Edutopia. Libraries have existed since approximately 2600 BCE as an archive of recorded knowledge. From tablets and scrolls to bound books, they have cataloged resources and served as a locus of knowledge. Today, with the digitization of content and the ubiquity of the internet, information is no longer confined to printed materials accessible only in a single, physical location. Consider this: Project Gutenberg and its affiliates make over 100,000 public domain works available digitally, and Google has scanned over 30 million books through its library project. Libraries are reinventing themselves as content becomes more accessible online and their role becomes less about housing tomes and more about connecting learners and constructing knowledge. From Library to Learning Commons Printed books still play a critical role in supporting learners, but digital technologies offer additional pathways to learning and content acquisition.
Photo credit: Francis W. Transparent Learning Hubs. Would More People Use the Public Library If It Had a Water Slide? In 2010, Poland's National Library performed a survey to determine the reading habits of the Polish citizenry. The results were not buoying: 56 percent of Poles had not read a book in the past year, either in hard or electronic form. Just as bad was that 46 percent had not attempted to digest anything longer than three pages in the previous month – and this included students and university graduates. But who's to blame here: The willfully non-literate masses for not trekking to the public library?
Or is it the library's fault for not attracting these individuals, what with its classically stodgy, hermetic-cage-for-learning design? At least one Polish architect believes libraries should bear some of the blame for a lack of reading. Hugon Kowalski, who runs UGO Architecture and Design, thinks that no matter how grand or inspiring a library's appearance is, many people will not flock to it unless it offers amenities other than plopping down with a book. Service Safari. For over a decade Livework has developed tools based on research, practice and trials. In combination with advanced thinking and continuous research we produce surprising customer insights, together with breakthrough business and market assessments. The tools enable us to design and create effective services for customers that organisations can deliver. No results found for the filters you applied Sketching Sketching is a quick and effective way to capture ideas.
Better than a note on a post-it,… Read more Customer Profiles Customer profiles are pen portraits of individuals that help guide service design. Read more Shadowing Shadowing is a structured observation of a customer’s experience of a service or product. Read more Customer Interviews Customer interviews are in-depth conversations with customers to gain insight into their lives and experiences. Read more Service Safari A service safari is an experiential field trip for teams to understand how services feel from the… Read more Read more. Learn by Asking | The User Experience. The idea of user-centered libraries isn’t new.
Consider this quote: Some [libraries] have tried smoking rooms, had boy’s club rooms and games, and many have tried simply to make the rooms homelike and cheery, and all of their experience is valuable to us. With the mention of games in libraries, you might think it is from within the past five years. But it’s not—it’s from 1908 (okay, maybe the smoking bit gave it away). The latest discussions about user-centered libraries have been based around the Read/Write web. Empathy and preferences As I discussed in the January 2010 LJ (p. 28), if we want to make deep connections with our communities, we must figure out how people feel. Let’s say that half of your library’s renewals are made by telephone. How can we recognize patrons as people and learn about their motivations? User interviews User interviews are essentially an open conversation guided by an interviewer. Identify a problem.
ABC Nightline - IDEO Shopping Cart. Beth Davies - Library Innovation and the Community. Breaking Web Design Conventions = Breaking the User Experience. The Results Are In and They Aren’t Good | Library Marketing. This is the first in a series of articles in which Nancy Dowd will examine the results of an exclusive survey of library professionals from more than 400 public libraries across the U.S. on public library marketing. The survey was sponsored by the NoveList division of EBSCO Publishing. This marketing survey’s purpose was to gain information about how public libraries market themselves, the effectiveness of marketing initiatives undertaken by the library, and the resulting engagement within their communities. The results clearly indicate there’s a disconnect; a canyon between what should be happening and what is happening within the marketing schemas of public libraries. In an era when the value of libraries are under scrutiny and library budgets are under siege it is essential that libraries communicate their value to users as well as non-users.
The majority of the 471 individuals who responded were public library directors and managers. Typekit Practice. Low-Cost, No-Cost UX | The User Experience. When budgets are tight, it is easy to feel frustrated and disempowered. After all, having access to a deep pool of funds makes it easy to get things done. But when times are tough, it doesn’t mean librarians should toss their hands in the air and give up on making user experience (UX) improvements. Here are a few things you can do to improve your library’s UX that won’t require finding much of a budget. Wrangling signage If your library is like most, you have a lot of signs. A good first step toward achieving this ideal state is to take stock of your current situation. UX benefit: A friendlier, more cohesive signage system that creates a calmer environment.
