A version of this article appears in Feliciter (vol. 56, no. 5) the magazine of the Canadian Library Journal. It is posted here with their permission.

When we shop, read a book, drive a car, or visit a website, each of us forms an opinion of that product or service that leaves us with a negative or positive impression of it. This attitude comes from our unpleasant interaction with an indifferent store clerk, or when we visit a website that helps us quickly find, select, and complete a purchase with just a few clicks of a mouse. These positive and negative affects are the defining characteristics of user experience, and these experiences shape our perception of the organization offering the service.

Yet unlike a web application, RFID, or QR-codes, a user experience is not a tangible product. User experience (UX) isn’t really about technology at all; in fact, it is a design methodology that helps librarians, web designers, application developers, and product vendors understand not only what people want to do with their products, but to understand the user’s motivation for choosing the product in the first place. And perhaps most importantly, the study of user experience helps those providing library services understand how our patrons use the services we offer, and how they integrate them into their daily lives.

The social web, a.k.a., Web 2.0, is comprised of immersive, personalized web services that give users the ability to create, share, distribute, and consume information in ways that benefit their specific goals and aspirations. As librarians and information professionals, we have to consider these goals and motivations, and seek to develop (or purchase) solutions that help patrons process, absorb, and derive meaning from the content we provide. We have done this in physical libraries for years; however, as online delivery becomes widely available and as user demand increases, we will need to devote more of our energies toward making our websites and web applications appealing, enjoyable, and easy to use. User experience can help libraries develop a vision of where we want to go next with web services, where we want to be next year, and where we plan to be the year after that.

What is User Experience?

In his 2010 “State of User Experience” speech, Jesse James Garrett defines user experience as “the design of anything, independent of medium, or across media, with human experience as an explicit outcome, and human engagement as an explicit goal.” In other words, user experience seeks to create products that people will want to use, and to delight users in such a way that they develop a sense of loyalty to the product or service being offered.

User experience is subjective and intangible. Yet, if you were to watch five library patrons find and download an electronic book using your library’s catalogue, it would become clear that their experiences, while varied, are very real to them. We may not be able to touch these experiences, but they exist because our users exist.

UX is not usability. Usability means that your intended audience can successfully complete the task they set out to do. Usability is concerned with functionality of a specific product, whereas UX is focused on creating something of value that speaks to the user on a visceral, behavioural, and reflective level. Put simply: a pair of Clark’s Wallabies are usability, but a pair of shoes from John Fluevog are user experience. They’re both types of shoes, but as a consumer (and shoe addict) I’m more likely to have an enthusiastic reaction to the new pair of Fluevogs I just purchased rather than the utilitarian simplicity of a Clark’s walking shoe.

This is because the Fluevog shoe is designed to elicit an immediate reaction (“I must have these shoes!”) that with time and exposure, matches itself to my own behavioural patterns (“I never would have guessed I could walk 12 blocks in 3-inch heels before I bought these.”). As I become more attached to the shoes, they become part of the story of myself, or the image I want others to have of me (“Have you seen those orange slingback pumps of Cecily’s? She has such an impeccable sense of style!”).

These reactions influence user behaviour, drive decision making, and help increase user delight. When we are delighted by something, we become more receptive, focus our thinking, and become more curious and willing to explore. Focus and attention are crucial to online experiences, because when a user pays attention to the task at hand, their rate of success increases. When a user is pleased with a product or service, she is more willing to overlook and cope with minor problems with a website or product, especially if it is fun to work with (“I think I’ll pick up some blister pads this evening. I’m planning to wear my orange pumps with this new dress I just bought.”)

Characteristics of User Experience

User experience design has three main characteristics.

Direct User Input
The most critical aspect of user experience design is direct user input. Although gathering user feedback is not new, user experience design seeks to understand and assess users’ actual behaviour and performance, rather than their opinions and attitudes. We collect this user information by observing users in the field and in controlled settings as they interact with design prototypes, or we can simply observe them in their own environment as they work with a website or application. Using these two methods will help you uncover their goals, objectives and thought processes, and will shed light on the steps your patrons follow when trying to carry out a specific task.

