Tag: usability testing

Why don’t libraries share the results of UX work?

While conferencing at ELAG 2016, Simon made this suggestion for improving collaboration among libraries doing user experience (UX) work on their systems:

I’ve been thinking on-and-off about the question implied in Simon’s second tweet – the reasons libraries do not generally share results of user experience testing of their systems. Below I discuss some of these, which are drawn from examples from people with first-hand knowledge from academic libraries.

“Not all libraries…”

I know many libraries do share their results and analyses, whether more formally in articles, books or book chapters and conference presentations, or more informally in blog posts, conversations, and social media. I am extremely grateful for any and all sharing of this type.

What about libraries that are doing such work but not reporting it? When I know about such work, though it requires extra effort I have had good success asking colleagues about their findings. People are usually generous with sharing – sometimes surprised in the interest, but delighted to be asked about their work. In my experience the trick to doing this effectively is:

  • Knowing that others have been doing something in the first place, for which an active stance towards professional networking helps enormously.
  • Finding the best way to engage colleagues on their terms, and making it easy for them to help you. If you’re nearby offer to visit, or set up a video chat; ask for an hour of conversation rather than anything in writing or a presentation. Manage the time and conversation effectively: focus on what you are asking about; be explicit about asking for honest opinions; always ask about lessons learned.

Why we don’t share

Time and money

By this I primarily mean a lack of time and money to refine the work into something publishable by traditional routes, such as a peer-reviewed journal or presenting results at conferences. I think this is a huge barrier, and I have no simple answers. There is an huge qualitative difference between libraries that invest time and money in this way and those that do not, which is only really apparent with experience.

There are alternative routes. For me the actuality of dissemination and sharing always trumps the esteem in which a particular route of communication is held. Some of the most effective project communications I have seen are blog posts that summarize progress and demonstrate the momentum and trajectory of the work simply with clear and engaging text. This is the kind of work I or a team member would expect to do as part of internal project communication, so text can be reused with reworking for an outside audience.

For events, workarounds such as unconferences and similar events are a lower-cost approach, but these aren’t without issues. Events with no registration fee still favour those privileged in various ways. Even if one can attend unconferences these don’t always attract an audience with enough specialist knowledge, or are not promoted in a way that will attract such an audience. This may sound contrary to the Open Space Technology principle that “Whoever comes [are] the right people” (Owen, 2008), but in practice OST principles depend on a lot of work behind the scenes and careful management on the day to be effective.

Culture

By this I mean the overall stance of the library towards engagement with their sector and understanding of the value of sharing, as a cultural factor. Having a budget for conference attendance and other development activity is not enough if your workplace does not value this type of professional engagement in and of itself, or does not have confidence in staff ability or value the work. In practice this may manifest more subtly in general discouragement and ‘lack of permission’ from managers in the organization, or not sending staff operationally involved in project work to events to speak and network with peers.

Competitive edge

I have heard an argument that we should not give away findings that could help competitors elsewhere in our sector, sometimes scaffolded by belief that as contemporary universities exist in a competitive market they should behave more like private companies. I disagree with the ideological foundation of this argument, but it is logical in acknowledging the reality of a market that has been deliberately created and fostered by government. At Library Camp in 2012, Liz Jolly and I argued that:

Universities have a culture of sharing both internally and externally, and also between those working in the same disciplines across institutions. Furthermore, both within and without higher education, librarianship is a particularly collaborative profession.

(Preater, 2012)

We could remove some of the ideological focus, and simply ask if the investment of time and effort to communicate our work might be less worthwhile than the other things we could spend it on. Above I argue that communication strategies in projects or otherwise should provide you with reusable material, but looking at this strategically I think skipping communication is ultimately detrimental to your library.

To be sure, there are benefits to individual staff in building their professional profile and to the library in being seen as a place ‘where things happen’ and viewed as forward-thinking, including in recruiting and retaining staff. Additionally though, I see an advantage in shaping the speed and direction of thinking as a form of technological leadership in the sector, creating the ‘discursive formation’ (in the sense Foucault describes, for example in part II of The archaeology of knowledge, 1972) of user experience rather than waiting for others to do so.

In communicating our work and engaging our community in discourse we define the content of the discursive formation, of the body of knowledge, in what is still a relatively new and not yet fully-established area. Communication has power in and of itself in bringing in to existence this body of knowledge, and while the practice of user experience is contested, early movers are able to establish how the ‘truth’ of this practice is created and sustained, in our particular context.

