Tuesday, December 22, 2015

Understanding User Experience in Libraries

Two of the research articles that I have published have focused on usability testing and user experience. Here are two presentations that I have made in order to teach people inside and outside the library about user experience.

This first video will define user experience and give you a baseline understanding of the concepts that need to be understood in libraries hoping to undertake UX work.

 


This second presentation defines UX elements further and explains how ECU Libraries has undertaken UX projects.


If you would like a one-and-done book to read that will help you get started with User Experience at your library, please read the following (short!) book:

Schmidt, A. & Etches, A. (2014). Useful, usable, desirable: Applying user experience design to your library. Chicago: American Library Association.

If you are interested in reading the UX Task Force's forthcoming article about our project and how it related to staffing, please visit our institutional repository.

Friday, December 18, 2015

Design Thinking

I recently attended the NC-LITe meeting at UNC-Chapel Hill. This meeting occurs twice per year in North Carolina at a rotating location. Meetings focus on Library Instruction and Instructional Technology. If you're interested in the group, the NC-LITe website can be found here. The format of the meetings is normally the same, with campus updates and some kind of active learning or breakouts to get people talking. I was excited to see this time that we were going to undertake an abbreviated Design Thinking workshop. 

This workshop was provided to get participants thinking creatively about an instructional experience, based on Stanford d.school's method. It was facilitated by Jonathan McMichael, UNC-Chapel Hill's Undergraduate Experience Librarian. The worksheet we used can be viewed and downloaded here. (Please note, we only did the first 7 steps to abbreviate the process to fit into the time we had available to us.) The Design Thinking Process works like this:

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons


·     McMichael introduced the idea of Design Thinking briefly and asked everyone to think of an instructional problem that they had. The original activity was for people to help come up with a gift for another person.

·     Next, he had three main themes. I believe that they were an in-class issue, a tutorial-related issue, or a technology-related issue. (I honestly cannot remember all of them exactly, but the main point is that this broke the 30+ attendees into 3 big groups.) From those groups, we paired off. I met with an instructional designer from a nearby private university. We introduced ourselves and it turned out we had a number of things in common. 
·     
      McMichael presented more information regarding what we would be doing. Each step would take about 4 minutes each, and we would have to make drawings of possible solutions.

·         The steps were to each do the following:
o    Interview: 4 minute interview to frame the problem we had
o    Dig Deeper: A second 4 minute interview where we were urged to dig deeper and get to the feelings of the person to empathize with them
o    Capture Findings: we independently thought for 3 minutes about the person’s needs and any insights we had about their problem
o    Define a problem statement (3 minutes): Write out a kind of thesis statement of what we were trying to solve. The worksheet follows a specific format.
o    Sketching: for 4 minutes, we drew as many pictures of ideas that we had to fix the person’s problem. Most people drew 3-5 solutions, but one person had 9 drawings.
o    Share: At this point, McMichaels told us to share our ideas, but to do a read on the person’s reactions. He told us not to be nice if we didn't like an idea and not to compliment the person’s drawing skills. Each person had 4 minutes.
o    Reflect & generate a new solution (3 minutes): We got to draw again. This time, we just noted a synthesis of ideas for their problem.

Something that I noticed about this particular workshop was that we did not have enough time to identify our “problem” at the beginning, so neither my partner nor I really had a great problem to work on. Additionally, I think that we should have shared what we thought the problem was before we started sketching because my problem statement had a number of assumptions in it that turned out to be false.

Afterward, McMichael led the entire group in a short reflection of the workshop. The discussion after the design thinking exercise yielded the following insights:
  • This process helps you see the problem in a more global context because you have to describe the issue to an outside party.
  • It is more organic and fluid because there are multiple solutions; you do not feel like considering any of them is an agreement to act.
  • Having to start from wider lens could change how you see what your problem is, because it takes you outside of the problem. 
  • One theme we discussed was showing unfinished work to others. This was liberating for some and some found it deeply uncomfortable. We often work with “completed work” as librarians, such as books and tutorials, and we do not want to show unfinished work to others. Some participants expressed that they wished they were more radical in their solutions.
  • If honesty hurts, you may be too attached to a certain idea.
  • When working on a problem, you can get stuck in one step of the process, and you may not move on. This quick format (4 minutes each step) ensures you don’t get stuck because it moves quickly. 
  • The best idea or advice could actually come from you but you have to be outside of yourself to get there.

