 Good morning, and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I'm your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries and library staff. We broadcast a show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time, but if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We do record the show every week as we are doing today, and it will be available on our website for you to watch at your convenience, and I'll show you at the end of today's show where you can access all of those archives. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch, so please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think may be interested in any of the topics we have on the show. For those of you not here in Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries in Nebraska, and that is for all types of libraries. So, you will find things on our show that are for publics, academics, K-12, corrections, museums, all types of archives. Really, our only criteria is that it's something that is libraries, library-ish. Something libraries are doing, products and services, there are things we think they might like to use. We have Nebraska Library Commission staff that sometimes come on and do presentations for us about things that we're offering here specifically in Nebraska, and we do bring guest speakers from across the country, across the state and across the country to talk about cool things they're doing in their libraries sometimes. So, before we do get into our show this morning, I just want to briefly mention for our Nebraska libraries. Here at the Nebraska Library Commission, we are keeping up on what is going on still with the COVID-19 pandemic happening across the world, and we do have resources here on our website for our libraries in our state. This post here about COVID-19 pandemic resources for libraries is pinned to the top of our website, so always be there at the top of the links. We also have a, where we're collecting information about libraries who have been closed, special accommodations they have for people if they are reopening, what the situation is there. So, this is our post about the resources where libraries can provide us with information about what they're doing, and then our sub-page here on the pandemic, depending on different situation you're in, what some help for you, financial help, what to do with my kids, what about my business. Specifically for libraries, I just want to show this for our Nebraska library staff on today. We have lots of resources here that we have gathered together. Some put together here by a staff at the library commission and then gathered from expert places around the world. CDC, World Health Organization, ALA, IMLS, anyone who's doing any sort of information about to help libraries deal with the pandemic happening right now. About closing, about re-opening now, holding meetings. Summer reading is a big thing coming up right now. How can you possibly do that? So, if you're in Nebraska library, take a look at this page. We keep updating it whenever we learn of anything new that might be of use to any libraries, any updates. If you're not from Nebraska, check out your state library, your state library association. They may be doing the same thing there. So, I am going to now hand over, present your control to you, Jennifer, right? You're going to run the slides for you guys? Yes, thanks. All right. You should see the pop-up sharing screen to you. Giving you that ability. There we go. Yep, you can get your slides up on full screen. All right, does that look good now? It's off there. If you go to the presentation and do it as presenter, you should be able to, it should take over and put your slides full. Because right now what I'm saying is you go to webinar interface. So, yeah, I was looking at the other screen potentially. There we go. Now it's full screen. All good. All right. So, this morning we are going to talk about who are these people and why are they in my library? Well, they should be in your library. That's good. And hopefully maybe they're coming back. And I will actually let you guys introduce yourself. Jennifer Rich, you can talk about how you did some research on this and how to help our patrons. And this may be something good for libraries where we're reopening. How will this affect that as well? So, I'm just going to hand it over to you guys to take it away. Great. So, yeah, that was the title of our session. And just for a little bit of context, this was a presentation we were initially going to do as an in-person library conference that was unfortunately canceled due to COVID-19. But so we're super thrilled to be able to do it for you guys. But it does mean that we, some of the things that we were going to do as kind of live demonstrations of UX techniques, we're going to talk through them instead. And, but that also is a great reason to use the question box. If you want us to slow down and go over something in more detail. All right. And now we're just going to introduce ourselves and how we met. Yeah. Thanks Jennifer. So, my name is Rich Harrison. I'm a user experience designer. I've been a designer for about 20 years and I've been focused on user experience and human center design for about 15 of those years. In that time, I've kind of run the gamut of different organizations from Fortune 500s to all the way out to agencies and startups. And I spent a good half of my career in higher ed in academia where I worked with Jennifer. So she's going to tell you a little bit about our experiences together. And I think this will be a good combination for you to get like a mixed perspective. Yeah. And I'm Jennifer D'Young. I'm a reference and instruction librarian and at Metropolitan State University, which is a fairly small public urban university in St. Paul, Minnesota. And I have in addition to library science degree, I have coursework completed toward a user experience graduate certificate. But I do want to stress that most of what I learned about UX methods, usability testing, focus groups, surveys, I learned basically just on the job and from working with people like Rich. I think it's been really critical for my library that we were able to form some connections and build allies in other departments like marketing and IT, which as many of you know can be challenging but was worth it. So as Jennifer goes through the slides, we're going to hand off back and forth a little bit. And I just want to introduce the presentation and maybe set the tone a little bit that the way that we designed this is to be interactive and engaging. As Jennifer said, we won't be able to do that quite the same way, but we do want to keep it very real and practical. So we're going to try to focus on like what we learned from our real world experiences and kind of get down into actual examples. This is really take this as a framework for solving problems using empathy. And I think those words are important because in user experience design, we really consider ourselves problem solvers and we focus on how do we define the problem? How do we frame it or reframe it in some cases as you'll see later? And then how do we use empathy to really get into the minds and hearts of the people that we serve? So it's a little bit about the squishy stuff. We're definitely focused on thoughts and feelings and some of the things that are a little tougher to define and that's why it's important to really engage and interact with users. So finally, I'll just say be ready to challenge some of your assumptions. We may provoke you with some different ways of thinking about things. So I would like everyone here to just think about yourself personally and about your library and ask yourself a question. How often are you including patrons and decisions about library services? At what point do you engage with them when you're thinking about say rolling out a new product or a new activity surface in your library? And I included a picture of a, it's a meditative walking labyrinth that I have, I'm fortunate enough to have outside in my library and I literally go out there sometimes and think through some of the problems I might be trying to come up with solutions for and reminding myself to think of those patrons. Advancing here. All right, so many of you may say or have heard people say that libraries are in trouble. It's a tough world out right now for higher ed, for libraries, for public libraries. And you may say or hear people say things like the general public doesn't understand us. They don't know our services exist. People aren't using our tools correctly. They're all