All posts by Steven Bell

Design Thinking

MIT’s Special Report On Design Thinking

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“Hard skills from a soft science” is the tagline that the MIT Sloan Management Review gives to the special design thinking report that is found in the July 2009 issue. Unfortunately only subscribers can access the full-text articles online, but I was able to access all of them through my library’s ProQuest ABI/Inform database. It provides a mix of articles that are either essays or interviews with designers. Of special interest are:

* “Designing Waits That Work” – an article by Don Norman on how to use design to create a better user experience for customers that must wait to receive a service.

* “Problem Solving by Design” – insights into problem solving from John Shook’s new book Managing to Learn that examines the “problem finder” role played by designers.

* “How to Become a Better Manager…By Thinking Like a Designer” – an interview with expert presenters Nancy Duarte and Garr Reynolds in which they discuss how to design presentations that both influence and persuade.

And don’t miss a short essay by Matthew May, “Elegance by Design: The Art of Less” in which he explains how great designers use the skill of subtraction to create elegant solutions.

I found much great reading here with lots of ideas worth contemplating. I regularly follow the blogs of Norman and Reynolds so some of the concepts here were a bit more familiar. But if you are just discovering design thinking this issue is a must read.

User Experiences

Libraries Can Learn From WoW Providers

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I thought the “WoW” experience was something that librarians could integrate into the design and development of the UX plan for their libraries. No doubt it is a challenge to figure out how to create something worthy of a WoW in the library. Experts will point to Seattle’s Pike Place Fish Market as an example of what it means to deliver a WoW experience. Turning a fish purchase transaction into a highly visible, entertaining and tourist attracting experience is a real inspiration for others, but not always transferrable to a library:

A fish market "wow" might not work at the library
A fish market "wow" might not work at the library

But we may be able to learn more about “getting to wow” as it was phrased in a recent Knowledge@Wharton article covering an annual study of great retail shopping experiences. According to a report titled “Discovering WOW –A Study of Great Retail Shopping Experiences in North American” there are five major areas that contribute to a great shopping experience. They are:

* Engagement – being polite, caring and genuinely helpful.
* Executional Excellence – having product knowledge and the ability to patiently explain and advise while providing unexpected quality.
* Brand Experience – good interior design and making customers feel they’re special and get a bargian.
* Expediting – being sensitive to customers’ time in lines and being proactive to streamline the process.
* Problem Recovery – helping to resolve and compensate for problems while ensuring complete satisfaction.

The report found that survey respondents identified 28 elements of a great experience and the typical WOW experience has 10 of those elements at the same time. For example, customers expect someone who can explain a product and seem genuine and complete the transaction efficiently. So let’s say I visit your library. I immediately am not sure where to go to ask a question. I wander a bit and see a desk with people behind it. I ask my question and am told to go to another desk. I need to get some stock prices from a few years ago for a public company. When I ask for information on a company at the next desk the person there seems more interested in looking at their computer screen. I’m told to go to the microforms department for annual reports on microfiche. At the next desk no one is familiar with the collection, then not sure how to use the micorform reader printer. After all this I don’t find what I need. I’d like to complain about it to someone, but there’s no one available who will take responsibility. Thinking it through are there ways the library could turn this into a WOW experience given what the report tells us about what people want in a service transaction?

Giving library users a better library experience, call it WOW if you like, doesn’t involve cool new technology, an infusion of expensive resources or drawn-out internal debates about service desk consolidation (though that might help). What it does require is a better understanding of user expectations in a shopping experience. At a minimum we can do better by focusing on just two simple things. One, be polite and courteous. Two, be familiar with the products. That’s a start. Quality is also highly rated. This is less within our control but we can do more to emphasize the quality of library research resources. Here’s the reason why we need to work towards the WOW experience. The study reports that 75% of shoppers who enjoy a great experience will return; when the experience is merely “standard” the likelihood of a return visit drops by over 65%. Futher, when shoppers have a great experience they are 80% more likely to recommend a store to their friends.

You may argue that many libraries already have steady users who have no where else to go for a computer, or use the library to get free DVDs or to get their bestsellers – or because their professor told them they have to go to the library to complete an assignment. I understand that your library has a core group of users who regularly visit, but rather than being satisfied with their dependence on the library – and increasingly they will have other more convenient options – why not concentrate on turning them into patrons who talk to others about how great the library is. Are you content with your regular users or would you like to turn more non-users into regular users? Or do you feel secure in knowing your patrons use the library because they have no other choice? Personally, I want library users who have other options, but choose my library because it is what they prefer. They don’t have to use this library, but they do because it is their preference.

User Experiences

What’s Your EBS?