I can definitely see myself doing this again when I have a specific issue to work on, in order to come up with some fresh solutions and ideas. I think it could even be done over Skype or Google Hangouts with a librarian at another institution (eliminating the two hours of driving). Many people might find the idea of drawing frustrating, but it was fun. I could also see this being a great idea for a staff development day. Another idea that I had for this particular exercise could be for helping students generate ideas for a paper topic in a composition or writing intensive course. 

Thursday, December 10, 2015

Ruminations on Continuing Education

Some people think that good ideas just pop into my head. I'm here to say that this is a fallacy: good ideas come to you with hard work, and there are ways for you to build your own ideas. My recommendation is continuing education. I have just finished my graduate certificate in Distance Learning and Administration through the university that I work for, East Carolina University. I was previously the Instructional Design Librarian and this was a related certificate that I could take in order to beef up my theoretical knowledge on the instructional concepts that I was applying already in my work on library tutorials. To make the deal even sweeter, my work pays for 2-3 free classes a year, so no student debt! I have enjoyed the classes for a number of reasons, including the fact that they required writing projects.

Wait, what?

You may be thinking that I have started drinking at my post, Dear Reader, or you may be thinking, "she is just one of those people who loves to write." True that may be, but an unintended positive outcome of taking classes has been that I have had to write annotated bibliographies and papers that have led to concrete, developed ideas for scholarly writing projects and presentations. By studying the concepts of distance education, instructional design, and assessment and then applying these concepts to my experience in libraries, I have had to think intentionally about my own practice of librarianship in a way that I am not sure if I would have made time for otherwise. Even writing discussion forum posts on certain topics have led to some Aha! moments. Having these guided writing projects have forced me to stretch myself, gain new knowledge, and do the research for potential future projects.

Photo Credit: Tsahi Levent-Levi


This is not the first time that I have taken advantage of workplace-sponsored education. I also learned how to speak Spanish when I worked at Sony Creative Software. At Sony, you had to pay out of pocket for classes and then you were paid back based on a percentage that corresponded to your grade. For instance, getting an A led to 100% payback, a B was 80%, and so on. But what should you do if your institution does not offer a free education? I have a suggestion for how to make this work in your favor without paying a dime.

Create an annual SMART goal for yourself that includes self-learning. I do this with the product Lynda.com, which is a tutorial video database to which the university subscribes. You can also do this with webinars or other free tutorial videos. Do some research before you get started and identify information that you want to learn about or skills you wish to hone. Do you want to learn to use Adobe Illustrator? Do you want to master assessment skills? Are you a new manager? There are many webinars, YouTube tutorials, MOOCs, and other learning opportunities out there. Plan out your own syllabus. Plan in time for yourself to write reflectively about each step of the process. If you are able to and your manager approves, do it on work time, because this is important work-related stuff.

Here is an example of my self-learning goal for 2016:



·         Using the product Lynda.com, complete 100% of the courses “Project Management Fundamentals” (2 hours, 7 minutes) and “Foundations of Graphic Design History” (2 hours, 16 minutes) by December 15, 2016. Continue to watch “Weekly Management Tips” video once per week by December 31, 2016. Report on progress in personal monthly report.

As it stands, my goal does not include reflection. As I am writing this post, I just had another Aha! moment: I think I should amend it to include a reflection piece. If your institution does not have Lynda.com, consider looking at your State Library or through your state's Library Association for free webinars. Many times, the webinars can be viewed after the fact, or the slides are archived. The North Carolina State Library has a listing of free webinars that you can view here.