these underutilized resources they should be using. They're not coming to my story time. Maybe they're not reading anymore. And I keep getting like hung up here. Sorry, I don't know what's going on. Okay, is there something else that's coming through on your computer or? I don't, it just like isn't always advancing but and it makes a, anyway, so. Looks good from here. Are you advancing the screens? Like, did you just advance to the next? No, I don't have control over it. You have control over your own everything yourself. I just have to hit it like four times for it to advance. I don't know what, sorry. Yeah, it's all good. All right, so Rich and I are asking you to flip that script on its head a little bit and not talk about how libraries are in trouble. Talk about how users are in trouble. We as libraries, library and library staff, we don't know what our users, what problems exist for our users. We're not asking the right questions and our solutions don't always align with user needs. And one thing I wanna stress here that it isn't just about numbers of people coming in the door and head counts and so on, that making our library services usable and accessible is actually a critical social justice issue right now in libraries. If we want, we need to recognize that many librarians are white and female and from a certain background and our patrons don't reflect that and user experience methods and techniques can be one of the most important ways to get, to make sure our libraries are more equitable and accessible. All right, and this is, a lot of what UX is is about reframing the problem and really making sure that you're always going back to what those users need and everything is thought of as why are we doing this? How does it serve our users? And that you're always thinking of advocating for your users first. So this is just a library Facebook group I met and called libraries and social media and someone posted this question and said that their director wants their library to create a YouTube channel due to COVID-19. And my response right away is, wait a second, that's like saying go do something with this hammer before identifying what the need is, who the audience is, did your patrons ask for that service? Will they use that service? Is that their preferred way to connect with the library? And it may be, but I think that if we all know budgets are limited, time is limited. If you're not doing that upfront research to make sure that you know what you're doing and that you're choosing the right tool for the job, you're kind of just throwing money and resources into a whole. Okay, so kind of switching gears back into thinking about design problems and how we frame up design problems. It's not always in the digital space. And I think if you Google bad user experiences, you'll see all kinds of things. Many of you have probably been in an elevator that just didn't make any sense, the buttons, the panels or maybe you've left a parking garage and you couldn't figure out how to get out of the garage or access an ATM machine. This picture is one example that's pretty classic. It's called Norman Doors. We actually reference it. Don Norman is the person who coined user experience several years ago at Apple. And he talks about these doors that have now been named Norman Doors where they have affordances. The word that he uses to describe the thing that tells you how to use it or how to interact with it that contradict the label. So in this case, you see the affordances that square reflective panel right above it is the word pool. So those two things don't go together. It's telling you to pull, but it's showing you an affordance to push. And this is kind of a really good snapshot of where we get into trouble with crafting user experiences. And from the user's perspective, I think we've all been in that boat, right? Where we've been using something on our mobile device or in our home, wherever. And we thought, why is this so hard? Who would design it this way? Like, didn't they actually look at it? And the reason that they're not doing, they're not creating those great designs is because they're missing that empathy step. And that's what we're gonna talk about here today is going into the minds and hearts of users, the way they see it and the way they will use it. And the important call out here about bad solutions is that often as designers and stakeholders, we think, well, we'll train you, we'll write a manual for this, we'll tell you how to use it. And that just time and time again, one usability test after another, I've observed throughout my career that it just doesn't work. So with the idea that we can't change users, we kind of have a fun video up. Jennifer, go ahead and play the video and then I'll talk through it a little bit. Yes, it's kind of telling that they label this hamster cheating on the maze, when it actually, that's a pretty smart hamster that just figured out a faster way to get to his treat, I think. That's awesome, I love that video. Well, we think it's important and I wanna share one quick anecdote here about why it's significant. So I, as I said, I've worked in different spaces and I worked for the public sector for a little while on software that people were required to get training for to use. And I remember the business analyst pulling me aside and saying, well, you know, Rich, this is not the private sector here. Like these people have to use this software, they don't have an option. And I said, actually, you should come out into the field with me because when I interviewed the people using this product and sat with them and observed them using the product, I asked them, like, well, what are you doing when you get stuck here? And they're like, oh, we don't actually bring this into the field. We don't use this the way it was intended. We've designed our own word templates and Excel templates. And I'm just like face palm and this, just imagining all this extra work they have to do to come back, many of them working extra hours at home. And then when we got back and observed the results of that, we realized a lot of the data quality and data integrity issues were coming from this copying and pasting from their kind of workarounds or hacks. So it's really important to get this right and align with how people actually use it, learn how they use it and cater to that because at the end of the day, they're gonna do what they're gonna do. Here's another video because we love cute animals. And this dog is problem solving. His bowl that was supposed to get him to eat slower. Yeah, it's funny to me that this, I mean, these are clever bowls. Like I love the design of this that we're trying to give the dog a puzzle to solve thinking, oh, well, the dog's smart and we'll make him work for his food. And clearly he's figured out, I don't want any of that. I'm just gonna flip it on its head and eat the kibble off the ground. And this is so analogous to what we see in design. The reason I mentioned working in all these different spaces is because it's been the same everywhere. It doesn't matter if it's government or private sector, users find really creative ways to kind of work around things. Yeah, and I have some, I mean, you all can probably think of examples of in your own libraries and there's another issue with librarians and library staff kind of stop noticing because we're there all the time. We're not typical users and we find our own workarounds and then stop kind of seeing those as issues and where usability testing and other forms of user experience testing can help is to kind of reset you and just say, oh gosh, I forgot that this is what patrons are seeing. Like you get yourself into their mindset. We, a number of years ago, my library, like probably many of yours just had a huge list of library databases and we didn't have a discovery tool at the time or a way for people to search all of our databases with one interface. And some of the librarians just weren't sold on the concept. They were nervous about the technology but also thought that it might be dumbing down library services for patrons and really wanted to just teach all the patrons, all the databases. And what I started to do is me and my web team in the library would bring them into our usability testing and have them watch how students were failing over and over and over again to use our tools and would just abandon the library databases altogether and go to Google. So seeing that really changed the mindset of those librarians and immediately they made a decision to go forward with a discovery tool. And sometimes they tell