All posts by Steven Bell

User Experiences

Libraries Need To Deliver The Wow Factor

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Do libraries, particularly academic libraries, have loyal customers? Do our library users come back again and again to use the library building, and if so, why? In every academic library I’ve worked in I’ve gotten to know the regulars, and beyond that are students and faculty you see again and again – if not frequently enough to gain “regular” status. But I have to ask if that loyalty is earned or if it’s because those library users have no choice. While academic libraries, and even public libraries to some extent, have a captive audience by virtue of being the only game on campus (well, there might be a Barnes & Noble in the vicinity) it doesn’t mean our users – even the repeat ones – are making use of, let alone being aware of our resources.

One characteristic of delivering good user experiences is that it typically results in return business. Whatever that experience is, it is something the user wants to experience again. The idea of the Wow Factor is another way of describing a good user experience. According to Brandon Schauer, an experience design director for Adaptive Path, the Wow Factor (or Long Wow as he refers to it) “is a means to achieving long-term customer loyalty through systematically impressing your customers again and again. Going a step beyond just measuring loyalty, the Long Wow is an experience-centric approach to fostering and creating it.” Looking at it from that perspective I do think librarians are capable of providing that impressive experience again and again. He also points to the importance of empathic design:

Deep customer insights and empathetic design pave the pathway to wow moments. By diving deep into a customer’s life and closely observing their behaviors, you can wow your customer by addressing needs that they’d never be able to articulate. By immersing yourself in the customer’s wider world of emotion and culture, you can wow them by attuning the offering to practical needs and dimensions of delight that normally go unfulfilled.

As a profession we appear ready to accept that much more information is needed about our user community. More librarians are getting interested in ethnographic methods that can provide more detail about our users and how they make use of or ignore what the library offers.

Even if we don’t yet know our users as well as we should the opportunities to provide the wow factor are available to us. While we have loads of folks that never come into the library, some who only use our resources online, others who just use the building as a shortcut or a place to grab a quick nap, librarians are making great impressions every day. Just recently I found a document for an administrator that he didn’t think could be obtained in time for his meeting; he had a PDF version of it in his e-mail within 15 minutes. Think about the many students who come to the library expecting that getting a research project started will be a truly painful experience, only to find a librarian who has them sailing smoothly in no time at all; you know they are impressed by the totally unexpected ease of the process. An unexpected level of service, like when the Nordstram sales clerk offers to carry your packages to the car for you, is one way to provide “wow” user experiences. You just didn’t anticipate getting that much help and personal attention. I don’t doubt that we have the capacity to wow our users, but I am concerned that it doesn’t happen often enough.

What we could use is a more systematic design approach to delivering Wow experiences. Schauer recommends these four steps:

1. Know your platform for delivery. Recognize the palette of touchpoints that you can combine to deliver wow experiences.

2. Tackle a wide area of unmet customer needs. Find an area of the customer experience that has long been overlooked and is teeming with potential for new insights.

3. Create and evolve your repeatable process. Discover the organization’s approach to delivering wow moments regularly.

4. Plan and stage the wow experiences. Developing all your ideas at once is a risky undertaking. Instead, organize a pipeline of wow moments that can be introduced through your platform of touchpoints over the long haul.

I especially like that last point. Many academic and public libraries will have a number of facility and technology developments in the pipeline. Instead of just making them available, we need to look at them as opportunities for wow moments. As in so many other areas of our profession that need change, another critically important one is to change our own ways of thinking about how to do business. We absolutely must pay more attention to how we can impress our user communities, and what must be done to leverage that to increase our visibility, community buzz and word of mouth about the library.

Articles, Books

InformeDesign – A Designer’s Database

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Many thanks to DBL reader Marc Gartler, Harrington College of Design, for contacting me to share a new design resource – well new to me at least. Marc pointed me to InformeDesign, which I would describe as a database of article on a spectrum of design topics. A good number of the articles are going to appeal primarily to architects or interior designers, but there are areas of content that are likely to have a more general appeal.

Marc also pointed me to a specific article he found in the database title “Closing the Research-Design Gap“. I would usually be less interested in an article that discusses design in the content of architecture, but this one has some interesting perspectives. It also discusses the concept of evidence-based design. The author describes it as “a deliberate attempt to base design decisions on quantitative and sometimes qualitative research”. This discussion of research as it applies to design may not appeal to all. But near the end of the article comes a quotable comment that does focus more on the mental process of design:

Good design, in the end, requires people with different experience, skills, and perspectives drawing on many forms of information in the pursuit of making creative and informed applications of knowledge as they generate and evaluate possible design solutions. Most important of all is a mindset that acknowledges that more information, including that generated through formally structured research processes, has the potential to generate plans and buildings that, as noted earlier, work synergistically on multiple levels.

