userslib.com

Inspired by a Smashing Magazine article - 20 (Alternate) Ways to Focus on Users - I thought I’d put together a list of alternative ways to focus on Library Users…

1. Interact with the patrons (outside of a usability setting): reference, email, suggestion box, etc. If reference isn’t part of your regular job duties, volunteer for a shift of your own (or just sit in on one now and then). If you’re lucky, you’ll have interactions dealing directly with the resources you are have a say in changing. But at the very least, you’ll get to experience the patrons on a human level - what brought them to the reference desk, what types of assignments they have, what language do they use to describe their needs, what they’re generally distracted by or have difficulty with…
2. Talk to the people who interact with the patrons: (reference & instruction librarians). Not only do these people interact with the patrons everyday, they’re the ones who have to develop lessons and explain all those difficult to use resources over and over again. I guarantee they all have something to say about the difficulties of using the various library websites, opacs, and other resources!
3. Log Analysis: what are they searching for on the library website and not finding? Are they searching for “Psychinfo” and not finding it because it’s actually “Psycinfo”?
4. Be where they are (online): search the web & blogs for mentions of your library. Are students taking lots of photos of your libraries or making videos in your library and putting them online? Are they posting to their blogs about the library or about research, and what are they saying? Join Facebook groups. For example there are facebook groups for UM incoming 1st years, individual schools and departments have groups, etc. You can find out a lot about what are they worried about, what technology they’re using, how much beer they’re drinking, etc.
5. Be where they are (in the library): go sit at a computer in the computer lab or group study areas in the library and eavesdrop. Just be stealth about!
6. Ask them (Guerilla Tests): if you have a simple question you’d like answered this is ideal. It could be as easy as “We have a service called _________ what do you think that means?” Or, print out the home page of your library website and ask them “where would you click if you wanted to find ____________?”
7. Ask them (Surveys): surveys are a great way to get lots of quantitative and qualitative information. My 2 favorite survey questions are open-ended “What do you like most about the library” and “What do you like least about the library” - you’ll be surprised how they have to say for both.
8. Ask them (student advisory groups): lots of libraries already have student advisory groups in place and chances are they’d be willing to let you use that group to conduct a focus group or do formal or informal user testing.

As a result of this post, Eric Frierson, Donna Hayward and I bought a poll question on facebook to find out how facebook users prefer to contact their librarians.

Here’s how the poll question appeared in the News Feed of selected Facebook users in the Michigan network:

See the results below

The first thing that stands out is that only 1 out of 200 said they’d prefer to get research help from a librarian on facebook. I don’t suppose this is too surprising because I don’t think people quite yet consider social networking a research tool. I hope this isn’t disconcerting to librarians on facebook because I think there’s still potential here… What I do find really encouraging is that only 38 out of 200 said they weren’t at all interested in contacting a librarian - that’s pretty good! And it looks like in-person interactions are still tops. On a side note, I think it’s really unfortunate that the oldest age range option for the survey is 35-49. So there’s no one over 49 on facebook!?

There’s a recent trend at our library: non-public service librarians volunteering to do reference. I think this is great! Since my “Interface & User Testing Specialist” position is a primarily HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) based job and doesn’t include any reference duties, I started volunteering a couple of semesters ago. Because it’s part of my job to understand library users - what better way to do that than to spend a couple hours a week helping patrons navigate the tons of resources available to them. Its one thing to look at an online resource and declare “this is so not intuitive!” and another thing to have to repeatedly try to explain to patrons the 20 steps required to find what they want. I feel very lucky to be in a position where I have the opportunity to interact directly with our users outside of an official usability context.

So back to the title of this post. Periodically the idea that librarians are going to become obsolete reemerges. Right, everything is going to be online and fully searchable. But there’s going to be exponentially more information every year. And much of this information will remain proprietary and subscription based. Of course I’m a big proponent of having easy to use interfaces, but interfaces are only useful if they themselves can be found. This is where librarians come in. They are the sifters, funnels, aggregators, and above all mediators between the people and the technology.