10 Ways to Use UX to Enhance Your Library Presence

Workshop Guidelines We’ve scheduled a break so you can check your mobile phones during that time Ask questions whenever you’d like-this workshop is for you Be prepared-we’ll be asking for volunteers When asking questions, please share your name and organization name and size

Meggan Houlihan First-Year Experience & Instruction Librarian NYUAD Library Beth Russell Head, Center for Digital Scholarship, Nadaleen Tempelman-Kluit Head, User Experience NYU Bobst Library

Overview of Day 9:30: Arrive & find a seat 9:40: UX Overview & Strategy Phase Methods 9:50: Exercise I 10:20: Execution Phase Methods 10:30: Exercise II 11:00: Break 11:10: Exercise III 11;40 Assessment Phase Methods 11:50: Wrap-Up Overview of Day

What is User Experience (UX)? The first requirement for an exemplary user experience is to meet the exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother. Next comes simplicity and elegance that produce products that are a joy to own and to use. User experience extends to all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products. Many people confuse user experience with the user interface. User interfaces are important parts of the design, but they are not the only part of user experience. Think of a tool like netflix. The user interface is important, but so is the content, the subscription packages, etc. This quick video gives a nice synopsis of user experience. One of the confusions with user experience is what method should be used? Just like many people equate user interface design with user experience, so to do they equate usability testing with user experience. Usability testing is only one of many usability methods. Often, user experience practitioners think about the phase of the project they are in, and the type of research they’re looking for, and then determine a UX method to use. That’s how the workshop will be focused today.

Credit: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/which-ux-research-methods/ This graph outlines methods to use depending on what stage of the process you’re in. It also outlines whether qualitative or quantitative research is the most effective to get the results you’re looking for. For example, if you want to know how many people have used your new service, you can look at analytics, which is on this spectrum. However, if you want to know why and how they’ve used the service, you’re looking to get more qualitative results, or methods on this spectrum. Today we’ll be focusing largely on qualitative feedback. Studies that are qualitative in nature generate data about behaviors or attitudes based on observing them directly, whereas in quantitative studies, the data about the behavior or attitudes in question are gathered indirectly, through a measurement or an instrument such as a survey or an analytics tool. Qualitative methods are much better suited for answering questions about why or how to fix a problem, whereas quantitative methods do a much better job answering how many and how much types of questions. Having such numbers helps prioritize resources, for example to focus on issues with the biggest impact.

Strategy Phase Goal Inspire, explore and choose new directions & opportunities Approach Qualitative & Quantitative Typical UX Methods Field studies, diary studies, surveys, data mining, or analytics How I’m framing today’s workshop is also by stages of the process. So in the strategy phase, you typically consider new ideas and opportunities for the future. Research methods for this phase include: Diary studies are when you ask students to write about their experiences in a diary format, regularly. Over a period of time, you’ll get patterns of behavior and learn pain points. It also serves as a gap analysis. By doing diary studies you may see where users are falling short in some areas, and it may lead to a new service. Surveys measure and categorize attitudes or collect self-reported data that can help track or discover important issues to address. Data mining and analytics are approaches used to gather quantitative data and use it to learn how a current system service or interface is being used. I won’t go into these methods today as we don’t have the time, but for most UX work, it’s good to couple qualitative with quantitative, or validate qualitative research with quantitative results. Field studies. Beth will be doing an exercise with you next on field studies, but basically what these are are less formal ways and less manufactured ways of observing user behavior than usability testing. Field studies should emphasize the observation of real user behavior. Simple field studies are fast and easy to conduct, and do not require a posse of anthropologists: All members of a design team should go on customer visits. Our field test today will be done as a more formal test than normal. Usually participants are observed in their natural setting so it’s going to be very much manufactured today.

Exercise I: Field Studies Lead Beth Russell Time 30 minutes Field studies get the team immersed in the environment of their users and allow them to observe critical details for which there is no other way of discovering. Field studies should emphasize the observation of real user behavior. Simple field studies are fast and easy to conduct, and do not require a posse of anthropologists: All members of a design team should go on customer visits.