I will be spending more time at InformeDesign. Thanks Marc for sharing this resource. 

 

Articles, Design Thinking

I Wondered When I’d See This

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Since its inception in February 2007, Designing Better Libraries has pretty much been a lone voice in the library blogosphere – or the profession itself - when it comes to discussing design thinking – and pretty much anything about design in any sense other than what it has traditionally been for librarians – designing buildings and interiors. As DBL readers know, our treatment of design explores it as a creative mental process that can be used to create better libraries and better user experiences for those who use libraries.

But I didn’t think that it would remain this way for long. There are more than a few ways to discover design, and I knew eventually I’d see someone else writing about it as well. That can be a good thing. Discussions of design is not the sole privilege of DBL, and it can certainly be helpful to have others sharing these ideas. So I was interested to come across an essay in Library Journal’s NetGen column that said “If we are going to look beyond librarianship for a professional model, we owe it to ourselves to study a discipline more akin to ours: design.” I think that’s just one theme we’ve been promoting here at DBL. In his essay “All Work and No Play” Terrence Fitzgerald advocates that what librarians can learn from designers is the value of play. He says that “Designers are taught to approach every problem with a sense of play.” I suppose there is some truth to that. If you’ve ever seen the Nightline segment called “The Deep Dive” you can see that there is a playful spirit at IDEO. There, toys litter the workspace.

While I agree that librarians do design things, such as instructional products, I would argue that there’s more to emulating the design profession than simply being playful. When I watch “The Deep Dive” I see some designers who are quite serious and even a bit competitive. I’m not suggesting that Fitzgerald’s take on the design profession is shallow. It may be that in the short essay he needed to dwell on just one element of the design approach, and thought that encouraging librarians to be more playful would be the best message to share about design work that would make for a sticky message. I certainly agree that we can potentially accomplish more through creativity and play, than simply following the “business as usual” methods that have been in use for…well, too long.

Articles, Design Thinking, Uncategorized

More Evidence That Design And Business Are Blending

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I recall seeing a few BusinessWeek articles in the past about design education, but now BusinessWeek has rolled out a great special report  all about design schools, including a ranking of the world’s top design schools. It’s got articles about the schools, about the designers and about the companies that are incorporating more design thinking and practice into their business. I think my favorite read is the article “The Cross-Discipline Design Imperative.” It speaks more directly about design thinking than just about any other article in the special report. From the article:

The word “design” has different meanings in these different schools, and as these meanings intersect, design becomes bigger, something that sits well above vocational skills and techniques. Design is a set of principles and ways of thinking that help us to manage and create in the material world. It values creativity as much as analysis. It is a way of seeing and painting a new, bigger picture…Now business schools and other interdisciplinary graduate programs are entering the fray under the banner of “:design thinking.” They have recognized that the creative principles found in design can be used to develop new solutions for business—and they see this as the next cutting edge…There is a tremendous demand for design thinkers today. In industry and in consulting, those who can marry creative right-brain thinking and analytical left-brain thinking are at a premium. That’s because innovation often happens not in the center of a discipline but in the space between disciplines, and right now a lot of new value is being found at the intersection of design and business.

So grab the issue off your library shelf or take a look at what’s available online. There’s some pretty good reading here.

Books, Creativity & Innovation, Uncategorized

Organizational Tension Between Innovation And Control

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There is an inherent dualism within most organizations between the desire for innovative workers and the desire to control those same workers. Afterall, if everyone is off being innovative who’s going to be getting the work done? This seems to be a problem in the library world. I am reminded of a rant by David Lee King in which he claims that his presentation attendees almost unanimously agreed that if they tried to implement innovative Web 2.0 technologies in their libraries they’d hit a brick wall with their supervisors and library directors. Is it that some library directors are simply resistant to change or do they fear that their organization will suffer if workers spend a few hours here and there experimenting with new technology – the result of which could be an innovative service enhancement?

This problem is by no means unique to libraries. It’s a challenge for all types of organizations, and it’s a conundrum that must be addressed by the organizational leadership. The problem and potential solutions are explored in a new book by Gary Hamel titled “The Future of Management“. I recently read an excerpt in Fortune magazine. Though the book received just a fair review over at BusinessWeek, I think the excerpt offers some stimulating ideas, and I’ll want to see more of what it has to say about innovation. For example, Hamel writes:

When talking to senior executives about the need to encourage innovation, I often get the sense they’d like their employees to loosen up a bit, to think more radically and be more experimental, but they’re worried this might distract them from a laserlike focus on efficiency and execution…I’ve heard this concern expressed in a variety of ways: “Yeah, we want people to innovate, but we have to stay focused.” “Innovation’s well and good, but at the end of the day, we have to deliver.” “If everybody’s off innovating, who’s going to mind the store?” These sentiments reveal a persistent management orthodoxy: If you allow people the freedom to innovate, discipline will take a beating.