For me this idea explains some of the meaning behind practitioners such as Andy Priestner stating, two years ago, that “UX in libraries is a thing now” (2014, emphasis mine), and from experience I would gauge this kind of engagement as putting you between two to three years ahead of libraries that are not doing so.

External validity or being ‘too special’

In this I include disbelief in the external validity of the work, or belief in the necessity of such validity as a precursor to sharing. ‘External validity’ means the extent to which the findings from particular research can be generalized beyond the specific context of the work. I first heard this argument when I was a participant in a library usability study, and naively asked the librarians how they were going to share their results – turns out they weren’t. Some libraries are indeed unusual in themselves, or attract an unusual user base, or both, but there is also a cultural aspect to this problem. Without deliberately maintaining wider awareness, we can lose perspective and end up believing it ourselves: thinking our service is ‘very complex’ or our situation ‘highly unusual’ when it is not particularly so.

My counter-argument is the commonalities between library services and membership mean ideas and concepts are often very transferable. Include some caveats or ‘health warnings’ on your results by all means, but let us weigh things up. Let us include you in our ongoing analysis. This is one reason I value making the theoretical underpinning of the approaches we use in our work explicit when describing what we are doing.

Fear of criticism, lack of confidence in the work

In this reason I include anything in the general space of a wish not to have one’s work critiqued, research methods problematized, or particular choices judged by others in the community. Perfectionism on our part can also play into and amplify this. All engagement in professional discourse includes some measure of risk-taking as there is implicit openness to criticism: speaking at a conference or using a platform or network where replying is easy invites replies. Criticism is tempting as it can be relatively easy for a clever person to say something high-impact. You could do as Ian suggests and start a blog and turn off the comments, but people can (and do) comment on your work elsewhere…

I experienced this recently (with my manager and her manager in the room) when a recording of a user from a piece of UX research was shown that could be interpreted as strongly critical of my project team’s work. This was extremely difficult to accept at the time, but on considered reflection seeing an interpreted piece of feedback was valuable, as it spurred ongoing development and provoked questioning of design choices that had seemed well-founded based on our research.

My recommendation is to trust your judgement if you are on top of your professional development, spend adequate time reflecting-on-action, and test your ideas by taking a critical stance toward your methods and work – including opinions and perspectives from peers. On this subject I recommend Elly’s post on ‘professional confidence’ (O’Brien, 2015). This is a great post that really bears re-reading as part of reflective practice in judging our own expertise and focusing where best to develop skills.

Concluding thoughts

Simon is right in that there is no central location for sharing results of our user experience work. I would love to see something like this created, with low or no barrier to entry so all practitioners could contribute. I think for academic libraries a space on the helibtech wiki could be a good starting point for collaboration. This is a slightly selfish request as in my workplace we maintain a list (a wiki page) of reports, presentations, industry white papers and so on about systems user experience, and used these in developing and shaping ideas for our ongoing research and development.

Absent such a location, I want to encourage practitioners to share their work. We want to hear what you have to say – share your methods, results, and conclusions where you can, as doing so contributes to and shapes discovery user experience as a professional practice.

References

Foucault, M. (1972) The archaeology of knowledge. New York, NY: Vintage.

O’Brien, E. (2015) ‘Professional confidence and “imposter syndrome”‘, Elly O’Brien, June 29. Available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20160921152614/https://ellyob.wordpress.com/2015/06/29/professional-confidence/

Owen, H. (2008) Open space technology: a user’s guide. 3rd edn. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler.

Preater, A. (2012) ‘Free and Open Source software and cultural change, at Library Camp 2012’, Ginformation Systems, 15 October. Available at: https://www.preater.com/2012/10/15/free-software-and-cultural-change-at-libcampuk12/

Priestner, A. (2014) ‘Why UX in libraries is a thing now’, Business Librarians Association conference, Leicester, 11 July. Available at: http://www.slideshare.net/AndyPriestner1/why-ux-in-libraries-is-a-thing-now-36899649

Towards ethnographies of the next-gen catalogue user

This is the third post in a series exploring user understanding of next-generation catalogues:

Talk

This is posted to coincide with the ChrisMash Mashed Library event organised by Gary Green in London on December 3rd. I spoke about the outcomes of an investigation into user experience and understanding of the next-gen catalogue and next steps we’re taking at Senate House Library. Not very Christmassy I admit…

@preater's presentation on flickr
‘@preater’s presentation’ on Flickr by Paul Stainthorp, license CC-BY-SA.

