Improving Library Services by Design: Service Design as a tool for Creating User-friendly, Competitive, and Relevant Library Services.

On a cold Minnesota morning you find two coffee shops right next to each other that sell exactly the same coffee at the exact same price, how do you decide which would be better? Service design is what makes you walk into one and not the other. Like coffee shops, libraries interact with users through services. However, not all services are created equal. Service Design is the intentional and rigorous planning of services according to the well-understood needs of users. Drawing on ethnographic and journalistic methodologies, Service Design empathizes with users, and draws on those insights to create or improve services. In this workshop, University of Minnesota Libraries Instructional Designer Paul Zenke, will discuss Service Design thinking and explore how this method can be utilized at libraries to design and create meaningful services that delight users