stories about librarians who aren't quite getting it right and I don't want to have it be that I have a negative view of librarians. In fact, I actually think in many ways librarians are the original user experience experts. And we are trained to think of users. It's in our kind of core sense of values and reference interviews for those of you who do reference or consultations or work with patrons, those are like miniature little field tests and you, boom, you just, you're a usability expert now because you have the sense of looking at what's happening and those patron interactions. And if you start just noticing where they're getting tripped up, you can sometimes immediately implement changes to make the user's experience better. This is an example of one of the librarians where I work. She's a cataloging and metadata librarian and she noticed that there's a student who was trying to search for a specific psychologist and our discovery tool, we were coming up empty. She realized that we had a print encyclopedia set that included a chapter on that individual but it wasn't part of the metadata. So then she went back to her office, added the information in the 505 mark record and then emailed all the reference librarians and said, let me know if you come other across other records like this where the metadata can be improved. And again, librarians are trained to put users' needs first. We know that people don't always know how to ask for what they want and this is an interesting one. We switched library systems recently and the sort of out of the box email that alerted you to that you got an interlibrary loan was just awful. It was like, I got one because I checked out a book or ordered an article and I had a hard time reading it and understanding it and I'm a librarian. The jargon was that confusing. So again, that's something where I could say, hey, I gotta remember in this case, I actually was a patron and I can go find the right person in library who can make that change. So we're gonna talk a little bit about the methods now but I want to recap. I know Jennifer just went through a lot of examples there but as we were preparing for this and talking about it, she was sharing these anecdotes and stories with me and I was thinking, these are really great examples of how you don't always need a usability lab. You don't always need a lot of time and money. I mean, in the case where Jennifer was talking on Facebook, she was advocating for users and representing their needs or in the case where somebody says, hey, these emails coming in are serving as research. They're indications of where users have pain and are struggling and we can fix this using these different techniques. So there's, it's perfectly legitimate to use those gorilla tactics. The main point is just to advocate for your users anywhere and everywhere you can. So getting into the methods a little bit, I think it's probably important at this stage to provide a shared vocabulary or shared understanding of what we mean by user experience. This is a really tough thing to define and I think when it emerged, it was trying to solve a whole set of needs under one umbrella. So I don't love any definition, but I think starting with the international standard on ergonomics of human system interaction, that's a mouthful. I'll just read through this. A person's perceptions and responses that result from the use or anticipated use of a product system or service. The reason I like that is because it covers both the real time use and what's happening just before and just after the event. In many times when we think about context and environment is absolutely critical to consider that somebody who's using a mobile device on a train where it's noisy and distracting is having a very different experience of your product than somebody who's sitting in a quiet home with maybe a dual monitor set up and great lighting. So environment is really everything. And just to reiterate what I said before, this is absolutely the squishy stuff. So we care a lot about how people are thinking and feeling and as I walked through some of these techniques what I'm gonna show you is that we really think of a human experience as having a clear entry point and a clear exit point. And you may have exit and reentry points along the way but every experience starts somewhere and it ends with some sort of goal that the user has and that's what we're after. We're really trying to understand like what looks like success to them in the end. We're thinking about that end to end event across space and time. So just as a clarification too, when we say users I know that's kind of a clunky sounding word. I think you could substitute it in patrons, faculty, students, the public, business owners. It obviously depends a lot on your particular library. You know who your users are but just always remember, remind yourself they're not you and you've been working wherever you are probably too long to really truly be able to see things yourself as a user anymore but you can engage with the users to try to understand their needs. And we're gonna talk a little bit about how to do that. Like how do we get out of our own set of assumptions that are untested? How do we empathize better and kind of challenge some of the things that are biases? And what I wanna do here is like I wanna give you some sort of UX in a number of steps but I wanted to find a method or a process that is easy to digest and talk through in this presentation. And I think design thinking does a really good job of that. Namely because it starts with empathy. And you'll notice the interaction design foundation graphic that I'm using here has these lines and arrows showing how iterative this process is. We start with empathy but as we're defining the problem and ideating coming up with ideas to prototype and test we're always circling back because it's all about that test and learn process. And the reason for this slide is just there's probably most of you have heard of or done usability testing. I hope some of you have and possibly you have Google Analytics, maybe you've done a survey. These are all, there's a lot of methods. And yes, many of them have weaknesses. People say, oh, surveys can be leading or focus groups can have a lot of people. But in the right context and especially if you kind of strategize about when and how to do which kind of testing I think doing a variety is great. In many cases there's sort of a complicated version of a test and a more of a gorilla testing version of the test. So you might have a pop up usability testing where you just have a single question you stand in a hallway that students are walking through and you offer them a candy bar for answering a single question. Or you might have a complex usability lab with eye tracking software. But the same thing with surveys you could do a one question survey monkey survey or you could do a complicated one. But I'm always gonna advocate for doing the gorilla testing, especially if you're starting from a place of you haven't done any usability testing or you haven't done any user experience research. And I would say if you can only do two methods of testing my top choice is always usability testing. There's plenty of scripts out there there's lots of guides on how to do it. And then my second top one would be to pair that with Google Analytics. So you have that both qualitative and quantitative together. When Rich and I were working on a redesign project before when he was still at Metro State we did the ones that we did was we did a competitive analysis where we looked at other library websites. We did a survey monkey and some focus groups and looked at analytics to kind of start to get a sense of where we were currently. We did journey mapping, we did prototyping we did A and B testing and we did usability testing. So we did a lot, but that was for a big redesign. And honestly, there was only like three of us who did all that and just pulled in people to help. So it can be done even in a small library in a small institution. We have a question. A few comments that have come in but a question I think would be good to ask now because you were just talking about what we call them, users, patrons, et cetera. And this question wonders what if you call would you ever, you have called them or I've heard them called library customers. If we did that, do you think we'd be more in tune with the experience they have? I just started thinking on them. Yeah. I wonder if we'll have different responses to that real quickly, Jennifer, and then you can speak on it because you're