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Perhaps you’ve read one of these books: When Fish Fly, The Starbucks Experience or The New Gold Standard. If you have you have probably obtained a few new ideas about designing a user experience for your library. One thing that you’ll learn from all of these books that is highly relevant to libraries is that it is possible to turn mundane, ordinary transactions – something librarians know about all too well – into memorable experiences. Something else these books have in common is their author, Joseph Michelli.

I had the great opportunity to meet Michelli when I attended the American Library Association Conference in Chicago. Just a few weeks before the conference I learned that the OCLC Symposium on “Leadership Beyond the Recession” (always held on Friday afternoons of every ALA Midwinter and Annual Conference) was having Michelli as their speaker. Having read his works I was glad I’d be in Chicago for the program. I even mentioned it here at DBL, and was surprised when Michelli himself left a comment on the post. It got even better about a week later when OCLC invited me to participate in the program by joining a panel of librarians who would talk about their library user experiences after Michelli completed his presentation. You can view a streaming video of the post-presentation discussion here.

Rather than give you a play-by-play of the talk, I’ll just refer you over to It’s All Good where one of the bloggers (Alice) summarized the presentation. I’ll just bring some attention to one thing that stood out for me – the Experiential Brand Statement. The idea is to create a brand based on the user’s interaction with your product or service – an experiential brand. For the Pike’s Peak Fish Market the experiential brand was “make everyone feel special”. It was just that simple. The folks who worked at the first market sought to make everyone they interacted with feel as though they were world famous. Michelli told us that prior to the experiential brand the Market nearly went out of business. The Ritz-Carlton’s experiential brand is “create the home of a loving parent”. They want all their guests to experience what it feels like to get the special treatment from a parent. And this really interesting article about Darden Restaurants (Olive Garden, Red Lobster, etc) discusses the experiential brands they create. Olive Garden’s experience is to “make you feel like you are joining an Italian family for a meal” and that experiential brand is designed into the décor of the restaurant.

The benefit of developing an experiential brand, as Michelli pointed out, is creating customer loyalty. Fifty percent of customers desert a business because of a bad experience. But customers are three times as likely to be loyal to a business if the customer feels like he or she has a bond with the product or service. So you can’t underestimate the value of creating good relationships that build these bonds. The library workers must be the transforming agents. They must be connected to the EBS. That helps to ensure that every touchpoint in the library will reinforce the EBS.

So what’s a good EBS for your library? I’m working on mine.

Creativity & Innovation

Library Trigger Points

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Since I’ve previously written about David Kelley of IDEO, I suppose it’s only fair that I dedicate a post to his brother and fellow IDEO legend Tom Kelley. But whereas I shared David Kelley’s insights into how design thinking is changing the way business operates, it’s one of Tom Kelley’s ideas about innovation that I want to promote in this post. Kelley was recently interviewed at IdeaConnection, and I recommend you give the entire interview a good reading. But Kelley’s mention of “trigger points” captured my attention, and got me thinking about how this ideas can apply to our libraries.

The idea behind the trigger point is pretty simple. According to Kelley it is:

the one or two essential elements in a product that are important to your customers. Sometimes you gain a competitive edge by fixing a problem or designing a great customer experience around those trigger points. If you make everything about your product or service continuously better and add more features, you may end up with a product or service that customers can’t afford and don’t understand.

So the trigger point is the one thing, or maybe two things, that really makes the difference for the potential library users – or as Kelley puts it – the offering that gets the person past whatever threshold was keeping them from using the service. What might that threshold be for the typical library, and how do we make this trigger point easier to navigate or how might we build a better experience around it?

It might not be the same for each library. In my own library a trigger point would be the web site and the access it provides to electronic resources. Our 2009 LibQual survey results clearly indicated that for our faculty and students it is highly important to easily find and connect to those resources. If we can do only one thing to create a better experience and loyal customer it would mean a better web site that allows for easier navigation and location of resources. On the other hand, it only tells us what it is important to the user, not the obvious solution. It may be that the solution isn’t a better website in terms of finding and connecting to e-resources. The solution may be creating simpler and more convenient paths to the e-resources from wherever the end user is most likely to begin their navigation path. So we also need to do a better job of learning and understanding how our users want to find and connect to the e-resources they need. It may be we need to better integrate the paths to the e-resources into course management systems or social networks.

And although some might suggest the library building itself is no longer that important, we are learning that our faculty and graduate students currently avoid our building because it is an unpleasant experience for them. They find the undergraduates too noisy. They want dedicated study and research space that better serves their needs and the way they work. For these community members the building and its available study space is clearly another trigger point. We need to create improvements that will get the faculty and graduate students past the threshold that presently serves as a barrier to their coming to and using the library facility.

