It is a great example of how they have looked at human behavior and aim to design their product to augment and work with what people actually do. And it's a great example of them putting a vision out there. So their motto is safety shouldn't be annoying and it's clear that they have seen how people behave based around smoke detectors and they've come up with what they think is a good solution to that. An important question in doing design work is asking this question, how might we? So it's a nice expansive question that helps you expand out and think of a lot of different ideas and things and when you answer this how might we question or when you ask it, you're gonna be thinking about a group and a need. Here's a not so good how might we question. How might we get more senior citizens to use the library? And it should be clear that this is not a great question because it's library focused. They wanna get people in the building, right? Here's also not such a great how might we question because the answer is sort of built into the question, right? You already know what you're gonna do in the situation. So it can take some practice to develop good how might we questions. And it's something that design thinking for libraries toolkit can help you with but consider practicing asking how might we questions to expand out to open your library's world to doing different things. Okay, wrapping up here, I wanna show you some better touch points in libraries, both small scale interaction design stuff and larger scale purpose stuff. All right, this is not in a library, but I noticed it in Chipotle once. This is I think to me a nice form of emotional design. They're hoping to connect with their customers here. They are explaining what's going on. They're being apologetic. They're being, it's a friendly thing. Trust us, we're disappointed too. So I thought this was a nice way on a small level to connect with people and taking advantage of an opportunity here. Here's another form of emotional design. This was meant to make computers not as scary and to get computers into the living room. And I think it might've just been the 25th anniversary of this computer I read, 20, 25th, which is crazy. But this was a successful piece of emotional design, I think. Here is a screenshot from the email newsletter service MailChimp. And even if you don't need to send out an email newsletter, I encourage you to go through their onboarding process and sign up for MailChimp because it's really fun and believe it or not, and they do a great job connecting with people. When you send an email campaign, their monkey gives you a high five, which is cool. In the settings for MailChimp, they have an option to turn off all these cutesy fun things. They call it the defuninator or something like that. And they've reported that something like 0.2% of users turn it off. People tend to enjoy this stuff. Okay, so some better touch points. Here we have our bad example. I wanna just show you a quick evolution of going from this, improving it a little bit, taking one step forward, making it slightly more legible. It's still mean, mostly. At least the thank you is a little bit bigger. Here I've changed it to a perhaps more appropriate type of face for the signs, but it's still not great, evolving a bit further into something that's easier to scan is better. It's reducing words, which is always helpful, but it's still not perfect. And I don't know if this is perfect, but here is another iteration of this. So going from the first image to this is not rocket science. It has some library branding. It has some positivity on it. It looks better. Many of us are capable of doing work like this. There's a book called, what is it called? The Non-Designers Guide to Design. And it's a good book that will take you through some of these principles if you are interested in these topics. And the funny part about it is it's a pretty hideous book cover. I think, it's not great, but it's a really, it's a good read for sure. Here's an example from the real world. This is a sign at Iowa City Public Library. Again, not very visually appealing, a bit on the mean side and not ideal. They evolved the sign into this, which emphasizes help, collaboration. It's got some library branding. There's prizes. This, to me, more expresses the attitude that is found in the library than this. So this is really, really great to see. Okay, some more positive, good signage. We'll run through these things quickly just because I like them. If you're gonna have a paper sign, maybe make sure it looks good and make sure it's in some sort of holder or I think that elevates it a little bit. I like this big coffee thing. Nice program, nice visual design here for this at Boston Public Library. If you're interested in these concepts of branding and communicating through visual design, check out Edmonton Public Library's guide. They do such a fantastic job spreading their library branding throughout the whole town of Edmonton. In fact, they have a necktie with the library colors on it and I recently saw a picture of their mayor with the library's necktie on, which is super cool. But they have these colors throughout their buildings on the inside and out and they do a good job explaining what they're trying to communicate to the community through their branding program. Okay, nice little human touch here with the it's easy thing for self-checkout. Again, no single sign or no single touch point in general is gonna totally revolutionize your library but all these things working in harmony I think is what we should aim for. Zoning in libraries is a really good idea because people come to the library and have different needs, right? We can maybe allow those things to happen in different spaces and this is a nice sign communicating what can happen in this one space at this library. Similarly here, pretty nice sign here. I like this sentiment as well. Will you come with me? Cool thing from Alberta's libraries. Nice library logo from the library in Cutter and San Rafael, we have someone from San Rafael in the audience here. Like