How to Make User Experience Practical for Your Library

Perhaps you have heard of user experience and you think you should be doing something, but you don’t seem to have the time or money. Perhaps you have gone to sessions where they tell you that you have to do all these focus groups and do research in a big fancy lab and it was overwhelming. Let’s face it, there are some barriers to traditional usability testing. But we still care about improving the user experience! And let’s also acknowledge that we are being compared to Google and Amazon and we are not as easy to use as they are. What to do? Wouldn’t it be great to feel clear on concepts such as usability, user experience and accessibility? Wouldn’t it be nice to know where you stand in your library and what your next step is? Wouldn’t we all like to serve our users better? In this session, we will look at easy ways to evaluate the library website of course, and also the larger user experience, in person and online. We will also look at what others have done and some of the most likely improvements to really make a difference, focusing on keeping it small and inexpensive. This session will have interactive components, not just lecture, and it will be applicable in all types of libraries