probably gonna have a better perspective than I do. But from an outside perspective as a UX designer, I would say call them what they call themselves. It's really important to establish shared vocabulary with people who use your services. And if they think of themselves as customers then call them that. I don't know, what do you think, Jennifer? Personally, I would get a little squeamish around the word customer. It's probably the higher ed part of me and the sort of move in higher ed and move to more and more about, I don't know, kind of like a profit model and a workforce readiness model. I get kind of nervous about that. But again, I think in the daily interactions that I have with patrons, I'm probably not calling them either. I'm saying hello, welcome to the library. So I guess come up with something you and your team is comfortable with. And I think Rich is on the right track about using the language that they use. Yeah, I don't know that we, that's actually a good question I never thought about. Do we talk to the people that come in our library using those jargon? Do we say, hello patron, hello customer? I mean, we don't, we say hi. What can I help you with? Amongst ourselves, we describe them in that way and in our research and stuff. So yeah, you're right. That's a great question and a good segue into talking about user research. And when we talk about personas a little bit later, I think we'll bring that up again because when you create a persona, even though it's an aggregate of different user needs and things, you still want to make it very personable and you don't want to say library patron. You want to give your persona a name and we'll have some examples of that. But as a segue, I love the question because it really speaks to meeting users where they are. I can't stress enough that if you gave me one thing to say about user research, it's going to be this number one item, go to where they are, be in their context. Because as I mentioned, if you're not seeing and hearing and feeling the things they are when they're using the product or service, you're probably going to miss a lot of things and make incorrect assumptions about what they're battling. I can give you an example of that when Jennifer and I were doing those early focus groups, we were pretty amazed when students were saying, yeah, we're doing all this work on this catalog, we're working with faculty, we're making all these edits and they're like, that's great, I don't use that ever at all. I go straight to the class schedule because I need this to work around my work schedule. I'm a working adult, I'm engaged in all of these other things. So I'm going to take the class next semester that fits within my schedule. And that really forced us to pivot and step back and go, oh, remember I mentioned those entry points, that's a different entry point. They're starting their journey in a different place than we assume. And I felt great, like learning that was such an important discovery because then we can be more effective with our design solutions because we can actually meet them where they begin. And I'm going to get in a little bit later into these details about how we map journeys and stuff, but I'll just say this, research is a big word, it's not academic research. And if the word is tripping you up a little bit, just think of it as user discovery. And I would want you to focus on coming away with four things. What are their primary and secondary goals? Really get a nice split on that. Like what's their main focus? And what are the things that support that goal? And then what are their expectations, challenges? And again, what does their environment look like? All right, so this is just, we're going to talk about some of the things that we've done and real briefly how we did it. So usability testing, again, this is one of our students that we did usability testing. And we had her use, if you can see it from the image, we had her use her own phone. And then we projected, we use an iPad, just the standard camera on an iPad and then projected that up on a screen that's behind her. So the observers in the room, by which I mean like me and Rich taking notes, the observers in the room could see what she's doing. So she's using her own device so that we can get, she's going to not be uncomfortable with like some awkward thing that we provide that she's not used to. The test set up, I said. Oh, I just wanted to interject real quick here because I want people to know that they can actually get something like this on Amazon. And I don't remember what you paid for it in the library, but it's relatively affordable if I remember this setup. Yeah. And there's other ways to test on mobile. There's multiple ways to do it. But again, just figure something out, but that was not an expensive device and we use it for other things. So it's multifunctional. We tend to do 20 to 30 minute tests and offer students an incentive like a bookstore gift card. But that's on the long side. I don't think you'd want to do that for just expect people to spend 20 to 30 minutes on and offer candy bars. But just drop the time down if you have less ability to offer incentives for the 20 to 30 minute tests, we might come up with eight to 10 tasks. These would be based around things that we know students are often trying to do, like try to find the hours that the library's open today. We'll do three to five users per round of testing per day. And then we try to immediately go back on our whiteboards and debrief. And then in some cases, go and make the changes that day that need to be done to the website to do another round of testing. Usability testing can be done remotely. And again, I think there's, I'm lucky that I work in a library that we mostly, they trust that the people on the library web team are gonna make good decisions and we don't always have to go back to like committee for everything we need to, we feel we need to change. And then again, the same thing, like we just go out and do the testing, we don't necessarily, I got frustrated one time we're in a meeting and there's, as meetings often do, people discussing, should we do testing? When should we do testing? How are we gonna do testing? And like drag on and on and on. I said, what, you know what, it's so fast. Like let's literally cancel the rest of the meeting, go do some testing right now. And that's what we did. So you can overthink it or you can just get out and meet your users. Yeah, we have a word. Can we go back real quick, Jennifer? The word that we use for that in UX is intercepts. And I give Jennifer and a few others at Metropolitan State University a lot of credit for both teaching me some of those more gorilla low budget tactics but also that you can just go in the hallway and grab people. Obviously you wanna put some thought into talking to the right people and making sure you've identified who your users are. You don't wanna just grab anyone. But I wanted to say real quickly that I think the second to last bullet is so key and I've learned this, that when you are done doing your testing, even if you've taken great notes, it's essential that you have some kind of debrief. And the way I like to do that is get in a room with a whiteboard or some post-it notes and start making groupings. Start finding affinities and group those things into things that help everyone develop this shared understanding of what they observe because you absolutely will forget it. And it's really key to capture it when it's fresh. And contextual inquiry or field testing is basically just a fancy way to say you're gonna go do usability testing in a person's environment. Most commonly I do this with faculty like go into their office spaces for example so that I can observe faculty using our library website in their office space or it could be an accessibility lab. This particular instance, it's a faculty person who does all his research and work from a coffee shop in St. Paul. So I actually observed him using the library website at a coffee shop. And what I mentioned that usability testing can be done remotely in COVID environment, I've been doing usability testing of faculty using Zoom which is what we have on our campus for presentation software. So I have them share their screen with me and then I watch them do tasks and they're at their home on their computer. One thing as we transition into this and I realize mental models like we're using some buzzwords here and I hope they're not making things seem more complex than they are. It's just a vocabulary we use to talk about these different techniques but one