LITA User Experience Interest Group

Call for Participation: LITA UX IG Meeting at ALA MW 2015

The LITA User Experience IG seeks 2-3 short presentations (10-15 minutes) on UX and Web usability for the upcoming 2015 ALA Midwinter Conference. This will be a physical meeting, and so the physical attendance for the ALA Midwinter is required for the presentation and/or attendance for this meeting. 

The LITA UX IG is also seeking the suggestions for discussion topics, things you have been working on, plan to work, or want to work on in terms of UX/Usability. All suggestions and presentation topics are welcome and will be given consideration for presentation and discussion. 

Please submit your topic below in the comments section of this CFP post in ALA Connect (http://connect.ala.org/communities/community-home/digestviewer/viewthread?MessageKey=512e8470-e998-4765-ade6-c030e3e7485e). You may also e-mail us off-the-list.

Please add your thoughts and ideas in the comments!

Meeting Details

Title: LITA User Experience IG Meeting
Date & Time: Sunday, February 1, 2015 - 10:30am to 11:30am
Location: McCormick Place West W176b

Thanks!

Bohyun Kim, LITA UX IG chair bkim@hshsl.umaryland.edu
Rachel Clark, LITA UX IG vice-chair rachael.clark@wayne.edu

I lead our Library Usability Group and our Student Working Group through a Service Design approach to better understand how our services are delivered. We used service design to get a better and more holistic understanding of service delivery within the context of the Reed College Library.  The key to our project was to look at our library as a whole, with the student at the center. By taking a more systems approach to a user's experience, we were (and are) able to get a better grasp of actual experience. It has also provided us with some insight into what student expectations are of service and the physical library.

Year one was focused on learning how the students use the space and the resources. Year two will see us looking at specific spaces on our main floor as well as where to move one of our public service touchpoints.

Connecting library instruction to web usability: Improve user experience

I, as a digital user experience librarian, conducted an experiment with one of the instructional librarians at my institution in order to investigate the intersection between user's web behavior and library instruction. We thought that library instruction plays a key role in web usability and affects the ways students behave on the library website, yet very little research has combined these two realms.

During instructional sessions, freshman students were asked to perform a series of information seeking tasks on the library website both prior to, and immediately after, instruction. A usability tool - Verify - recorded individual student use of the website during the completion of each of these tasks. We'd like to share the results we found. The results allowed us to investigate how students behaved on the library website to complete the tasks and how the steps demonstrated by the librarian during instruction strongly influenced how students completed the tasks afterward.

Could you add your email so that we can get in touch with you later?
Thanks!

Email is not dead -- in fact, your library's emails are delivered to your patrons' inboxes more than 90% of the time while Facebook continues to diminish how many of your followers even see your content. The trick then is to get your patrons to open your emails and then interact with the content in a way to drive value for your library. 

At Darien Library, we are using A/B testing to discover how to design email newsletters that get opened and acted upon. Our most recent test of changing a subject line generated 10% additional opens. Then by adding a digital service to an email, we increased usage of the service by 151%. 

In this short session, Amanda will go over some of the metrics you can test for in your email campaigns. She will be focusing on MailChimp, but other email campaigns also offer insights on how your users interact with your library's emails. 

My email address is: yooylee@iupui.edu

Thank you!

I'm a Systems Librarian at Harvard University, and I and my colleagues Odile Harter (Research Librarian) and Lisa Junghahn (Law Librarian) developed a simple, low-frills protocol for a pop-up user study called the Research Confession Booth. Participants were recruited from amongst passersby to complete a ten-minute task at a laptop, while Quicktime captured their screen, mouseclicks, and voice narration.

Tasks have included "Show us a favorite feature of a resource you use to do research" and "Walk us through a snag you recently encountered while trying to find information for your coursework." With very little overhead, we've been able to capture a rich trove of information about how our users understand and navigate our systems, and how they actually do their research. We'd like to share the basics of our protocol (including tips on making it IRB-friendly) as well as some highlights from the data we've collected thus far.

Hi, I am a research scientist at the Trace Center, University of Wisconsin - Madison and would like to present on the Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure. Here's our blurb --

"Accessibility and usability are highly intertwined. A website that is designed to be highly usable has a high chance of being accessible as well. However, some patrons with disabilities need access to additional features or assistive technologies (AT). Managing usability and accessibility together is the most effective and efficient approach. 

In this session, we will present the Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure (GPII; www.gpii.net ). The GPII’s cloud architecture allows any patron to use built-in operating system features for enhanced usability, and AT as needed, without significant staff assistance or expense, while preserving library network security. Using the GPII, patrons can explore various accommodations, and carry their needs and preferences across multiple information and communication technologies. 

We will demo the Library-GPII-System (LGS), a library-focused implementation of the GPII that will be piloted in public and university libraries beginning in March 2015. The LGS aims to provide library access to patrons without disabilities, without posing any security or disruption risks to  libraries' information technology networks. The LGS is being developed by Raising the Floor Consortium members (www.raisingthefloor.org) as part of a US Department of Education grant."