Thinking more about library trigger points strikes me as one good way to begin a process of understanding the library experience beyond just fixing a series of things that are broken. Yes, it is important to fix what is broken, but no combination of small fixes is likely to tackle the challenge of identifying the one or two trigger points and developing appropriate solutions that will turn a non-user into a library user.

Creativity & Innovation

Capturing Your Creative Ideas

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You often find writers using a quote to start off a book chapter or an article. Most times those quotes are like background noise. It’s there but you don’t notice it. But every now and then it grabs your attention. That’s what got me to take a look at this UXmatters article titled “a practical guide to capturing creativity“. It began with a good quote from Linus Pauling that I’d never come across before: The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas. Make sense. Librarians are creative folks. I don’t doubt we all have many ideas. The problem is capturing them and then developing the one that has the most potential.

The main problem, according to author Jonathan Follett, is that creative ideas jump into our minds when we are least ready to capture them. He writes:

When the creative moment strikes, we need to be ready for it with ways to save, preserve, and ultimately use our invaluable ideas, notes, and sketches, so they can contribute to the success of great digital products. Such ideas don’t always come to us in the office environment. I find, generally, that there are far too many distractions in my own studio. In our over-stimulated modern world, with thousands of messages competing for our attention and bandwidth, it’s no wonder creative professionals require time away from their desks and computers to generate new ideas.

The often cited example is the shower idea. There is a well recognized phenomenon that people tend to get ideas or creative bursts of genius in the shower. Why is that? No one knows for sure but one suggestion is that the brain needs to be free of the constant ongoing details that flood each moment. But when the mind is unchained from all those details it can pull together the many disparate puzzle pieces that go into a creative idea. The shower seems to be a particularly good place for that to happen. Follett’s focus is on how you go about capturing the idea when it comes, as it so often will disappear if allowed to drift off. You know how it works. You say to yourself “that’s a great idea and I’ll make a note of it after breakfast”. Then after breakfast you are asking yourself what that idea was you had in the shower. Don’t let it happen to you.

So what do you do? You’ll find some good ideas in this article. Follett’s advice is to keep it simple. He emphasizes the use of easily carried notebooks for jotting down ideas. He has a preference for the Moleskine notebook. I carry a Daytimer and keep it stocked with plenty of notepaper at all times. Even though I carry a smartphone I just find it easier to jot down ideas on paper with pencil – and it’s easier to sketch an idea, another reason Follett likes notebooks. What about the shower? Follett shares information about a notebook and pen designed for writing in the wettest conditions. Try using your smartphone in the shower.

Follett doesn’t ignore higher tech methods for capturing ideas. Voice recorders are an obvious device for this task. I’ve experimented a bit with the voice recorder on my smartphone. It works well enough. The problem is that I forget to use it, and there are times when I wouldn’t want to – such as when I get an idea on the commuter train. You could acquire a specialized voice recorder if that’s your preference. He even mentions using Google Voice to record ideas from a cell phone. Why not just leave a message with your idea on your work voicemail? The advantage of Google Voice is that it transcribes the message so you have a written version, but Follett found that it didn’t always work that well. Still, you may want to experiment with Voice. And if voicemail isn’t high-tech enough for you, consider using a hand held video camera to record yourself describing your creative ideas.

Are librarians creative professionals? It’s certainly not a characteristic associated with the traditional stereotype. How much creativity does shushing people and stamping book cards require? But we know that librarians are indeed a creative bunch. Need examples? Consider the spring 2008 issue of Urban Library Journal that profiled creative librarians and their creative library projects and approaches to service. Capturing one’s creative ideas is a good start, and a good way to make sure that we all have lots of ideas on hand. After all, that does seem like the best way to discover that one really good idea that could make a difference.

User Experiences

Join A UX Book Club

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Here at DBL we make a regular effort to bring books or videos of value to your attention. Most of us are not likely to enter a graduate program on user experience or design, so our best mechanism for becoming more learned about UX and design thinking is to read more books, articles or watch video presentations about these topics. If it can be hard for you to get started on a book, then a book club may be just the thing you need.

I had no idea there was such a thing as a UX book club, and it turns out that these clubs are sprouting up all across the country. I found one in Philadelphia in minutes. I first learned about UX book clubs in a post at Boxes and Arrows. Following the author’s advice I went to the home page of the UX Book Club. There I learned more about the UX Book Club concept, and that there are UX Book Clubs all over the world – including my own city.