very important thing about contextual inquiry is that first bullet around not leading people. That's one of the hardest things to learn as a user researcher. I will say that that takes some practice but essentially making sure that they're leading you. Make the test a participant led event. So we talked a little earlier about testing our assumptions and checking our biases and making sure that we're really understanding people and we like to think of that as the mental model. So when you go out and interview your users preferably one-on-one because as Jennifer mentioned one of the challenges with focus groups is you get a lot of people in the room and the most dominant voice takes over a little bit of group things starts to emerge and it gets sort of tough to sift through that. It's a good place to start and we did use those techniques at Metropolitan State but ultimately the very best way is to identify your users and go talk to a handful of them one-on-one and try to understand like what do they expect to see? How do they expect things to work and let them tell the story from their perspective? How do they think and feel at those different steps of using their product and what words do they use when they talk to others? Like when they describe what it's like in the library or the library experience, let them tell you in their language how they solve problems and how they talk to people and ultimately you should be able to come away with that with a list of assumptions that they have even before they interact with you because they're bringing in that mental model of hey, I use these other products and services, they work this way, when I come in here I expect it to match that same kind of flow. So personas can run the gamut from something what we would call like a proto persona or a hypothesized persona. This is just your starting place to say who do we think the users are all the way out to a user researcher or user research backed persona. I wouldn't get too hung up on the depth of how far you go into your persona. I would say that make sure that it's something that's actionable and continue to revise it and consider evolving it as you learn more about people. So in this case, this is a real world example where I was working with a social worker on a product, social workers on product that they were using and Mary Hinton is not an actual person, that's a fictitious name and photo but what she represents is a composite or an amalgamation of the things that we learn when we went out and interviewed people and everything in here is actionable. Her needs and wants, her expectations, the environment she's in, her level of experience. In this case, I did use age but I would caution you with age and gender. Those can be tricky because they do set up a certain group of expectations that may be false and I think this is a great example where even though the demographic ran a little older, this group of social workers and nurses were very advanced and actually expected the software to provide a lot of keyboard shortcuts and advanced features. And this is just a Metropolitan State University Library. This is a persona that my team created. We have about three or four of these and we have them in little cards and our use for them is often just to be constantly reminding ourselves to think of the users and it might sound corny but even like hanging up persona pictures in your workspaces to so when you're developing tasks that you're thinking of these users. So once we've gone out and talked to users one-on-one, we've understood their environment challenges and pain points and things. We need to come back to what a user experience is which is moments across space and time with different stages and steps and that's where we get into the personas journey. And in this case, we're putting a real person even though it's again a composite of different people, we're putting this human being through a set of stages and steps and they have channels, touch points, interactions, et cetera. I chose this example intentionally because if you Google user journey or customer journey, you're gonna see a lot of very polished, well-designed, elaborate journey maps with all these different moments of truth and stages and that's great. There are times when that's very warranted but we're all about like getting down into very pragmatic solutions, open up Excel or even Word. And you can see in this example, this is a customer's journey through a website with five clear stages to search, evaluate, experiment, purchase and then obviously from the business side they wanna retain that customer. But the key thing here is what channel are they coming in on? And by channel I just mean, is it person to person like an analog channel? Is it digital? And then where do those touch points happen? So in this case, we see touch points where they use Twitter or Google and we see touch points again where they go through the cart and checkout steps. And finally, I'll just say their pain points are the things you wanna focus on. So the stages and steps are gonna tell you where those pain points are happening and what things you need to focus on because at some point you're gonna have a lot of to-dos and you're gonna need to prioritize them. Hopefully your pain points will tell you, okay, we know we have the biggest gap right here and in the next slide, I'll show you what that can look like. So I thought this was pretty clever and pretty interesting. They're trying to, in this example, they're creating a journey map to get people to register to vote. And you'll notice this line, this kind of curvy line that's showing emotions and thoughts so back to the very human squishy things. But this is very useful for us as UX designers because we can see that right there in the awareness stage, they start out with a lot of hope. And then when they move into information gathering, they're either gonna stay really motivated or they're gonna start to develop frustration. And again, this is gonna help us focus on, okay, where is the real problem happening? Because that where in space and time is really central to pinpointing what order of things you wanna deal with. Another technique that I really like a lot and I feel like as a naturally oriented, like librarians would be naturally inclined to like this sort of thing is card sorting. And it's just a way to help you kind of think through the architecture of a site. But you can, we used OptimalSort, which is software. And the nice thing about using OptimalSort is you can send a link to people remotely. We actually sent OptimalSort to students who weren't even at Metro State yet, but we're at a community college and we're intent, we're planning to come. So we have people who have been exposed to our website and ask them, how would you organize the information on the website? And it's just again, one of my favorite types of user experience testing. OptimalSort does cost money and I think there's a free version and a pay version. And we had, we did some creative things where we would say, okay, the library will fund this thing and could the marketing department pick this up? And then also you can do card sorting with literally cards and we would take it in to like, if we were doing instruction sessions and classes or just spread it out on the reference test wherever there were patrons, we would ask them if they would be willing to do some of this. One thing I'll quickly, can we go back? I'll quickly add to card sorting that's useful to know is that there are two types. You can do an open card sort where the participants are telling you they're actually writing out the cards and saying, okay, well I would call this, this thing. And I would group these things in this bucket or there's a closed card sort where you have your categories already and they're just organizing them for you. I actually like the hybrid approach of both. I wanna give them a starting place but I also want them to write out some things or even scratch out things and be like, yeah, I wouldn't call it that because again, we wanna speak their language and establish shared vocabulary with them. We want them to tell us like, how would you organize this? And this is just an example of like when we would get together and whiteboards are just great especially if you have someone with decent handwriting which isn't me but just a way to kind of prototype brainstorm but in this case is what you're seeing right now is kind of an early form of like prototyping and brainstorming that our group was doing based on some of the very preliminary research that we did. We