All posts by Steven Bell

Design Thinking

Designing A Video Presentation On Design Thinking

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Whenever introducing a new idea or concept to your colleagues there’s a possibility that they might encounter some difficulty in grasping it. Then again, it’s important to develop a message or way of introducing this new idea that makes it easier to grasp. I think that’s the point of developing a “sticky” message. It’s the type of message that grabs the listener’s attention, and keeps them focused on the message. The message must also effectively communicate the core concept in a way that is simple and memorable.

So I attempted to design something that would better communicate what design thinking is, and do so in a way that offers a sticky message. I had mentioned in a previous post that I would be working on this. A colleague recently pointed me to Jing, a web-based utility for creating short screencasts. It’s easy to use and works well for short, instructional videos that can quickly be posted on the web so that students who need some instructional or research assistance can be guided to it. I thought this might be a useful tool for creating a message about design thinking.

You can see the results by going to the new design thinking page on my re-designed personal web site (it’s not done yet). On this page you’ll find the link to a 5-minute eClip presentation that serves as a brief introduction to design thinking. There’s a lot more that could be said, and the real challenge was trying to decide what to say, how to say it, and how to present it. In the spirit of design thinking I look at this video presentation (screecast) as a prototype – in fact this is about the fifth iteration so far. I look forward to your comments and suggestions that can help to improve this eClip presentation.

Articles, Creativity & Innovation, Uncategorized

Check Out The Latest Inside Innovation

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The September 10, 2007 issue of BusinessWeek contains the latest IN:Inside Innovation supplement. If you don’t have the paper issue handy the supplement is available in online format. The focus of this edition of IN is collaboration. Featured articles include ones that explore how IBM gets its innovation networks to work, how 10 top innovators use cross pollination to draw inspiration from crossing the boundaries of their own professions, and how twenty-somethings are transforming social sites into business networks.

An article that should be read by librarians is the one on brand hijacking. That refers to situations when customers take over the brand to conduct negative attacks on the product or institution. Yes, it’s true that most libraries don’t even know what their brand is, let alone offer one that the hijackers would want. But there is some good advice here for libraries that want to use branding to build better relationships with the members of their institution (be authentic and honest; listen to consumers; and get more involved with user communities). There are some good, brief examples of making things work better with design.

Design Thinking, Uncategorized

Explaining What Design Is Can Be A Challenge

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I’ve always found it a bit of a challenge to find good, short, memorable messages that can provide a simple but powerful way of communicating the concepts behind design thinking. I’m currently reading the book Made to Stick (great read BTW – more on it later), and that’s already providing some good ideas on how to create a better way to deliver the messages that will effectively communicate why this is an important set of skills for librarians who want to design better libraries. As I develop those messages I’ll be sharing them with the readers of this blog for your feedback and opinions. Right now, I am developing some slides and messages (e.g., “design thinking is a way of solving library problems the way designers solve design problems”)- which are a good start but perhaps still too vague to quickly capture an audience’s attention and have them wanting to learn more.

Well I see I’m not the only one trying to develop better ways to, with simple and effective messages, communicate about design and design thinking so that it will stick. Take a look at Design Session 01, a video made by design student David Ngo, that tries to explain what design is. While it is somewhat amateurish and a bit corny in spots it looks like this video, which is the first in what will be a series of videos on design, has some promise. Well, take a look and see what you think. Perhaps a video on design thinking for librarians might have some possibilities?

Books, Design Thinking

The Power Of R-Directed Thinking

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While we probably have a number of Blended Librarians among the folks who make up the regular readers of DBL, I’m going to assume that the majority of our readers have never heard of the Blended Librarians Online Learning Community (on the Learning Times Network) or participated in a Blended Librarians Webcast event. If that assumption is correct then a good number of you would likely miss a post I recently made to the discussion board at the Community. So I’m going to share it here because I think it also has value for those who are interested in using design thinking to improve their libraries, develop better user experiences for the library user and to get ready for the Conceptual Age. What’s the Conceptual Age you ask. Well, that’s covered in the post. Read on…

A couple of weeks ago Lauren Pressley shared some thoughts on a book she was reading titled “Everything is Miscellaneous” and there was a fair amount of response to her post (if you don’t have time to read the book, I left a link to a video presentation by the author).

