Posts tagged with User Research

U-M Library’s universal header is the light gray bar at the top of the library website and Library Search that aims to help people recognize that they’re on a U-M Library website, and links to our different sites and services through the “Explore” menu. In the fall of 2020, the Design System Team conducted remote usability testing that helped us to understand people’s experiences and identify opportunities for improvement.

U-M Library’s Library Search launched in 2018 as a unified search engine application containing five previously distinct interfaces: Catalog, Articles, Databases, Online Journals, and Library Websites. Library Search was a big change for users, and an increase in user support requests suggested that further exploration was needed to pinpoint user pain points. The authors began an exploratory study that helped understand users’ experiences and identified areas for continued work.

In three blog posts, the authors describe a multi-year library service design project. This last post describes the team’s prototyping and testing processes, and our resulting interactive exercise.

In three blog posts, the authors describe a multi-year library service design project. This second post describes the research process used to develop our user experience tool.

In three blog posts, the authors describe a multi-year library service design project. This first post describes the origins and goals of the assessment project.

How can we improve the familiarity and credibility between Library experts, resources and services we offer and the students, faculty and staff who use them? Whether we’re building new relationships or reconnecting with patrons/colleagues during assessment or user research activities, we have the opportunity to use certain marketing and communication best practices and tools during our user research to align clear and targeted communication with our key audiences.

When planning an assessment project in the Library, one important step is to consider whether your project should be vetted by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at U-M, a committee that ensures studies with human subjects are ethical, that subjects are protected from unnecessary psychological or physical risks, and that subjects are participating in a fully informed, voluntary manner. This post details when your data collection may be subject to a full IRB application and review process.

The first post ("Personas: A Classic User Experience Design Technique") in this 2-part series described what personas are and, generally, how to create them. I closed with some cautions about ways personas might come out less than helpful – creating flat, overloaded, or fake (unresearched) personas. The second post presents our persona development for a specific website project.

Personas are employed in user experience design work to help design teams create or improve systems, spaces, and services with targeted populations in mind. Libraries use personas as archetypes to maximize effective library user experiences. This is the first of two posts about the creation and use of personas in the U-M Library.

When developing or reconsidering a library service, sometimes you can get stuck in your head. You go back and forth with your colleagues proposing different ways of doing things. You model out different scenarios, do an environmental scan, read the literature, weigh pros and cons but you still can’t decide how to proceed. A great way to figure out how to move forward is to go to your users for feedback by employing intercept interviews.