Traditional methods of assessment such as focus groups and surveys are not useful when attempting to measure user behaviour. In focus groups and surveys, people’s responses can be unreliable. Paul Sherman, a user experience consultant based in Austin, Texas, writes that these methods should be discounted because “in general, people ‘lie’; that is, they don’t self-assess their performance well, and they unknowingly generate inaccurate explanations for their behaviour and attitudes.” (Sherman 2009) Most of us have had the experience of expressing an opinion about something that runs counter to how we actually use it. For example, when I was in the market for a new car five years ago, fuel efficiency was a key priority, and I chose a model that met my stated needs. In reality, I keep the trunk of my car full of stuff, added a heavy bike rack to the undercarriage, and I’m a bit of a lead foot. These behaviours all undermine my car’s fuel efficiency even though I said it was an important factor when choosing a vehicle.

A Clearly-Defined Development Process
Another important characteristic of UX design is having a well-defined development process with discrete stages that move from more abstract ideas to more concrete issues such as layout and design.

Recently, the Web Team at Vancouver Public Library implemented a process that outlines the stages of the design life cycle and identifies the tactics used at each phase. During the earliest phases, we seek to discover user needs, and find out how developing a website or deploying a third-party solution will meet those needs. We combine surveys with contextual observation to outline features and functional requirements that the website must support. As we move through our process, we construct the information architecture and navigation systems of the website. By this time we’ve moved from abstract ideas toward building the website, so we develop task flows or use cases that capture detailed descriptions of how a user goal might be accomplished on our website. We do all of these things before we even think about developing wireframes or building a web-based prototype. It is only when these early stages are completed that we pass our designs on to the graphics technicians and web developers.

Following a clearly-defined development process reduces the risk of producing a design that is doesn’t meet the users’ needs or one that gets in the way of their interaction goals. It also reduces the likelihood that a completed design will need to be re-worked.

Design Iterations
Most of us are familiar with the adage “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” That’s the theory behind the last aspect of user experience: iterative design. We improve designs incrementally by repeatedly exposing prototypes to users while asking them to complete real-world tasks using these mock-ups. We assess user performance and success rates, and refine our designs based on these results.

We may be tempted to add features at this stage to increase the likelihood of user success, but this may not be the best approach. Making a design more complicated by adding alert messages, explanatory text, instructions for operation and other ‘helpful’ features may actually make the design more frustrating for the user. Whenever something competes for the user’s attention, their focus is taken away from the task at hand. This can make errors happen more often. Instead of adding features, iterative design may reveal that subtracting features might be in order.

The iterative design process can be used for everything from making small changes such as changing the labels on buttons to a complete overhaul of a web application interface across several generations. The keys to making iterative design work are repetition, exposure, and refinement, regardless of the size of the project.

Final Thoughts

In his book Designing the Obvious, Robert Hoekman, Jr. tells the story of being at a dinner party and overhearing friends talk about their frustrations with web sites. It occurred to Hoekman that web application design is really about designing the obvious, e.g.,“understanding the principal activity your product is meant to support so you know what to build, and more importantly, what not to build.” This understanding, he writes, comes from “knowing how people use computers, and having the ability to create something that works with users instead of against them.” (Hoekman 2006) Developing a user experience strategy that embraces direct user input, a formalized development process and iterative design will help us reach this understanding.

Design is subjective, and web technologies are a moving target. The reality is that our technological landscape shifts so rapidly that we may feel as if we’ll never quite keep up.

We have to keep moving.

The landscape will shift beneath our feet, and we might be tempted to plant our feet and dig a trench in response. We must remain flexible and committed to change, and be able to anticipate changes as they appear on the horizon. Our landscape may shift, but one thing that remains constant is our ability to adapt to a changing environment. Librarians can and do adapt to changes, and so can our patrons, if we guide them along the way.

References

Brewer, Peter and Joshua Porter. “52 weeks of UX.” http://www.52weeksofux.com .

Garrett, Jesse James. 2003. The elements of user experience. Indianapolis, IN.: New Riders

Hoekman, Jr., Robert. 2006. Designing the obvious. Berkeley, CA: New Riders.
Norman, Donald A. 2004. Emotional design: why we love or hate everyday things. New York: Basic Books.

