Technology to Enhance User Experience in Libraries*

 

This face-to-face  workshop focuses on defining user experience and seeing what other libraries are doing to improve their services. We will talk about low-cost and simple, yet impactful, activities to turn your library into a user-centered environment. User experience is a method of assessing libraries that is not common in health sciences libraries. The term user assessment comes out of website design (as usability). However, other industries have found it useful to assess how users experience their services and spaces, and the idea and use of user experience research has grown over time. There are several ways of defining "user experience" to various physical and virtual spaces and services that a library may want to evaluate. For libraries, this can mean analyzing how users interact with your website to improve your virtual presence, observing users to improve your physical space, or interviewing how users research to improve services and instruction. 

 

Agenda

8:00: Welcome, introduction, icebreaker

8:30: Intro to library user experience (Lecture)
Types of user experience, why do it, intro to ethnographic research, information seeking research; how it can influence library services

9:30: Demonstration of basic usability setup, software examples, sample videos

10:00: Break

10:15: Hands-on group time with different user experience methods: interviews, usability testing, observation, card sorting, graffiti walls, love/break up letters, surveys

10:45: Groups share their user experience methods with everyone

11:30: A brief introduction to data coding/analysis (lecture)

11:45: Wrap Up/ Discussion/Questions

 

MLA CE Credits: 4