also did AB testing which is simply, do we use drop down menus or we do this other kind of menu? Well, let's test them side by side. And with, you can do it initially with paper prototypes like print, literally print out your home library homepage and then do a Photoshop mockup of what you might want to do that could be like testing two different things. We also use a product called Aksure that can do really simple prototypes and wireframes and then we can test like, you know, this way or this way and then you test both of those prototypes. And I want to say that with AB testing, you can, there's a few different methods of that. You can do a quantitative AB test where you put things out into the user space, let them interact with it and get a bunch of like really hard data on how they use it. Can you go back to just one quick second, Jennifer? I want to say too, I want to call out that we deliberately did not show you the finished results. So in Aksure, this was coming right out of a paper prototype or that whiteboard sketch, this is very stripped down. This is, there's no design here other than just the layout or the information hierarchy and layout of this page because that's what we want to test. We're not trying to test colors or animations or anything to do with how it looks and feels. We're trying to test how it works. Oops. And I think that, again, circling back to the other side that showed all the different methods, there's just a variety of things to do and Richel later showed you a website that kind of has really great resources for if you want to do this kind or this kind. But in library is something that we, you probably have access to that you can do some initial user research on is looking at your support tickets, looking at any chat and search logs you have. Obviously you have to kind of come up with a strategy relating to patron privacy, but our discovery tool, for example, everything a user searches, like I can get logs for that. So I go in there sometimes I say, oh, Yikes, a bunch of our patrons are searching for the library hours in our discovery tool full of articles. That means A, they're not necessarily understanding the function of that search box, but B, there's sometimes ways you can actually sneak the library hours into, you can try to fix that initial problem or you can kind of try to flip that script again, reframe it and say, if people are gonna keep looking for the library hours and the discovery tool, then let's find a way to put the hours as a search result. And you can do that in our case with by indexing like a library guide that includes the hours. Yeah, those are great points. So I think we're kind of wrapping this up now and then we'll get to some of the questions and answers. But before we get into the final slides, I wanted to summarize this. We do have a list of resources and things you can dig deeper into and we'll set you in a direction in that sense. But from our perspective, what you really need, this photo that I found of a chocolate bar was, Jennifer was telling me a story about a library that just went out with chocolate bars and that's what they gave to participants to encourage them to test. I think what you really, really need to do this work is a true love for your users because this empathy is a stretch. It's gonna take a lot of hard work to get into their head and heart spaces and a true willingness to be wrong. I bring as much as possible, I try to bring a scientist mindset or frame of reference where I get, I'm actually excited when I'm wrong because it means I'm learning and I'm getting closer to a good result. I think we can maybe kind of skip through some of these. If Rich, if you're okay with that. Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah, I'll just let everyone know because someone did ask me about this. These slides are also available. I've added them to the, because Jennifer just sent them to me this morning. I've added them to the session page that's on our calendar at the moment for today and they will also be included when I put up the page with the archive as well. Nice, thank you. Yeah, I won't say a whole lot on this slide for we don't test, we observe. I put this here just to remind you that when you hear usability tests, a little bit of a misnomer, we're actually there to observe. And if I only had one question in a usability test, it would be show me how you use this. I really want them to guide me and I want them to tell me what they're expecting to see at each step and how it's all about like the probes and follow-up questions. So when you see them do something, you say, oh, you're staying very neutral, you're not trying to encourage them positive or negative. But if you notice something interesting, you can say, oh, show me how you did that or what did you expect to see? Or was that difficult or easy for you? And why did you do it that way? That sort of thing. This is the picture of a focus group that we did at the library. I'm gonna keep kind of cruising through some of this because I want to get to this. I think- I think I have a question or a question actually. Someone wants you to show, please show the slide where you show the ways to observe. I'm not sure- I think that was a little further up where we provided some other techniques. Yeah. Okay. Yes, yes, that's interesting, yeah. Yeah, there's, I think again just to stress that there's a number of different forms of user experience testing. And there's very likely one that would fit your particular case. And there's lots of helpful guides out there. I would be happy. I think Rich or I would be happy if you reached anyone who reaches out to us and says, hey, I work at this kind of a library. What would you maybe recommend? And I mean, not that we're the be all and all. We don't know your users, but we might, we know the tools and the techniques and we might be able to offer suggestions. Listen, thank you so much. I also do, speaking of the candy bar slide, I highly recommend Bribery as well. I've found that works very well. And it works on me, I've noticed too, when I get emails from different companies or places, depending on my feeling about the place, sometimes I definitely am more apt to go through the survey if it says, you will be entered into, you know, to, for an Amazon gift card or something. Yeah. And it's a respect for their, it shows respect for their time also. I, you know, every library out there is saying the same thing right now. We don't have the money. I don't have the time. I don't have the support. Rich and I have talked about this old proverb sometimes that you may have heard if you're into mindfulness, you should sit in meditation for 20 minutes a day unless you're too busy, then you should sit for an hour. We have our own version of that, which is you should test with your patrons twice a year, unless you're too busy, then do it once a month. You kind of made up the time frames there. Maybe your library wants to test once a week once, you know, but the important thing is, is this is really, really important. And if you're not doing this, then you could, again, be throwing resources away. We, we both picked some resources to share. This is Rich's Choice was a book called Lean UX. That's his, like, if you can only get one book, get this book. This 18 F methods is actually a government website and it has a little card for each type of thing. We were just talking about usability testing, contextual inquiry, card sorting. There's a card on the 18 F methods cards for each of those. My book, my, like, if I could recommend one book is called How to Make Sense of Any Mass by Abby Covert. It's an information architecture book. And when you read it, she's an information architect. You'll be like, whoa, this is librarianship. We're taxonomous. We're used to thinking in categories and organizing. And we put that E on another line intentionally. So that's about it. You know, questions, we would love to have questions now. We have resources in the slide for things, different testing methods. And then we have our contact information. Should anyone want to follow up with either of us or both of us? Like I said, don't worry about trying to scribble down all those URLs on that previous slide there. The links tell the different resources. The slides are available, so you'd be able to get it from there. Yeah, one thing quickly I'll say about the resources we provided. When I'm in the audience, I always want people like, if you just gave me one book or one link, that's what we tried to do with the 18 F cards and we each picked a book. And then these