Sherman, Paul. The User Experience Team Kit: How to Hire a UX Team and Incorporate User-Centered Design Methods into Your Software Development Lifecycle Process. ShermanUX, 21 February 2010. http://www.shermanux.com.

OK, the title of this post is on the hyperbolic side, but I do have a point. But first, a little light entertainment:

Does your library put a Bridge of Death before your customers? Oh, I’m sure you don’t have a Bridge Keeper who requires patrons to answer “these questions three” before approaching the desk, but we do keep patrons away from the information/reference desk in some subtle ways. One of the most subtle and pervasive ways we do this is by placing directional signs in front of the desks.

I was curious to see how my own library handles directional signs, so I stopped by before the library opened and walked around the building. On just about every floor of the building, we’ve placed signs at the escalator landings to ostensibly help patrons find their way to our collections. How many of you have seen signs like these?

These signs predate my time with the library, but I can only assume they were created to cut down on the number of directional questions. Questions like these are repetitive, and speaking for myself, I know I sometimes get a little tired of answering them. Yet the types of questions that are most asked by the public – the “where’s the bathroom” and “can I check this out?” kinds of questions – weren’t always answered by the signs at MPOW.

When thinking about the usage life cycle – the stages that a person goes through when they use a product or service – the point of first contact is the most important point and is one of our last chances to make a good impression. It’s in that point of first contact that we have the opportunity to begin building a relationship with the customer, to leave her with the impression that this is a service that she likes to use, that she chooses to use, not one that she uses because there is no other alternative.

By the same token, learnability is an important aspect of usability and user experience. As designers (and make no mistake, librarians who organize physical spaces are acting as designers in that moment), it is our responsibility to take into consideration how quickly a patron can learn how our system works.

The sign from the Science and Business division is a little more successful in this regard, as they convey their message simply and clearly, with bold graphics and large text that is easy to read at a distance. The sign from the Literature and Social Sciences division, on the other hand, presents the user with many choices in a smaller, more difficult to read font size. Instead of being able to glance at the sign and quickly gain an idea of where they should be going, the user is forced to stop and spend time with a sign, time that could be better spent finding what they’re looking for, or by asking library staff at the front desk for assistance.

While messaging is important, we should also consider where we place signs like these and what message the placement sends to our visitors. I held the camera at chest height and took the photos – I didn’t intentionally place the camera at a lower angle just to prove a point. In both instances, half of the reference desk is obscured by a sign. More often than not at MPOW, we have two or more people staffing the information desk at a time. When half the staff is conveniently hidden behind a sign, we’re sending a subtle message to the patron that there aren’t enough people around to help him find what he needs, so the patron will either go off on his own and try to find what he wants. But let’s get back to the bridge keeper analogy.

In the Python clip I posted, the bridge keeper stops King Arthur and his Knights and asks them to make a decision before they proceed. By placing these signs on the escalator landing directly in front of the information desk, we’re telling the public that in order to get help from us, they must complete an initial stage before proceeding. We’ve introduced a hurdle, albeit a small one, to the patron’s successful completion of their task (to get information and ask for help).

When talking to library staff, one of the common complaints you’ll hear from us is that the patrons don’t use the information desks anymore. Patrons approach us timidly, saying “I didn’t want to bother you” when their frustration reaches a level that they’re forced to ask us to help them find what they need. We’re often baffled by this, and many library staff will say that they don’t know what to do to make people come over to them and ask for help.

Here’s a suggestion – try removing signs like this for a couple of weeks and see whether the public approaches us more often. Sure, we may see an initial increase of the kinds of questions that these signs are intended to cut down on, but I’d venture that if we make it easier for people to approach us for simple things, that they’ll learn that it’s OK to approach us for more serious information requests as well.

I was in the process of starting an online application for a job I’m interested in when I hit a roadblock. Who’s in the wrong: the end user (me) or the designer? You be the judge.

I spent some time tonight reorganizing my RSS feeds in Google Reader. I have a category of blogs that I’ve organized under the label “UCD”, but as my interests have shifted toward user experience, I now find that the “UX” label is more appropriate for the list of blogs I read most often.