Rethink service points When a patron is trying to accomplish a task, being bounced around to multiple people—whether on the phone or in a building—is never fun. Short of this, you can improve the service model at your library by enabling more people to accomplish more things at any given desk. Be visionary It’s made of people. Service Safari. Methods.
Project Management (4) A project plan takes into account the approach the team will take and helps the team and stakeholders document decisions made regarding the objective, scope, schedule, resources, and... Creating an interdisciplinary team with the right mix of skills is vital to the smooth and successful execution of any project. Team members may be able to cover multiple roles or there may... Use your kick-off meeting to discuss the business case related to the site, the vision and mission based on user and organizational goals, and the vision for the site moving forward. Website requirements are a list of necessary functions, capabilities, or characteristics related to your website and the plans for creating it. There are several types of requirements that... User Research (14) When reporting results from a usability test, you should focus primarily on your findings and recommendations that are differentiated by levels of severity.
Usability Evaluation (14) Untitled. Untitled. Personas. The purpose of personas is to create reliable and realistic representations of your key audience segments for reference. These representations should be based on qualitative and some quantitative user research and web analytics. Remember, your personas are only as good as the research behind them. Effective personas: Represent a major user group for your website Express and focus on the major needs and expectations of the most important user groups Give a clear picture of the user's expectations and how they're likely to use the site Aid in uncovering universal features and functionality Describe real people with backgrounds, goals, and values Benefits of Personas Personas help to focus decisions surrounding site components by adding a layer of real-world consideration to the conversation.
They also offer a quick and inexpensive way to test and prioritize those features throughout the development process. Best Practices for Developing Personas Questions to Ask During Persona Development. Untitled. VuFind | Library Open-Source Software Registry. Jump to navigation Open Source Software inLibraries You are here Home › VuFind looking for something specific? Subscribe to an RSS feed for updates on this package » Last updated March 18, 2015.
VuFind is a library resource portal designed and developed for libraries by libraries. The goal of VuFind is to enable your users to search and browse through all of your library's resources by replacing the traditional OPAC to include: Catalog RecordsLocally Cached JournalsDigital Library ItemsInstitutional RepositoryInstitutional BibliographyOther Library Collections and Resources VuFind is completely modular so you can implement just the basic system, or all of the components. Package Links Releases for VuFind more Main menu Powered by Drupal This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Open-Source Software for Libraries - The Creative Librarian. Experience maps, user journeys and more… | UX Lady. Experience Map is an important design tool to understand our product/service interactions from users’ point of view.
One experience map is basically a visual representation that illustrate users’ flow (within a product or service) their needs, wants, expectations and the overall experience for a particular goal. Besides Experience Maps, different names are used to refer to similar representations, some of them are: Customer Journey, User Journey and some time Blueprint or Service Ecology, although there are some nuances in the latter two, I prefer to include them in the group of the multidimensional maps. If you search the internet you will see that there are many different examples of experience map, with some common elements between them. After reviewing many of them, investigate the existing methodology and design one for the company I work for, I have reached the conclusion that there are some design patterns, more or less clear, here I will share with you some insights about them.
From Content Audit to Design Insight. Throughout my career, I’ve generally understood the value of doing (or having) a content audit as an input into a website redesign. A content audit is an assessment of a website’s content from both a quantitative perspective (i.e., “How much content is there?”) And a qualitative one (i.e., “Is the content any good?”). But what’s not often discussed or understood about content audits are the significant benefits they yield beyond the basic assessment of content quantity and quality. On a recent project I worked on, the content audit was crucial to facilitating strategic conversations about design direction.
These conversations would have been much more difficult without having completed the content audit. We used the audit in several ways, each instrumental in guiding the effort: I’ll use this project as a framework to highlight how to effectively approach and use content audits in the context of a website redesign project. The Project The problems were clear: The Process The Results.
GEL (Global Experience Language) Just My Type. 05.larson-picard.pdf. E-WRITE | Writing for online readers. Methods. The Color Scheme Designer. AARP-50Sites.pdf. Home | Usability.gov. Center For Plain Language | Make it clear.