Slides from this talk are now available:

My slides were kept deliberately simple – it was presented in a pub on a flat screen TV! Notes are included to explain things further. Please get in touch if you want to ask anything about this.

Starting point

We implemented Encore from Innovative Interfaces in June to run alongside and partly replace the older WebPAC Pro catalogue, also from Innovative. Our Encore instance is here; the search I used in my talk was ‘industrial workers of the world‘.

Ahead of implementing we didn’t have much idea about how library users would understand this type of catalogue, so for my masters dissertation I had a look at this using various qualitative methods:

  • Usability-test style cognitive walk-throughs, done almost as a warm-up but providing lots of interesting data. As an aside I think every library should be doing this with their catalogue – it is so quick and easy to do.
  • A semi-structured interview using repertory grid technique. This was very good for comparing what my participants really thought of each type of catalogue.

Key findings

To summarise very briefly:

A Web-like catalogue encourages Web-like behaviour

Putting readers in front of a catalogue interface that looks and behaves like a Web search engine results in behaviours closer to a Web search engine than traditional information retrieval.

By this I mean:

  • A tendency to scan and skim-read Web pages quickly, concentrate on titles.
  • A process of iterative searching based on using a few keywords and then reworking the search over again based on what’s found on the results page.
  • Trust in the relevancy ranking of the catalogue; an expectation that the catalogue should be tolerant of small errors or typos via ‘did you mean…?’ suggestions.
  • The tendency to ‘satisfice’, meaning making do with results that seem good enough for the purpose rather than searching exhaustively.
  • The view that a search queries are an ongoing process, not something that should produce a single perfect set of results.

Caution: this is based on coding qualitative data from nine people and is not intended to be absolute or apply to every user. I found strongly contrasting opinions of the catalogue with an overall tendency for younger readers to take to the new interface much more easily.

The method I used was inductive, that is developed from analysis of what I observed. I really did not expect this ahead of time.

Using our catalogue is an affective experience

I found there was a strongly affective or emotional response to use of our catalogue beyond what you’d think you might get from using a mere lookup tool. The response was about more than just the catalogue being pleasant to use or familiar from other sites.

This was very interesting because I do not see why a library catalogue should not be a joy to use. Why should library catalogues be a painful experience where you have to “pay your dues”? Even if we changed nothing else behind the scenes and made the catalogue more attractive, you could argue this would improve things because we tend to believe more attractive things work better because they’re more enjoyable. Here I am paraphrasing from Don Norman (2004).

Next steps

Usability testing gets us so far, but as I’ve said previously in an artificial “lab” setting it does not produce natural behaviour. That’s a problem because we don’t get to see the reader’s true understanding emerge. We don’t get to see how they really behave in the library when using the catalogue.

I went fairly far in comparing systems – WebPAC Pro versus Encore – but what anchored that testing was the old catalogue. Having implemented the new catalogue and positioned it fairly aggressively as the default interface I wanted to dig deeper and better understand how the catalogue fits in to the reader’s experience of doing research at Senate House Library.

Think about the experience of library use: the reader comes in and experiences an entire “ecology”: the physical building; print book and journal collections; e-resources; the library staff; our catalogues and Web sites. I wanted to better understand how readers experience the catalogue in this context rather than just thinking about it in systems terms as a tool for looking items up that is used with a particular rate of error or success.

Towards ethnographies of the next-gen catalogue user

What we’re going to do is borrow techniques from anthropology to do ethnography in the library. This means studying and observing readers in their habitat: as they work in the library and do their research.

The outcomes I want from this are fairly “soft”, based around our staff knowing the readers better. What I want to know is: how can the library better support our readers’ use of the catalogue and improve their experience of Senate House Library? This is fundamental: I think without better understanding our readers use of our catalogues, we can’t start to improve what we do and provide a better service.

Properly speaking this is more a case of “borrowing ethnographic methods” than “doing ethnography”. This is OK as the methods aren’t owned by one field of social science, as Harry Wolcott (2008) says they “belong to all of us”.

Practically, what want to do is use a battery of techniques including semi-structured interviews, observation, and close questioning to generate data that will allow development of theory from that data as it is analysed qualitatively. This is a grounded theory approach. The actual work will likely be small “micro ethnographies” done over a period of some months in the library.