Being the logical person that I am (shut up), I figured that the best place to change the folder name was to go to Settings > Folders and Tags, but when I went there, this is what I saw:

Huh. There’s no way for me to rename the folder/tag from here. OK, I thought, maybe I’ll find it under Preferences…

Frustrated, I turned to Google (irony!) for help. It turns out that I can’t actually rename a tag or label in Google Reader, instead I have to create the new tag, assign the new tag to each subscription, and then remove the old tag.

One of the first lessons I learned as a budding UX professional is you always provide the user with a simple escape route. Just because a person has assigned a label to a group of feeds, it doesn’t mean that user won’t ever have the need or desire to change that label at some later date. As a designer, your job is to provide a clear path to that interaction, one that doesn’t involve kludgy workarounds or near-fixes.

In an odd way, switching to the iPhone has made me a better citizen.

I don’t want to say that I’m not helpful, just that when it comes to directions, sometimes people would be better off asking a seeing-eye dog than asking me. I’m hopeless.  When people stop me on the street to ask for directions I usually look the other way  or bluster past them with a hastily whispered “Sorry”. That doesn’t happen anymore thanks to the iPhone’s built-in GPS and Maps application. 

Last night as I was biking home, a grandmotherly woman flagged me down as I slowly pedalled past. She asked me to point her in the direction of Ash street, and for the life of me I could not remember where it was. Never mind that I whiz past Ash street whenever I ride my bike to work or to the Canada Line station, and never mind that I’d literally just rolled past it a few seconds before the woman stopped me. I just could not place Ash street in my head at all.

I finally remembered I had an iPhone, so I pulled my bike to the side of the curb, grabbed the phone, launched the Maps application, and pointed the woman one block east of where we were standing.

The story here is that thanks to the iPhone, I’m now willing to interact with people in a way that I haven’t been eager to before. I don’t have to worry that I’ve sent some unsuspecting tourist into False Creek by telling them to turn left when I should have told them to turn right. I’m able to introduce a small but meaningful human interaction into my day, and even though I experience interactions like this dozens of times a day at the reference desk, helping a lost stranger find their way seems more altruistic somehow.

The New York Public Library recently unveiled their new website design, and I must say that I’m very impressed by the amount of user research and testing that went into seeing this project through. The site is lively, colourful, and eye-catching, and the information architecture, labeling, and information flow all seem to have been designed with simplicity, ease of use, and findability in mind. Of particular interest is the “Getting Oriented” sections of the site that are tailored to new library users. They even made a video tour of the new site available to the public:

In looking at this video I was struck by one thing: the language used to describe some of the features is pretty technical and sophisticated, which leads me to think that either NYPL users are smarter than the average patron, or that this video is really meant to introduce the site to other librarians and library workers. For example, the narrator talks about how the site was developed to assist with “serendipitous discovery” and extols the site’s “digital galleries” and “archival materials”. The video even mentions that the site was built using the Drupal open source content management system. While these are fascinating details to me (because I work in web services and knowing about these things is part of my job), I wonder just how relevant those bits of information are to the average NYPL user.

It could be that the NYPL serves an audience that has a great deal more technical knowledge than most public library users, and if that’s the case they’re fortunate.

OK, it might not be the gaudiest, but it’s awful close. Emphasis on awful.

Earlier tonight, I was trying to set up Direct Deposit with my insurance company. I logged into their customer service centre, found the form, and started the process. What I saw there made my eyes bug out of my head. I have much to say, but really, I’ll just let the video speak for itself:

OK, I’ll concede that I let the menu scroll by that fast for shock value, but even if I let it scroll by one item at a time, there must be hundreds of branches to choose from, all of which are sorted by branch number – a number that will only make sense to bank employees, and maybe not even then. How many of you know the branch number of your bank? I thought so.

Here’s how I would design the selector, if given the opportunity:

It would be easier if Blue Cross allowed users to select their bank branch by province. After selecting the province, the secondary menu would change to only reflect branches within that province. Furthermore, the menu would be organized by city, in an easily visible format that would make it easier for the user to quickly select the correct branch.

But nobody asked me, which is painfully obvious.

Does your library’s floor plan or system of organization match the conceptual model of your users? MPOW doesn’t (not always) and this fact has never sat well with me, ever since I set foot across the library’s threshold as an employee.