I mentioned, they use our website, template prefab and how's it working for you? Okay, cool. And they've got a nice library logo even though it has a book in it which I'm kind of against because it's the easiest solution, right? It still looks nice and we help them a while back. I don't know if you still have these circulating around. Yeah, Grove, they stopped. But do any of these still exist? I was wanting to know. Okay, cool. Yeah, cool. So I'm gonna be an image of that or show it to me. But this, okay, yeah, bamboo library card, pretty neat thing. Nice library card too. Again, minor touch point but one that should be taken into consideration. Okay, good website here I think Addison Public Library, nice images, nice icons, limited amount of content. I like this catalog record a lot because it is human focused and not library record focused. There are action items here, requesting and adding to a list. I don't, this is not an exposed mark record, right? This is adding some value to the situation and it blends seamlessly with the website. Okay, here's the counterpoint to that University of Illinois homepage. Montana State University did the hard work of figuring out what exactly people wanted most, dividing those things into three buckets, making people not think too hard about what choice to make, where they wanted to go on this site. So they've done a lot, they've done a lot of testing to figure out what labels they should use for these buckets and they're getting people to where they need to be in a fast manner and they've got contact information and hours there. The search box, the search box is big. It can maybe be more legible in a certain way, maybe more visible but I think this is a very, very solid homepage. Great library related website, warinc.org. California related too. This is a project in conjunction with the Contra Costa library. They worked with community partners to help these returning vets tell the story of their service through their tattoos. I heard the library was involved with this project. I went to the website to check it out, thought I would click around for a couple minutes. I was like captivated for 20 minutes listening to these folks, compelling design, cool way to develop some original content and to add value in this way. Okay, some service points. Here we have NCSU's Hunt Library and they have a really great library. A lot has been written about it so check out Hunt Library online for some pictures and articles. They have small modular service points and they are similar in nature to we recognize this as the Apple Store, right? And there's no one point of sale in this place, right? People will take your money anywhere in this space and a desk that, a phrase that I've heard recently for service points in libraries is the everywhere is a desk library and I think that's a really interesting way, an interesting thing to aim for. In the semi recently redesigned Apple Store in Portland, half the space, maybe half the space is divided, devoted to products. The other half is devoted to training and working together and that was super interesting to me and I heard with the VP or whoever's in charge of Apple's retail spaces and one of their keynotes say that they wanted to make Apple stores the town square where people come together to work and with technology and content and I was like, public libraries. So some other things about finding purpose and moving forward. MTV, we know, used to be music television, right? But they don't show music videos anymore. They show horrible reality TV programs. So if MTV can totally evolve and not show music videos anymore, I think we can do whatever we wanna do in libraries. I mean, we still call this a phone even though it does other things. So what other opportunities are there for us to do different things? If we're gonna have collections, what else can we do? We can develop original content, we can develop collections that people can't get elsewhere. This community is into baking so they have a bakeware collection. Outside of Portland and Hillsboro, they have a huge and growing library of things where you can check out, as you can see, all sorts of different things and it's a really, really neat thing. I'm sure this is happening at some of your libraries too. Chicago Public and New York Public launched pilot projects that were super successful helping solve the problem of the digital divide and they have expanded these projects circulating Wi-Fi hotspots. This library, you can check out a piece of land and you can grow food at the library, super cool. So this is not just having a book about gardening at the library, this is also providing an experience to be able to work together with folks. People in our communities have all sorts of interesting hobbies and passions. Can we collect that stuff and help them connect to other like-minded folks? Can we get that stuff into our collections? What sort of content experiences can we create for our communities? This is a growing popular type of program where libraries are either hosting a cookbook club where people all check out the same cookbook, bake a dish, make a dish and come to the library and have a potluck and eat or actually cook in the library together. Literary lots, Cleveland Public Library worked with folks to develop underutilized spaces in the town to recreate children's storybooks so you could walk through little red riding hood, for instance, way to add value to the story experience. And creation in libraries is a great way for this kitchen idea. So here's library 10, which is in Helsinki. This is the old library 10 where you could check out guitars. There is a radio station and a recording studio. All sorts of good creation happening closer to home in Brooklyn. Artists and dancers practicing in the library and in return offering programming to library folks programs. This guy chants the rapper who a few of us have heard of probably his big hip hop guy right now. He cut his teeth at Chicago Public Library's U Media program and got a lot of practice there. This guy is printing 3D prosthetic