So I followed the instructions and found my way to the Facebook Group for my local chapter of the book club. The group has over 60 members. It appears I just missed a recent meeting at which the book Sketching User Experiences by Bill Buxton was discussed. We have this book at my library and I’ve looked it over previously, but it could have been interesting to discussed it with others. I don’t know if I’ll have the opportunity to read the next book the group selects – or attend their meetings – but I think there will still be value in being part of the UX Book Club. Take a look to see if there is a UX Book Club in your city.

Design Thinking

Reynolds 5 Steps To Thinking Like A Designer

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If you are familiar with the Presentation Zen blog and book you probably recognize the name Garr Reynolds. I don’t have the name of the presentation, but I recently watched a video of Reynolds giving a presentation in Sweden. At first I was just interested in an opportunity to watch Reynolds give a presentation. I wanted to take note of his slides (which are excellent) and his presentation style (also quite good). But I found this particular presentation communicated some good ideas about design.

After spending some time speaking about Japan and general principles of presenting, Reynolds focuses on “thinking like a designer”, and offers 5 tips (although in the presentation he mentions 9 tips but only gets to five of them) – and the five make watching this video worthwhile. Here they are:

1. It’s not about the tools. You can have amazing technology tools for developing presentations, but ultimately it is about your ideas not the tools

2. Start in analog mode – Reynolds suggests we all take time away from our computers when planning our presentations. Instead of immediately jumping on the keyboard, consider doing some scripting or sketching as your first approach. I tend to agree with this suggestion. I often start planning out my presentation on a tablet that I use to script out the talk. I use this approach to brainstorm what methods I want to use, such as storytelling, images, text or video, and where and how they’ll contribute to the presentation. Reynolds shares a sketch book that is a series of open squares. Into each one he can place ideas, sketched images or the text that will eventually make up the presentation.

3. Take a risk – “In the beginner’s mind there are only possibilities. In the expert’s mind there are few”. Reynolds reminds us that as children we were much more likely to experiment and try new things. We weren’t afraid to fail. He suggests we be more childlike in our approach to presentations as it may lead us to try new things. I’ve been adding some hand drawn illustrations to my presentations; just stick figures. But attendees rarely expect this sort of thing and it captures their attention. It’s always a bit of a risk though. I never know if they’ll get the message across effectively or how the attendees will respond.

4. Put yourself in their shoes – This is a basic principle of nearly all fields of design, and is a hallmark of the design thinking process where before you even begin trying to develop a solution you identify the problem by putting yourself in the place of the user and examine your services from their perspective.

5. Embrace simplicity – You hear everyone talking about making things more simple but on this point Reynolds shared the following “Shinpuru ni suru koto wa” – Japanese for “an act of simpleness is not simple to do” (that’s according to Reynolds who has been working in Japan on and off for 20 years – there are quite a few references to Japan in the presentation). Reynolds lays out some ideas for trying to achieve simplicity.

I recommend that you watch the video and you’ll probably get more than these five tips. For example, a sixth tip could be to “deliver a sticky message”. It’s not too hard to find a video presentation by Garr Reynolds but for those interested in thinking more like a designer for their next presentation this will be time well spent.

Uncategorized

Deep Dive, Maya Design And Librarian-UX Connections

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When I want to share and explain the concepts of design thinking with an audience of librarians I often make use of the video “The Deep Dive.” It was originally an episode of Nightline shown in 1991, and it profiles the firm IDEO. In the program the IDEO folks are charged with redesigning a supermarket shopping cart. Watching the IDEO folks, an eclectic mix of professionals, go through the process illustrates the basic concepts of design thinking in very practical ways. I’ve owned the DVD that I bought from ABC for a few years. But now, thanks to someone who put event online (paying no attention to the FBI warnings about copying the video) you can watch the entire Deep Dive on YouTube. If you haven’t seen it, spend 22 minutes watching it (in three parts) before it is taken down.

IDEO is a firm highly associated with design thinking, but there are other design firms that use this technique as well. One is Adaptive Path, and I recommend you follow their blog. A lesser known firm is Maya Design, but they’ve done some interesting work, particularly their re-design of the interior of the Carnegie Public Library. We featured a designer from Maya on a Blended Librarians Online Community webcast a few years ago. I recently noticed an article about Maya Design in the latest issue of Fast Company that discusses their 3-day design boot camps. Seems they are now teaching others to become design thinkers. Sounds like a program I’d really like to attend.

What also caught my attention this past week was the announcement of two UX-related resources in the library community. One of my favorite events at any ALA conference is the Friday afternoon OCLC Symposium. This year the main speaker is Joseph A. Michelli, Ph.D, (The Starbucks Experience: 5 Principles for Turning Ordinary into Extraordinary) who will “engage the audience in a conversation that explores ways to bring a unique customer experience to the library.” I’m already registered and will hear what Michelli has to say about Starbuck’s recent challenges and the resiliance of the user experience in a recession. But just the fact that OCLC is turning its attention to UX is interesting to me.

