In order to contribute to our never-ending quest for a great user experience, I recently attended and presented at Designing for Digital, a conference specifically for those working on user experience issues in libraries. For me, this conference was not only an opportunity to present the work we’re doing at OhioLINK, but also a chance to learn from others engaged in similar efforts.
One of the best presentations I attended was from Dierdre Costello at EBSCO. Her presentation, “Search is the New Black: How Students Make Decisions on Search Results,” examined her team’s insights into how students do research. Related to designing search filters, she discussed the importance of students’ ability to both scale up and down their search. Student researchers want to hide items with filters but not completely remove them from the search set. So much of the OhioLINK user experience revolves around search results i.e., catalog results, EJC Results, etc. Considering research like Costello’s helps us in providing the best experience possible to our users.
My presentation “Facets on the Left: Reaching a Shared Unverstanding of the User Interface” discussed the OhioLINK’s Electronic Journal Center (EJC) and how the project team currently rebuilding the system developed a shared understanding of the user interface. OhioLINK began improvements to the EJC with the goal of rebuilding the underlying architecture and migrating to a relational database infrastructure. We spoke with users, librarians, consultants and the development team at OH-TECH Shared Infrastructure. As we progressed in the project, we realized that across all of these stakeholders, we did not have a shared understanding of our requirements for the user interface. After lots of planning and conversations, there was no single answer to the question “What does it look like?”
So we brought in LeanDog, an Ohio-based consulting company that facilitates team product development. The LeanDog coaches came in for a two-day session with the entire team. The team went through an immersive and hands-on workshop where the coaches introduced methods that drive out detail, encourage collaboration, help prioritize the work and most importantly reach a shared understanding of the project vision. Our project team learned about practices and principles from the Agile development methodology – such as story mapping – which helped us refine our user interface requirements.
Through this experience, we were able to apply these principles on our own. We completed story mapping exercises for the entire application, and the process resulted in a set of user interface requirements that represented the ideas of the group. Participation from team members at all levels – including project sponsors – ensured that this process was successful and helped streamline stakeholder communication through better collaboration.
The Designing for Digital conference was an incredibly valuable experience, especially as we help our academic libraries design the future of libraries on the web. The hands-on workshops and informative sessions offered the unique opportunity to collaborate with colleagues from across the country, in both tech and education communities, on user experience, discovery and design.
Be sure to look for the new and improved EJC later this summer!