In other words, having more of one means less of the other. So what advice does Hamel have for organizations that would like to have their cake and eat it too? Hamel’s approach is to provide examples of companies that, in his words, have learned to “double dip” and have both innovation and worker discipline in the same setting (not just a separate innovation or design lab). His examples are Whole Foods Market, W.L. Gore and Google. One problem that most library managers might have with these examples is that they use some fairly radical organizational structures. This can include the use of small teams with with the power to make key decisions, highly flat structures where there are no titles and no supervisors, half-days off for “dabble time”, financial rewards for innovation and a host of other practices that may be indeed difficult to implement in traditional library hierarchies. In fact, this is a problem that the BusinessWeek reviewer had with the book. How many organizations can structure themselves like these three companies? Even Hamel acknowledges that there have to be mechanisms to “keep things in check.”

So while it’s unlikely library organizations are suddenly going to re-structure themselves to resemble Google, there are some libraries that have organized workers into teams, others that are allowing for more experimentation time and others yet may be trying techniques that allow workers a bit more freedom and a little less control. If you know of some good examples or you are making progress in this area at your library, please leave a comment to share your insights.

Design Thinking, Uncategorized

Design Thinking + Integrative Thinking = Better Library Decision Making

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Roger Martin is the dean of the Rotman School of Management at the Unviersity of Toronto. He’s been mentioned previously at DBL, particularly for his writings on the need for B-Schools to incorporate more design thinking methods into the curriculum. By way of an article in the June 2007 issue of Harvard Business Review, I learned that Martin has a new book coming out titled The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking. In this HBR article, “How Successful Leaders Think”, Martin provides an overview of what it means to be an integrative thinker, and how it can lead to successful accomplishments. Based on my reading of the article I find commonalities between design thinking and integrative thinking. That’s no surprise given Martin’s past writings on design thinking. So I ask myself why he now uses the term “integrative thinking” rather than “design thinking.”

To some extent it may be that from a marketing position, the phrase “integrative thinking” be more effective at grasping a reader’s attention and sending a message about the book’s content. Design thinking could be perceived as being more esoteric, and clearly you’d want your book to reach a wide audience. Many experts have described the work of design thinkers as blending multiple disciplines. I came across this most recently in a chapter on creating a symphony, from Pink’s A Whole New Mind, in which he has a chapter on design. Hemple and McConnon, in a 2006 BusinessWeek article titled “The Talent Hunt”  described design thinkers as “hybrid professionals” because they combine multiple disciplinary skills into a single mind-set. To my way of thinking that could also describe an integrative thinker – and a blended librarian.

But Martin provides a slightly different perspective on what integrative thinking is, and it’s a bit more than just being a hybrid professional. He studied more than 50 business leaders to identify the characteristics of “how they think”, which Martin sees as being more essential to success than what they do.  What he discovered is that successful leaders all appear to have the ability to blend opposing ideas and to creatively resolve the tension between them. These leaders can take two very different and conflicting ideas and integrate them into a single new idea that is superior and contains elements of the two conflicting ideas – not an easy thing to do. So what can we learn from Martin’s research that could help us to add the power of integrative thinking to our design thinking?

According to Martin, integrative thinking is pretty rare. Why? Well, he says that it’s a process that requires dealing with complexity. He says “Most of us avoid complexity and ambiguity and seek out the comfort of simplicity and clarity…we simplify where we can.” While this seems to run counter to some basic design concepts, namely designing for simplicity, the problem with this according to to Martin is when it comes to decision making, and making great decisions is what makes great leaders great. To avoid complexity most decisions are reduced to a choice between right and wrong. Integrative thinkers develop more creative solutions. Martin then reviews the four stages through which integrative thinkers go on the way to making a decision. In short, integrative thinkers seek less obvious solutions keeping their eye on what is most salient, use nonlinear methods, see the totality of a given problem, and resolve the tension between opposing ideas.

And as some experts believe leadership can be learned, Martin likewise believes that integrative thinking can be learned and practiced. Unfortunately he doesn’t yield much information about how that happens, other than to say it involves developing a “habit of thought.” I suppose he wants to leave us with a reason to buy the book. I think that’s where it all comes back to design thinking. It’s about approaching challenging decisions with a different thought process, one that isn’t status quo for librarians.