Examples

In my talk I mentioned some examples of ethnographic research done in libraries, these are:

  • Investigating user understanding of the library Web site – University of North Carolina at Charlotte (Wu and Lanclos, 2011)
  • Looking at how the physical library space is used – Loughborough University (Bryant, 2009)
  • Ethnographies of subject librarian’s reference work – Hewlett Packard Library and Apple Research Library (Nardi and O’Day, 1999)
  • The ERIAL (Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries) project which has produced various outputs and has an excellent toolkit telling you how to do it (Asher and Miller, 2011)

References

Asher, A. and Miller, S. (2011) ‘So you want to do anthropology in your library?’ Available at: http://www.erialproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Toolkit-3.22.11.pdf

Bryant, J. (2009) ‘What are students doing in our library? Ethnography as a method of exploring library user behaviour’, Library and Information Research, 33 (103), pp. 3-9.

Nardi, B.A. and O’Day, V.L. (1999) Information ecologies. London: MIT Press.

Norman, D.A. (2004) Emotional design. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Wolcott, H.F. (2008) Ethnography: a way of seeing. 2nd edn. Plymouth: AltaMira.

Wu, S.K. and Lanclos, D. (2011) ‘Re-imagining the users’ experience: an ethnographic approach to web usability and space design’, Reference Services Review, 39 (3), pp. 369-389.

Thoughts on usability testing the next-gen catalogue

This is the second post in a series exploring user understanding of next-generation catalogues:

What I like about usability testing

I have always found usability testing library systems enjoyable – as a participant, facilitator, and manager – and gotten useful things out of it. My preferred style is Steve Krug’s “Lost our lease, going-out-of-business-sale usability testing” from Don’t make me think (2006) with about five subjects and a very focused idea about what I wanted to get out of the process. By that I mean specific problems that needed user feedback to inform our judgments.

What I like best about this method is it represents effective action you can take quickly on a shoestring. You can short-circuit the endless librarians-around-a-table discussions you can get into about Web stuff: let’s test this out rather than just talking about it! I have defended using this method with small groups, as even testing a few users tells you something about what your users are actually doing whereas testing no-one tells you nothing at all. In writing that I realised I was paraphrasing Jakob Nielsen, “Zero users give zero insights”.

We’ll likely employ this method when we rework the Senate House Library Web site next year.

What I don’t

I think there are some problems with this style of testing as a methodology so have been looking into other methods for investigating Encore.

My main problem is the artificial nature of the test. Putting a person in your usability “lab” with a camera recording and asking them to do various tasks does not produce a natural experience of using your library catalogue. Your methods of observing the test will alter the users behaviour: these are observer effects you cannot hope to control for. In my dissertation interviews I tried to temper this by focusing on subject searching, browsing, and exploration of the next-generation catalogue interface rather than asking for subjects to complete tasks. I used a form of close questioning to explore participants’ understanding of Encore. This relies on asking probing questions along the lines of:

  • How?
  • Why?
  • What?
  • What if?

Ultimately this is based on a contextual inquiry approach described by Beyer and Holtzblatt in Contextual design (1998), but done with the understanding that it was taking place in an artificial environment not “the field”.

In truth the usability testing-style part of the investigation was meant as a warm-up towards comparisons between two or more catalogues using the repertory grid technique. I thought this worked reasonably well. The usability test section yielded up a good deal of qualitative data and certainly worked to get participants to the right frame of mind for grid construction.

It also produced useful results about for tweaks we could make to improve Encore as a better fit to readers’ expectations of a library catalogue. That is, it worked as usability testing.

However as I did the work I was aware of the artificial nature of the process affecting how my subjects behaved and their problems engaging with the process in anything like a natural way. The cognitive walkthrough style is difficult on two levels: it feels odd and a bit embarrassing to do it as a subject, but also it makes you think about what you are doing and how you should express yourself which affects your behaviour. Several participants picked up on this during their interviews and criticised it.

I’ve found our readers experience of the catalogue is deeply affective, and think we need to dig deeper into that affective layer to understand the user experience. I think ethnographic methods like the contextual inquiry approach is the way to go here, and will return to this in my next post.

Final point. I know our vendor has done their own usability testing on the Encore interface including informing changes to the current look and feel, in use on our catalogue. I have no reason to doubt its effectiveness or rigour. We could do usability testing of Encore, but I doubt we would add much beyond what the vendor already knows.

References

Beyer, H. and Holtzblatt, K. (1998) Contextual design. London: Morgan Kaufmann.

Krug, S. (2006) Don’t make me think. 2nd edn. Berkeley, CA: New Riders.