Good luck, and keep learning!

Thursday, December 3, 2015

Transforming Research Consultations with YouCanBook.Me

I have been working at Joyner Library for over four years now, but about a year ago, I took on a new role. As a new manager, I wanted to look for something to improve upon as one of my first projects. The Research and Instructional Services team had a long-standing research consultation service that provided short one-on-one meetings with a librarian to help find library resources for student, faculty, and staff research projects. The process of setting up a consultation was quite cumbersome for both the librarian and the student. The process went something like this:

Graphic Credit: Katy Webb
This process could take up to four days, depending on how long it took to receive emails back and forth. The extended time between sending the initial form to us and scheduling an appointment meant that there were a lot of no-shows for the sessions. This seemed like a prime place to make an improvement in our processes. Our first attempt at making a change was to try to survey current users of the service. We sent out a survey to all people who had completed a research consultation in the last semester. We only received five responses, which was not enough data to draw any overarching conclusions. Members of the department considered ways to cut out unnecessary steps in the current consultation process. We felt that the main time waster was the process by which librarians email back and forth with students to find an acceptable time. Using our Joyner Library room reservation system as an example, the department felt that the student should have a time that they were supposed to come to meet with a librarian sooner in the process. At the same time that we were collecting survey responses, I happened upon an article in a well-known library trade journal, C&RL News. The author, Amanda Nichols Hess, wrote about how the Oakland University library liaisons were using a product called YouCanBook.Me to set up research consultations. I checked out this product and it seemed like a great fit, but we would have to come up with a lot of internal processes to make it work. At Joyner Library, the RIS librarians are not liaisons in the sense that we are not each considered to be a "subject expert" in a particular field. There is a separate Collection Development department that buys books. Additionally, unlike Oakland University, all of the research consultations come in via one channel and are "doled out" to people based on their other scholastic pursuits and personal interests. The author of the article was using the product to feed into her own Google Calendar, and the university was using enterprise Google products. YouCanBook.Me did seem like the answer to our problems, in that it took much of the work off of the student's shoulders and put it in the librarians' court. Consider again our past process above, and now look at our current process.

 When a student wishes to book a librarian, they will click a link from the “Ask a Librarian” page and be taken to http://joynerlibrary.youcanbook.me . A screenshot of the interface can be seen here.


Screenshot Credit: Katy Webb
Users of the consultation service are given a listing of open times to choose to receive a consultation. These hours correspond with the RIS desk hours, and include more evening hours than were previously possible. Hours begin at 8:00 AM and end at 9:00 PM on days that the library is open 24 hours. Saturday hours are not available, due to the fact that these hours are covered by graduate student employees. Sunday hours begin at 4:00 PM and end at 9:00 PM in order to the evening reference librarian time to prepare for consultations scheduled prior to the Sunday shift. The times are shown in 30 minute blocks. 24-hour advanced notice is required, meaning that students cannot sign up for a consultation on the form that same day. Consultations can be scheduled up to 16 weeks in advance. The appearance of the site is meant to mimic the colors and style of room reservation system. This was done with CSS that was provided by the department in charge of the website.

After choosing a time that works well for them, the student fills out a form. The form is almost exactly the same form as we were using in the past, but we carried it over to YouCanBook.Me. Consultations can be in-person or via telephone, Skype/Google Hangouts or Email.

Screenshot Credit: Katy Webb


The student receives a confirmation email and another email is sent to the person who books consultations for the RIS department. On the back end, YouCanBook.Me feeds a 30-minute meeting with the information from the form into a Google Calendar. This was ideal for Joyner's RIS department, since we already used Google Calendar to show our shared desk calendar. For work email, ECU uses Outlook. We created a new color for the Book a Librarian sessions and these now appear along with the desk schedule (in orange on the image below).

Screenshot Credit: Katy Webb

At times when no librarian is available to take consults, the time can easily be blocked off in the Google Calendar application and the YouCanBook.Me interface will not show those time slots. Students can easily reschedule the sessions by clicking a link in their confirmation email. They are told to show up at the reference desk at their scheduled time.