hands for his son in the library and doing different iterations. Like I said before, the library space is a really big advantage. You don't have to have a cool green tree. If you do, great. But it's a great way to gather people together and it's something people can't do online. Here we have Oak Park Public Library outside of Chicago's Idea Box where they have a flexible space. They change it up and learn from what happens. Here we have in the middle of the Chicago winter which you all know nothing about. They have developed this sunny park-like space and you can go on their site and see what else they do with their Idea Box. So here's the new Helsinki Central Library which is cool. They went through a huge user-centered design process and I love this. They have a sauna in the library. Maybe not contextually appropriate for the United States but sauna is such a big part of their life that they wanted to integrate this into what was going on there. Similarly, kind of, the new Arhus Library in Denmark has a big bell and whenever someone is born in the hospital in town the parents have the option to hit a button and the bell rings in the library. Super cool. We can get outside of the library as well and here we have a pop-up library program in Laundry Matz. So free laundry day and learning happening in the library. This is a library without borders, really neat. Getting outside of the library circulating digital things in airports. Co-location. So how can you work with partners to be in the same space and are there any synergies that you can have doing that? Here we have a library co-located in a mall with a library, cafe, gym, restaurant. Can we think of the library as this flexible gymnasium space where different things can happen at different times? So in this space you can do basketball, volleyball, all the balls, tennis, whatever and can our spaces be as flexible? We often want to be good stewards of our funds so we buy this furniture that lasts for 50 plus years but maybe you don't need that, right? Maybe we should be more flexible. So here's an example of a library of flexible library furniture that was an entrance into a design competition for semi-permanent library spaces that can be assembled and disassembled. We see people working together in spaces. How can we better design our spaces to let people work together? Check out this video from Grand Valley State University. They work with Steelcase to study their students and design spaces to meet the curricular needs of the university and students. Okay, ultimately I think that our libraries should be solving real problems and this is such a good way forward to learn about our communities and make them better places. So the Homepage Cafe, Free Library of Philadelphia worked with this group that is getting people experiencing homelessness on their feet, employed people working in this cafe and instead of having this classic urban library situation that oftentimes is confrontational, they in essence invited people into the library on a deeper level to make the situation better. And here, San Francisco has done a lot with this. Social workers in library spaces providing service at points of need, library nurses in Arizona. Love this example, you can pick up good food, good, helpful food in the library as part of this Baltum Market program. So this is helping solve the problem of food deserts in Baltimore. Order groceries online, pick them up in the library. Here's co-location, Vancouver Public Library and the YWCA, low income single mothers living at the library with their kids. Wow, amazing. Here's an example of radical user center design. This library, they call it the garage library opened outside of Malmo, Sweden and it was essentially an empty warehouse. They worked with community groups to figure out what this space should be. There's a lot of programs, it's based around conversation, there's a cafe, there's a small collection, pretty radical cool thing. We really should become community experts. We need to learn a lot about our communities. I think we need to have community information development plans, just like collection development plan. So again, this turning outward, I think is super important. Hope you'll read the article, what's a library worth. And we need to get off the hamster wheel of CERC stats. This is keeping us busy, it's kind of busy work and promoting new standards of success and learning how to tell the library's story in a deeper way is super important. This UX stuff is not new in libraries. Here we have a quote from 1903 from a librarian from Hennepin County, Gracia Ulta Countryman. She's a really big inspiration, I think. This is a great statement about being hospitable, being gracious, taking down restrictions, making connections, I think it's really lovely. She also has, they also tried game rooms at the time. She talks about trying, having a smoking room in the library, which in Oregon and California, Washington could take its own kind of thing now. Maybe we don't want to go there, but never know. So in wrapping up, I want to leave us with this, which is our international symbol of libraries, which was created in the 80s, mid-80s. I think it's an iconic, great symbol, but to me it's a little bit not descriptive of what we do because it's someone just reading all alone, right? So here's my revision, which includes some more action, some more diversity, gathering people together based around content. I'm not suggesting we need to replace our symbol with this, but to me this is just more descriptive of what we do and what we're aiming for. So again, I hope you'll take your role as user-experienced librarians seriously and design some great experiences for folks. And I'm like two minutes over now, but I can stick around for questions. Should you have them? You can email me at librarian at gmail.com if you have any other questions or comments. And I will go back to the first slide with the URL in case you want to download the slides or any other things I have referenced today. Thank you very much for your time, I appreciate it. Thanks.