A conceptual model, in case you don’t know, is a collection of thoughts and information that we use to help us figure out how something works, because the parts of the object are visible and the implications of the object are all clear. For example, if we look at a bicycle, our conceptual model probably tells us that this is a self-propelled vehicle that should be operated by a seated human being. The clues come from the seat, the pedals, and the position of the wheels, seat, handlebars, and pedals in relation to each other which suggest the proper position of the body when operating the vehicle.

At MPOW, the division I work in was once called Newspapers and Magazines (it is called something else now, and I’ll get to that in a bit.) By giving the division this label, we’ve set the expectation that leads our patrons to think that if they come to level 5 in our building, they will find all the newspapers and magazines we subscribe to in one section. We’ve helped them form a conceptual model of how the library organizes its collection.

Except that’s not really how we operate. We do keep newspapers in a newspaper reading gallery on this floor, and we also have a few magazines, but other magazines are scattered throughout the library in their subject divisions. If I wanted to read Popular Photography, for example, rather than coming to the Newspapers and Magazines floor, I’d instead have to go to the Fine Arts & History division to find it.

The division is now called Online Information & News, a name that was selected (I assume) because it gave more prominence to the library’s electronic resource collection, which is quite extensive, even with the cutbacks we recently made. I remember thinking when the new name was announced that this wasn’t necessarily a step in the right direction, because by putting the word ‘online’ at the beginning of the phrase, we’re now telling the user that all of our information (whatever that means) can be found online. This causes a great deal of confusion for those users who come to our floor expecting to be able to walk over to any computer and pull up a digitized copy of The Vancouver Sun from 1928. Guess what? They can’t. This collection isn’t online.

And did I mention that we also keep closed stacks items from the Fine Arts & History division on our floor?

I wish I knew the right answer to this labelling problem and could come up with a name for the division that matched the user’s conceptual model and expectation. It would make sense to me that if we are called “Newspapers and Magazines” that all magazines the library subscribes to should be found on this floor. I know other libraries are moving toward a hybrid system of organization that keeps the best part of subject-based organization while experimenting with organization schemes that are more in line with bookstores.

This isn’t a brain dump that has answers. Rather, it’s an attempt for me to focus my thinking on the importance of suggesting or creating an experience that closely matches the user’s expectations. These kinds of mental models work best when the operation at hand is clearly observable, and when the visible parts of that system are consistent with the system image (the labelling).

It’s our job as librarians (the designers) to make sure that our design model matches the user’s mental model. Typically, the only way designers and users can communicate is through the system image (the library design), so we should ensure that everything about our product is consistent with the patron’s expectations. Users get all their knowledge about a system from the system image, and if that system image doesn’t match their expectations, they’ll be frustrated. Or they’ll do what I’ve seen dozens of times: they’ll take a step back, look at the sign on the wall, and look at the person behind the desk as if they’re a crazy person.

We’ve made our library harder to use than it needs to be. We’re making our users tense, and when people are tense, they aren’t willing to or capable of learning. They get tunnel vision and become more rigid, and start seeing us as the problem, rather than the solution.

One thing I’ve noticed since switching to the iPhone from my Nokia N82 is that the iPhone has become my go-to device when I need to look up certain kinds of information.

For example, take the Now Playing iPhone app. Before the iPhone, I’d go to mytelus.com/movies, select my province, then scan through a long list of cities to find a theatre near me. If I wanted to find a particular film, my task flow was pretty much the same, except I’d start with the movie. Even though my N82 was Internet-enabled, trying to view this site or any site that wasn’t optimized for mobile viewing on it was frustrating, and I’d just turn to to my computer instead.

Now that I have the iPhone, I launch Now Playing and let the phone’s geolocation features find all theatres within a 5km radius, or allow it to suggest which theatres in a larger radius are showing a particular title. Even if I’m sitting in front of my computer, I still reach for the iPhone.

It made me think that it would be amazing if there was an app like this for libraries that worked no matter your location. The Worldcat app comes close, but for now it only works with US libraries (and maybe UK ones?).

How has the iPhone (or Droid) changed your behaviour? What kinds of information do you search for with these devices?