This new process takes minutes and gives students the instant gratification that they like. Once they are done booking, this is when we do the messy process of finding someone to cover the consultation. The process that we devised goes like this: The scheduling coordinator receives an email from the YouCanBook.Me system. She takes a look at our instruction matrix, which is a document that we use to assign instruction classes. She looks for an appropriate match and then goes into Outlook and schedules a 30-minute meeting with the librarian. She pastes the entirety of the information that the student provided into the meeting request. If the person will not be there for the time that the student scheduled, she can choose a different full time staff member to schedule. After sending the Outlook request, she changes the wording of the Google Calendar meeting from the word "Booked" to the word  "Scheduled" and includes the name of the librarian who has received the Outlook request. Once the librarian is done with the consultation, he or she changes the status to "Completed", or in the case of a no show, "No Show". This helps with statistics later in the month.

We made two other changes to the research consultation service at the same time as we went paperless and moved to YouCanBook.Me. We changed the name from Research Consultation to Book a Librarian. This seemed to make more sense to students, took on the word "book" from YouCanBook.Me and it was a little pun. The other change that we made was to conduct all of the research consultations in our workroom, which is located directly behind our reference desk. We reorganized the room, put a small conference table in there, and mounted a flat-screen all-in-one computer to the wall. YouCanBook.Me is basically an offshoot of our room reservation system, in that the student is actually booking our workroom for 30 minutes.

Although this library idea was not fully our own, the process we created for the back-end has made our consultation service much more accessible to students. We have fewer no-shows, and our consultation bookings have doubled. If you have questions about YouCanBook.Me or want to know more, please feel free to contact me.

Tuesday, December 1, 2015

The Human Library

If you have a moment, take a mosey on over to the Academic Library Marketing blog. This blog is so well-written, well-researched, and well-designed, it gives me serious "blog envy." While you're there, check out this invited post I wrote for the blog this summer about an event called the Human Library. The Human Library is a one-day event that allows patrons to come in to the library and check out another human being with an interesting story. Attendees are able to choose a “human book” from self-authored description cards that are set out on a table. Each human book has selected a title that reflects a common stereotype. Examples of human books at Joyner Library’s events were HIV, Overweight, Dyslexia, PTSD, Deaf, Rabbi, and more. After making their selection, the person is paired with their human book for a 15-30 minute conversation. This event has strong social justice implications, in that it may help address common stereotypes and allows for transparent conversations to occur in a safe space.Our library has had great success putting on the Human Library for the last two years. If you are thinking of putting on a Human Library and would like to see examples of my planning documents and feedback from attendees, please visit: http://media.lib.ecu.edu/DE/HumanLibrary.zip 

Enjoy the post, check out the rest of the Academic Library Marketing blog, and let me know if you have questions!
Photo Credit: ECU Student Affairs Graphic Design

Ideas for Makerspace Assessment

Do you have a makerspace in your library? The American Library Association describes makerspaces as:
Kids gather to make Lego robots; teens create digital music, movies, and games with computers and mixers; and students engineer new projects while adults create prototypes for small business products with laser cutters and 3D printers. Many libraries across the US have developed makerspaces—places to create, build, and craft—and they are experiencing increased visits and demand as a result. For public libraries, they are places to promote community engagement. For academic libraries, they are places where students and faculty feel welcome to do classwork and research (American Library Association, Makerspaces).
Many academic libraries are starting to purchase 3D printers and other techy and non-techy doo-dads and make them available to the public. But how do we assess the impact of these new spaces? What if the space that the makerspace is in is not monitored 24/7 by a librarian or student employee? Here are four ideas that I had to make assessment of an academic library's makerspace more fun.