Design Thinking, Uncategorized

Another Design Thinking Video

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You’ll recall the short screencast-type video presentation that I created about design thinking. I hope you took a look at it, and that it helped you develop a better understanding of design thinking. BusinessWeek recently issued their own video about design thinking – just a little more professionally designed and developed than my own. What’s great about this video is that it features brief interview segments with some top design thinkers, such as Roger Martin. Their insights into design thinking – and about the people who use this technique – also help to provide a better understanding of what it means. Martin sumarizes this general vagueness of design thinking when he comments that business leaders know they need what designers bring to business, but that they don’t quite know what it is. If that tends to describe you as well, take a few minutes and watch the video.

And while I’m mentioning resources worth checking out, there a fairly new blog that examines innovation, creativity and design. Take a look at Campell on Branding and Innovation: Observations, insights and musing on marketing and design-centered thinking. Campbell is a design student with corporate experience. Looks like this blog is one worth following.

Articles, Creativity & Innovation

Fast Company’s “Masters Of Design” Issue

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Perhaps as a sign of the growing interest in design within business, Fast Company’s October 2007 issue is largely devoted to design. Printed boldly on the cover is the title “Masters of Design” and the issue does indeed profile several prominent designers. Don’t expect too many insights on design thinking in this issue. It’s really focused more on how design in influencing industry, and the changing emphasis that is being placed on the value of design. As the introduction to the issue states “Studies have now shown the design-oriented firms in all kinds of industries outperform their more traditional peers – that design and innovation go hand-in-hand with financial success.”

But the insights that do come in the interviews, and the examples of great design (mostly industrial) are worth a look. Definitely take some time to check out this issue.

User Experiences

Can we ever really move beyond the self-centered library?

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It’s been a while since I’ve posted, but I have a good reason—I’ve started a new job. I’m still at Georgia Tech, but now I am the User Experience Librarian. I’ll get into what exactly that entails in a future post, but for now I wanted to share some thoughts on being “user” centered.

There has been a lot of talk about libraries becoming more “user” centered, even back in 2000 I recall seeing user-centered or user-focused in several job postings. With the emergence of all the Web 2.0 magic, this term has become even more prominent.

But are libraries really any different? Can patrons detect a difference? I think that those of us working in libraries have seen a change, but what about our users? Has any of our rhetoric translated into a noticeable change? Do they perceive us as being user-centered, or is it just us who perceive ourselves as being more user-centric?

Taking it a step further, can we ever break the boundaries of departmental self-interest? The Reference department has one perspective, while Circulation has another; Systems/IT has their agenda, while Cataloging has another—and so on. I’ve worked in several large academic libraries and this territorial thinking seems to be universal. If each department perceives the “user experience” differently than how can we ever truly be user-centered? That’s one of the challenges I face now since I am essentially floating without a department… but perhaps that is a good thing? I’m trying to take a more holistic approach.

The book Understanding Your Users provides a good illustration of this problem. When it comes to designing services, we each hear different things.
user centered design

So where do we go from here? Sure there are strategic plans, vision and mission statements, and maybe a library brand, but do these unify staff? Do we really hear what patrons are saying or are we only listening to ourselves?

Design Thinking, Instructional Design & Technology

Instructional Design Should Be About Thinking Not Process

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In past work John Shank and I have drawn parallels between some core elements of instructional design and design thinking. For example, both begin with efforts to understand users. Both involve prototyping to develop an appropriate product. And both incorporate efforts to evaluate outcomes to determine if the product, as designed, achieved the desired solution. In fact, for those with some background, prior experience with or training in instructional design, it should be a logical leap to grasp the key concepts of design thinking.

A new article about instructional design in the latest issue of Educational Technology (Sept-Oct 2007) titled “A Principle-Based Model of Instructional Design: A New Way of Thinking About and Teaching ID” is primarily about instructional design, but the author makes a case that what it is really about is not the process we’ve all come to know and love – as exemplified by ADDIE – but is really a set of principles and a way of thinking. The author, Kenneth Silber, never mentions the phrase “design thinking” but he writes:

If ID (instructional design) is problem solving (not a systematic procedure), then the real questions are how designers think, and the principles they use.

In drawing his own parallels between the two, Silber develops five principles, one of which is “The thinking process is similar to one designers in other fields use.” In other words, the commonality between the many different fields of design is the application of design thinking. “There is a great deal of similarity between the way IDers think about problems and the way designers in general do” writes Silber.

Silber’s goal is not simply to draw these parallels, but to make a case that instructional design is more about problem solving and thinking of ways to design solutions. If that is the case, and he presents a great deal of literature to support his argument, then he states that instructors of ID should rethink their methods and help learners to understand how to use design thinking to identify problems and determine their solutions. I’ll have to read this one a few more times for it all to sink in, but it was great to find an instructional design instructor whose principles can help us to further refine our thinking about the intersections between instructional design and design thinking.

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