resources are really focused on like, okay, you need a checklist. You need a set of techniques you can get up and running with quickly. It is a practice. It does take time to get better at it, but there's no better way than to just jump in and do it. And I feel like these links we landed on are the quickest way to get in and just get going. All right. Yes, any questions? A few questions did come in throughout the show and so I'm gonna get to those. But if anybody does have any other questions, comments, tips or tricks you want to share if you've been doing this ideas, type into the questions section on your GoToWebinar interface. We're getting close to 11 a.m., which is as I said our official, our show officially goes to 11, but we will keep going as long as you guys have questions and we discuss things and as long as Jennifer and Rich have answers they want to give. If you do need to leave because you have only allotted to 11, one hour for the show today, that's fine. We're recording, we're recording the entire show and you can come back and watch anything you missed at your convenience later. So... Yeah, I'm happy to stick around. Jennifer, I don't know what your day looks like but I can stay a little extra. I can stay. Not for hours. No, we're just talking about it here. So when it comes to UX, it seems like libraries are overly focused on usability testing, which is important. But what are we doing or what can we do about the totality of the library experience? Can we design the UX we want to deliver and then make sure staff are delivering it at every touch point? Are you trying that at your library or in your research? So I think we're talking about doing usability within the follow-up with the staff afterwards. Yeah, I think that there is, I think that's an excellent question. And I think my library like many others did start with usability testing. And again, I would probably, that's probably still my go-to method if I could only do one. But thankfully I've kind of gone, I've gone beyond that. My library has gone beyond that because I do think there's definitely limitations to what usability testing can do. Many of these methods can point out issues, but they don't tell you how to fix it. So if you're not really all in, if you really don't have your heart open and you're not ready to be empathetic, you might just kind of keep re-not fixing the problem. And so yeah, I think there's an opportunity to, if you have UX people in your library to try to get them to come anytime you can bring other people into the testing room that is helpful. If you have a staff meeting, keep reporting out your results and what you're doing and show the pain points and tell stories. I think telling the user stories is so important whether it's something you saw at the reference desk or the help desk or if it's during a different kind of testing. I had a student who came to the reference desk crying, like actual really crying out of frustration with how bad our website was working with the JAWS screen reader program and seeing that and like first off, it impels you to do something because that's awful that we have a library website that's not allowing people to our resources but to tell the stories to other people so that they feel that too. And you have an obligation to share that. Our library web team is made up of whoever wants to be on and every year we put on another call out anyone can do this, join our team. We rotate through people so that we try to build a staff that everybody has these principles. We have like a guiding principles document that we use that has a lot of or philosophical kinds of aspects in it. I don't know if that really sounds like I'm not addressing the question, but that's what I'm doing. I can jump in and speak a little bit to this to echo what Jennifer is saying. I've had this experience many times where sometimes you bring a lot of thought and deep work to what you're presenting and you want the work to have integrity and show due diligence. So I've often presented in front of groups where I'm leading with, here's how I did this and here's my methods and here are all the charts and graphs and things. And I think we had a slide about this. Don't lead with that because I've lost too many groups of people and I realized what was happening was they weren't connecting emotionally. They weren't connecting as human beings. Save your charts and graphs and data for the end of your presentation and start with the story. And when you have audio and video, in one case we were observing people. We had a list of calls, recorded calls, people calling into the help desk, deeply frustrated and it was an issue of trust. They didn't trust the company and that break in trust was best communicated by just hitting play, sitting quietly and letting everyone in the room, it was uncomfortable but letting everyone in the room hear this customer say, I don't believe you anymore. I don't trust anything you're telling me. And that converts people so much faster than a presentation full of a bunch of data and things. I was thinking as you're talking, yeah, getting your staff involved in it, in the usability testing itself as well may help them follow through with what you come up with as the change that needs to be made and how they're providing services or what they're doing. So they can share ownership of the whole thing. I mean, you were mentioning, Jennifer, how we've got these people, if you have your UX people, why not have everybody? Like involve all staff in usability testing, those one quick question when they come in the door or here's a one piece of paper with one question or a survey monkey thing and I'll give you the candy bar if you answer this question for us. Have anybody do that and then they feel like they're actually part of the whole thing and not just being told the UX people said, this is a problem. Well, and you can also get into the issue where usability testing, for example, might be just like a checklist that you say, oh, I have to launch, I wanna launch this new website. I already have my mind made up of what I wanted to look like, but I'll do this usability testing as a checklist, which is totally the wrong approach. But I think it's something, unfortunately, both Rich and I have seen too often. So it's the motivation of why you're doing it. Yes. Go ahead. So here's a question that Kate was from the beginning and I wasn't sure if you're gonna mention it, so I decided to hold it to now, but I think it's a good end of session question too. Does the issue of innovating without knowing, you talked in the beginning about how don't just do something because you wanna do it, find out what the patrons, your users want. But the question is, does the issue of innovating without knowing exactly what users want or in response to their behavior, how do we decide to try something totally new and untested because we think it could be useful? Sort of like the people don't know what they want until you show them, give it to them. Yeah, I can take a crack at that one. We have a saying in UX and many of you may have heard it and that is that the first idea is usually bad and that's true up through the first several ideas and even as an experienced designer, that can be tough to, it can be a tough blow, like you put your heart into things, you have great ideas, you spend a lot of time with patrons, you know these people. I think that's why I wanted to show design thinking as a methodology to start with because design thinking focuses on, by all means explore your ideas, that's the point, but don't explore them by yourself. Bring them out to the groups of people who use your products and be willing to pivot early and often. So we mentioned paper prototypes and Acture because those are fast and usually pretty easy things to like just explore. I think you should explore all of those innovations but don't do anything that you can't provide evidence for. This was the big lesson for me is I have to go in front of a room full of stakeholders. A lot of times there's a lot of money involved, things are on the line and they're under pressure and I have to convert them somehow. So what I've learned is I don't wanna go into that room without evidence, I call that evidence-based design. If I can't show something through user research, quantitative data and hopefully tell a whole story about what users are really looking for, then my ideas just look like my opinion. So as long as you test early and often and get in that test and learn mindset, by all means I think you should explore everything. Well, if you stay focused on