UX has been out and about

Our User Experience team has been busy lately. Jacob Shelby, Andreas Orphanides, and Ashley Evans Bandy presented in early March, at Code4Lib 2020. In their session, “A Journey, Not a Destination: Towards a More User-Centered Library Discovery Experience,” the trio talked about the disconnect between a resource-focused website (like that of most libraries) and topic/need-focused users (like students). They presented an ongoing web discover project that is designed to create a more seamless discovery experience across the library’s web platforms. Meredith Wynn also presented at Code4Lib, with a poster entitled “Drupal 7 to Drupal 8: What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been.” The poster was designed to help teams decide when and if to migrate to D8 by showing what the Libraries did for our migrations and how we prepared our various stakeholders for it.

Josh Boyer was in Austin in early March for the Designing for Digital 2020 conference, and co-presented on “Personal README Files: User Manuals for Library Staff.” With librarians from Michigan and Virginia, Boyer talked about how READMEs can improve team communications. Robin Davis also presented in Austin, on “Participatory Paper Prototyping: Revealing User Needs and Priorities.” Davis shared how we invited users to build paper prototypes as part of a user research strategy, and how that revealed user goals and priorities that user interviews hadn’t teased out.

Davis also recently published an article about a project at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where she worked before coming to Raleigh. “Introducing first-year and transfer students to a college library with a historical mystery from the special collections” appeared in the journal College & Undergraduate Libraries 26:4. Using a real 1921 crime, the library developed a mystery game to orient new students to the library’s resources.