I also came across a slideshow from a presentation by John Blyberg, Darien Library’s Assistant Director for Innovation and User Experience, on the topic of user experience design in libraries. If Blyberg is discussing UX in his conference presentations that will help to get more librarians interested in these ideas.

Design Thinking

Who is in charge of the atmosphere?

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I happened upon The Royal Oak, a quaint bar nestled beside a Starbucks and a movie theatre in the suburbs of Atlanta

The food was just ok, but the thing that struck me was this statement on their menu:

“A pub is a state of mind, and that alone sets it apart from any other drinking or eating establishment. It is a place where relaxation, stimulation, and conversation are the order of the day.  In their ‘local,’ as the English refer to them, a sense of being ‘at home’ is very much in evidence, and it is the publican’s job to ensure the maintenance of that atmosphere.”

This got me thinking about libraries. What is our state of mind? What is our atmosphere? Who is in charge of it? And perhaps the question for this blog: who designs it?

Is it the building manager’s job to create engaging experiences? What about the Head of Public Services? She might have good intentions but probably does not have the time to devote to such a large enterprise. So what about the librarians or staff? Again, there may be some interest, but “library as place” most likely ends up other duties as assigned.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot coming into a new workplace. I  walk throughout the building several times each day observing how patrons are using the space and how they have adapted to it. The library seems to have it’s own unwritten code of conduct. For example, there are many large tables on different floors. All of them are filled with students (finals week)—some of these are quiet zones, while in other areas people converse freely. Why is that? How was this ecosystem formed and how has it evolved over time? I have not noticed any library staff enforcing rules, so who is in charge?

I’ve started sketching layouts of the building with ideas for creating defined zones. Will simply rearranging the furniture have a positive (and noticeable) impact on study behavior? Will patrons accept what I design or simply do whatever the want?

 I don’t have any answers… just tons of questions, but think about the “atmosphere” of your library.  Who is in charge of it?What needs to be done?  And what can you do to change it?

User Experiences

UX: Strategy, Flow & Affordance

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Were you aware that visitors to your library web site formulate their impressions of your site in the first 50 milliseconds of their visit. For those of us less familiar with the metric system that’s 0.05 seconds. In other words – very, very fast. Chances are it doesn’t take them much longer to react to your library or its services the first time. That first impression creates a halo effect, a cognitive bias where one’s thoughts are fueled by past impressions. That is why creating a good user experience is critical for your web site and library.

The role design plays in the user experience is the subject of a new article titled “Is Design the Preeminent Protagonist in User Experience?” Authored by Phillip Tobias and Daniel Spiegel, both of Kutztown University, in the online journal Ubiquity this article begins by exploring different definitions of user experience. The authors conclude that UX does not have a universally accepted definition. But defining UX is not the focus of their article; connecting design to UX is. They write:

There can be no doubt that one factor contributing to UX is design. By leveraging design an experience can become more engaging, invoking a much grander experience and positively influencing the user’s mental model.

The bulk of the article is devoted to three components of UX; strategy, flow and affordance. Strategy is mostly what you’d expect – devising plans and methods for achieving the desired outcome. The goal of a strategic redesign should be to capture the user’s attention, and begin to shape their conceptual model of the site or library.

For me the two new concepts in this article are flow and affordance. I can’t recall encountering them previously. Flow relates to how effectively the design takes the user through the system or experience. The authors liken it to reading a good book; if it’s well written you become completely engrossed and don’t even notice time passing. A design with good flow creates an experience that is painless even when it involves complexity. That sounds like the type of experience that would make a library better, but it’s elusive. They write “to get this experience, or flow, there needs to be some form of design, where the position of the elements constructs the optimal user experience.”

Affordance relates to the elements of an object’s design that contribute to a user’s interaction with it. On a web site affordance suggests the functionality of a button or feature in a way that meshes with a users expectations for that element. In the article a keyless remote device is offered as an example of design that effortlessly conveys what its purpose is. If you encounter a new car, perhaps a rental vehicle, you need no instructions for the keyless remote. The placement of buttons and symbols are the affordances that make it all clear.

In speaking to library colleagues about user experience I try to make the point that good UX is the result of a design process. That requires us to think carefully and purposefully about the UX we create for our community. Tobias and Spiegel reinforce this in their article when they emphasize that design directly affects user experience. If we want to make a good first impression on our users and influence their mental model we need to let design drive the user experience.