 Lego Bar Chart


Photo Credit: Bruce Guenter, Flickr
Who did not love to play with Legos as a child? If you read the ALA's makerspace definition above, Legos are in the first sentence, making them a great addition to any makerspace. My idea with the Lego bar chart is to get feedback from makerspace users by having them contribute to an ever-growing Lego bar chart. The concept is simple: leave green, yellow, and red Legos in bowls on a table signifying three levels of feedback for the users. Behind the bowls, place a flat Lego "baseplate" with table-tent descriptions of what you want to know, but limit the questions to things that can be answered with Difficult, Moderately Difficult, or Easy or things you would ask on a 3-point Likert scale. Examples could be: How hard was it to use the 3D printer? How satisfied were you with the technology in the room? Legos can often be found at yard sales or thrift stores, so the cost for this idea needs not to be high. If you don't want to use Legos, find some 3D blocks on Thingiverse and print them with your library's 3D printer. You will need another method to follow up (think Post-Its or card catalog cards) in case the person wants to give additional feedback.



Postcards


Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Create postcards with check boxes asking your assessment questions on one side and a blank front on the other. Have users of the space design the front with a drawing of what they did in the makerspace while they were there. Leave markers, pens, charcoals, glitter pens, and other decorative stuff to allow them to make the front of the postcard pretty. Put a real mailbox in the makerspace where they have to "mail" the postcard to the librarian. The mailbox can be attached to a wall or put on a stand in the space. This will have a minimal cost associated with it; a cheap mailbox will run the library $15-35 (or look at the ReStore) and the postcards can be printed in-house for the cost of heavy paper. Paint the mailbox to make it fit in with the maker theme, but don't go too far, or the users of the space might miss the point.

Posters and Die-Cuts


Photo Credit: TRC Production Center
Joyner Library is home of the Ann Rhem Schwarzmann Production Center in the Teaching Resources Center. This space contains many of the things you would find in a makerspace, including a vinyl letter cutter, a poster printer, a 3D printer, and even a button maker. The space was designed for pre-service teachers, but is available for use for anyone at ECU. The space also has die-cuts, which you would recognize from the bulletin boards from your elementary school classroom. The third idea that I have for assessment is to use the die-cuts to make a number of shapes using patterned and colored paper, and allowing people to give feedback on poster boards. The poster boards will have a prompt on them and  You could also encourage the users of the space to make their own die-cut or decorate it before they give their feedback, if they wish. Leave glue sticks or tape so that the makers can attach the die cuts to the poster or bulletin boards. The cost of this idea would be minimal and would include the cost of scrapbook paper, glue, and poster board.

Social Media/Hashtag


Create a simple hashtag for your makerspace and ask people to use their smartphones to photograph what they made while they were using the makerspace. Encourage the people to show not only finished products, but works in progress. Compile these images and use them in future promotional materials. You will need to get permission to use the images in your promotional materials, so plan ahead and get the permission while the users are in your makerspace.


Note: I am not the person responsible for the Production Lab at Joyner Library. These ideas are untested, so if you end up using them in your makerspace, please let me know!

Welcome to the Library Ideas Blog!

Welcome to the Library Ideas Blog. This blog will provide some sound and creative ideas to try for public services librarians in academic libraries. Other libraries may find ideas that will be useful, but the main audience for these ideas will be adult learners.

Photo Credit: Vince Tomlinson (thanks, Dad!)
My name is Katy Kavanagh Webb, and I am the Head of Research and Instructional Services at Joyner Library, East Carolina University. I was formerly the Instructional Design Librarian at Joyner. I have in-depth knowledge of graphic design and how to create tutorials. I am a maker in the sense that I love a project and that I consider myself to be creative. I have lots of experience in events planning, having served as the Musical Director for the Madison Area Music Awards (MAMA) and the Events Planning Chair for WORT 89.9 FM in Madison, WI. For this reason, I think that I will be uniquely positioned to offer you ideas to try at your institution.

Some of the ideas I present will be tried and tested at our institution or others. Some may just be ideas that I have had that I want to share but have not had a place to do so. Yet others will be things I am thinking about right now and would like to try out. Enjoy reading and email me if you have any questions.