what it is they're trying to do less than the tool, you can, like patrons didn't come to us saying we want a discovery tool because they don't have the word for that. But when we observed them and we saw how they were using it, you could see how that tool might be a solution to get to what they're trying to do. Yeah, the users will tell you this is the thing that's bothering me, I can't make this work. And we as the librarian and library staff experts, we have the knowledge to know, oh, I know the fix for that. It's this thing that you don't need to know about the jargon but we'll work on it. Use our expertise for that, yeah. I think another thing about this too is as so many people have trouble with and a lot of the upper management or stakeholder people be okay with failure. It's okay to come up with a great new idea, try something new because some other library tried out or you found out about something and be willing to do a test phase in real life and be okay with the fact that at the end, you might decide, no, I spent two months testing this out with our patrons, our users. And in the end, it wasn't what we needed and that's okay. I had to learn from that. So many people I think are stuck with, why should I take the time to do it if it's not gonna work? What if it doesn't work? Or I took so much time to do it, I have to make it work no matter what. No, failure is a good thing and you can learn from it for the next thing. Yes. Yeah, you can even learn to love it and I'm speaking as a person. I will never forget, I'll just open up to you guys. I'll never forget the moment where we had a group of graduate students come in and speak to a large group of us. We had people from university advancement, IT, I was there, obviously I was involved as a designer on making these things. And I just felt ripped apart, I felt shredded. They came in and said, this doesn't work, this doesn't make sense, we don't use this the way you built it, it looked like a total failure to me. And I think that really converted me into, I'm no longer going to start with my best work and then just hope it works out. I'm gonna actually start with a draft and a sketch and build this up and learn from users and include them in the process because I don't wanna feel that embarrassment and pain anymore and it was great to have that. It was a formative experience for me because empathy is pretty easy after you go through that kind of pain. All right, so we have one last comment, suggestion. If anybody else does have any desperate questions you wanna have answered right now, get them typed in here cause we'll be wrapping up, I think in just a minute or so because we only have one other thing in here. Someone has a suggestion of back in the beginning when you're talking about bad design and the dog and the hamster just doing their own thing. The video, Seth Godin's This Is Broken shows a lot of bad design that we just don't pay attention to in our libraries like bad signage. Half the way to a better experience is fixing the stuff that's broken. Yes. Great, thank you. That's great, that's great advice. Yeah, resources too, there's a link to a video maybe we mentioned this about the Normandor concept and that's another great watch to kind of think through bad design. And badly designed doors are an interesting metaphor, right? Because like you think of physical buildings and you can do a lot of user testing on physical buildings but a library website in many ways is just, that's our virtual buildings and what are our doors and how easy is it for people to find their way into our services online especially in COVID land, right? Especially in this current times as we were saying repeatedly, yeah. Now should be the time when everybody has been I hope over the last few months desperately figuring out how do we make our website work? How do we make our online things work? Cause that's where we are now. Yes. Yeah. All right, I don't see anything else typed in. If you have any, like I said, last minute question you wanna get in get it typed in right now. Other than that, I think we will wrap up today. Thank you so much, Jennifer and Rich. This was great. As you said on the beginning, yes, this was supposed to be your session was supposed to be at the library tech conference of a Minneapolis, St. Paul where I was also supposed to present there as well back in March and it was at the very beginning of all of the pandemic and it was canceled and I was just glad to get you and I've brought some other presenters from that conference as well onto the show. There's always great resources at that conference anyone who's ever been we're not sure what the future of that is but it's always been such a great resource and I was glad to be able to have you guys on to share about this. Usually you have to say something that I am very adamant about myself and I worry too many places do not do it and that's why I wanna keep, just do it. Great, thank you so much for having us. Yeah. Yeah, I really enjoyed it. Thank you everyone. All right, I am going to pull presenter control back to my screen to wrap up for today. There we go. There it is, okay. All right, so that will wrap it up for today's show. As I mentioned, I did put the link to the slides on this is the session page for today's show. So while we were talking, all you guys were talking, I added a link to the presentation. We use slide share to post things like that. Jennifer did send me the PowerPoint of that. So that is available already if anyone wants to go look at it. When the archive is up, it will be on that page as well. Our archives, I will show you that, are right here. These are upcoming shows coming up over the next couple of months and our archives are right below there. This and today's will be at the top of the list. There will be that same session page that you saw with the link added to the recording that will be on the Library Commission's YouTube channel. And as I said, these are all free and open and you want to watch. So share it everywhere you want to. While we're here on the archives, I'll show you there's a search feature where you can search all of our show archives if you want to. You can also search and limit it to just the most recent 12 months if you want something just recent. That is because this is our complete show archives and I'm not gonna scroll all the way down on this long one page, going back to the very beginning of Encompass Live. Our first show was in January, 2009. So we're 10 years on, even more in to the show. So if you do search the full archives, just pay attention to when the original broadcast date was. Some of these sessions will be eternally useful, things like reading lists and how to read your library collection, that's right there. But some things may become outdated, services may no longer exist, services may have changed, websites and links might not work anymore. So just pay attention to original broadcast dates if you are looking through our archives all the way back. All right, back to Encompass Live page here. We do have a Facebook page. I have a link here to it and I've got to open over here. If you are a big Facebook user and would like to, do you like to use Facebook to keep up with things to give us a like over there? We post reminders to your reminder from this morning to log in on the fly for today's show, information about our presenters, when our recordings are available, we post down here, many new shows coming up. So if you do like to use Facebook and give us a like over there. So I hope you join us for our, this is our upcoming calendar. You can see I've got Julian and some July dates in here. We're kind of finalizing some things for their July and even have some August ones coming up. So keep an eye on this page for our upcoming shows. I'll be joining us next week. Our topic is pretty sweet tech, how to leverage online learning to build new skills. Many of us are doing a lot of online learning now like this because of the situation. And Amanda Sweet who's our technology innovation librarian here at the Nebraska Library and Commission will come on next week to talk about that. She does a monthly pretty sweet tech is her session, monthly episode with us. The last Wednesday of every month. So if you are the big tech person with your library, definitely keep an eye on her upcoming topics and join us next week about to learn more about using online learning. And that wraps it up for today. Thank you everyone for attending. Thank you, Jennifer Rich and I hope we'll see you on a future Encompass Live. Bye-bye. Thank you, bye-bye. Thank you.