Execution Phase Goal Inform and optimize designs in order to reduce risk and improve usability Approach Qualitative & Quantitative Typical Methods Card sorting, field studies, participatory design prototype, usability studies The execution phase is a transition phase from strategy to design direction. Research in this phase is mainly formative and helps you reduce the risk of execution. Methods in this phase include: Card sorts: In this method, a person tests a group of subject experts or users to generate a categorization. It is a useful approach for designing information architecture, workflows, menu structure, or web site navigation paths. These are really ways to test users mental models of an information space, and can help determine the best information architecture for your product, application, or website Field studies have been covered and we’ll be doing an exercise on usability testing today too, so will discuss them in more detail as part of the exercise. Participatory design protoyping is facilitated by someone who is walking users familiar with an interface through the process. Usually the facilitator has a paper prototype that they discuss with the participants, and then the participants, either in groups or individually, iterate on the prototype. For an upcoming exercise we’ll be prototyping based on a test we’ll be doing.

Another effective method that can be utilized at either the Strategy or execution phase is persona creation. Personas are fictitious yet realistic representations of your target users. They act as a multipurpose tool used to drive many important product development tasks such as: the creation of user scenarios, feature generation, and feature prioritization. Created out of complex user data, personas take on a format that is meaningful and creates user empathy among your development team, ensuring your users are always the focus of your efforts. In this next exercise Meggan will be walking us through creating a proto persona. Proto personas are used when there is no money or time to create true research—based personas – they are based on secondary research and the team’s educated guess of who they should be designing for.

Exercise II: Proto-Personas Lead Meggan Houlihan Time 30 minutes

Journey Maps Many UX practitioners create personas but then don’t necessarily know how to utilize them. This is an image of a simple journey map, and it helps describe how personas can be utilized. A journey map is a visual or graphic interpretation of the overall story from an individual’s perspective of their relationship with an organization, service, product or brand, over time and across channels

Usability Testing Usability studies are another Evaluation phase tool. I’ve noticed many people doing usability tests on a finished product, which is actually what we’ll be doing today in the exercise. It’s preferable to test a product conception, using wireframes and mockups, rather than testing a finished product. It’s rare to test a finished product and have developers and product owners then go back and re-make a design or service. As I said earlier, they are the most used UX method. Usability testing is used evaluate a product or service by testing it with representative users. Participants are asked to complete typical tasks while observers watch, listen and takes notes. The goal is to identify any usability problems, collect qualitative and quantitative data and determine the participant's satisfaction with the product. Unlike field studies, usability tests tend to have prescribed questions, and are in a non natural setting.

Exercise III: Usability Testing Leads: -Beth Russell -Nadaleen Tempelman-Kluit Time: 30 minutes

Assessment Phase Goal Measure product performance against itself or its competition Approach: Quantitative Typical UX Methods Usability benchmarking, online assessments, surveys, A/B testing We’re not going to focus on the assessment phase today, but I’ll give brief overviews of these methods. Unlike the previous methods we’ve discussed, these methods move from behavioral to attitudinal. A/B testing presents changes to a site's design to random samples of site visitors, but attempts to hold all else constant, in order to see the effect of different site-design choices on behavior Usability Benchmarking measures user performance. Unlike most usability methods, benchmark studies more closely resemble true experimental psychology lab studies, with greater attention to detail on methodology, study protocol and data analysis. Since the claims you want to be able to make about the data will be stronger, the methodology and approach you use should be stronger as well. In a benchmark study, you would never ask participants in the study to use what’s called verbal protocol during the study. Verbal protocol is a way to try and understand what users are thinking while they are performing tasks. Verbal protocol has negative impacts on many measurable user performance metrics, such as time to complete tasks. People process information slower if they are asked to perform verbal protocol at the same time, and therefore it negates the intentions of a true benchmark study. These studies measure Success/Failure within a time threshold Time on task # of errors before completion

You’re Almost Finished! Let’s Wrap Up What are the three most valuable or practical things you’ve learned in this workshop Share them with the group.

Thank You Read UX stories on the NYU UX Department blog: https://wp.nyu.edu/libux/ Follow Us: UX department: @LibUXprose Nadaleen: @nadaleen