In the same spirit of sharing what you’ve been reading I wanted to post about the book “A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future” by Daniel Pink. He begins by explaining how the brain works. In essence the left hemisphere and right hemisphere control different areas of the body. You probably already knew that. But when it comes to thought processes, not just body control, the two sides are very different. The left side produces what Pink refers to as “L-Directed Thinking”. L-Directed Thinking is sequential, literal, functional, textual and analytical; not bad qualities for a traditional librarian – we certainly are text-oriented. The other approach is the “R-Directed Thinking” controlled by the right side of the brain. R-Directed Thinking is simultaneous, metaphorical, aesthetic, contextual and synthetic. While L-Directed Thinking worked well for the knowledge age (think accountants, stockbrokers, computer programmers – and traditional librarians), Pink gives evidence that we are moving away from the knowledge age and into what he calls the “Conceptual Age.” Think of it like this. The coin of the realm in the knowledge age was an MBA. The new coin of the realm in the Conceptual Age is the MFA. To excel in the Conceptual Age, one must “become proficient in R-Directed Thinking and master aptitudes that are high concept and high touch”. After laying out this basic thesis Pink devotes a chapter to each of the specific aptitudes he says are necessary to be a success in the Conceptual Age – what he calls the “six senses”. They are: Design; Story; Symphony; Empathy; Play; and Meaning. [Note to DBL Readers – the chapter on design is inspiring but on a practical level there are a number of good ideas and resources at the end of the chapter for becoming more design oriented and thinking like a designer).

I commend you to read the book to learn more about each sense – particularly design because that’s an important skill for a Blended Librarian. But what really resonated with me when I read the book is how much of it reflected what being a Blended Librarian is all about. To my way of thinking, Pink could have subtitled his book “What You Need To Know To Be A Blended Librarian” – but then he probably wouldn’t have sold as many copies. For example, in the section on symphony, he talks about “boundary crossers”. A boundary crosser is someone who blends multiple skills into one profession. Pink says “while detailed knowledge of a single area (e.g., traditional librarianship) once guaranteed success, today the top rewards go to those who can operate with equal aplomb in starkly different realms.” Sounds to me like a good way to describe the importance of being a Blended Librarian.

So if you think of yourself as a Blended Librarian, and you really have been working to incorporate new skills from the areas of technology (computing, networking, software, teaching technology, etc) and design (instructional design, design thinking, etc.) into your traditional librarianship skill set, then you are probably also an R-Directed Thinker. You are probably ready for the Conceptual Age. But just to be on the safe side, pick up a copy of A Whole New Mind (well, the traditional librarian in me forced me to get a copy via ILL) and brush up on all six senses.

If you’ve read the book too – or when you do – please share some of your thoughts here.

I hope you enjoyed the mini-review of the book – obviously biased in some ways. But if you have in interest in Blended Librarianship you can learn more at the website (link in first paragraph). I would encourage you to join (no fee – and you can join by going to the Blended Librarians website) the Community and join us for the next Blended Librarians webcast (totally free) on Thursday Oct. 27 at 3:00 pm EST. John Shank and I will be giving a presentation on design thinking for librarians. To learn more and register (free – but you must register) join the Community and get more information on the “What’s New” page.

Creativity & Innovation, Design Thinking, Instructional Design & Technology

Playful Design

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Last month’s ALA TechSource’s Gaming, Learning, and Libraries Symposium (GLLS) transformed my thinking about library services and, in particular, my thinking about designing user experiences. During the conference, I was enthralled by speaker after speaker who described how games not only draw in hard-to-reach patrons, but how they inspire a greater level of engagement among those patrons. School children, for example, who resist cracking open textbooks eagerly consume lengthy, complicated gaming guides and spend endless hours trying to master new gaming skills. Why do they expend the extra effort? The answer, in part, is play.

 

According to James Paul Gee, GLLS speaker and author of the book What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, marketers figured out something that teachers and librarians have yet to master: sound learning principles sell complexity. In the case of games, those principles have been applied to play so that learning, in effect, becomes fun. It follows that if librarians were to apply some or all of these learning principles to designing library experiences, patrons would enjoy using the library and even become more likely to take on the complicated aspects of using our services.

 

Using play to encourage deeper learning is not a new idea in library circles. In her article, Play Matters: The Academic Librarian’s Role in Fostering Historical Thinking, librarian-extraordinaire Lisa Norberg proposes creating digital sandboxes full of rich primary source materials that encourage students to explore and have fun with the resources. Then, if they want, they can continue to learn more about how to locate them using library search tools. In doing so, librarians can engage patrons on an emotional level before “leveling up” to more advanced techniques.

 

What, then are the key learning principles librarians should apply to their services? Gee mentioned 12 during his talk at the Symposium, which I’m paraphrasing liberally here:

  1. Lower the consequence of failure. In other words, make libraries risk-free zones.

  2. Put learning before competence. No one is born knowing how to use a library so patrons shouldn’t feel as though they’re expected to be experts on their first visit.

  3. Make players/patrons co-designers so that their actions matter and make a difference. This could mean inviting patrons to make design decisions from the earliest planning stages to implementation.

  4. Order challenges so that they become progressively more difficult (like levels in a game).

  5. Arrange challenges in cycles. Players/patrons are given the chance to test a skill, perfect it, then move on to another challenge where they can build on the skill.

  6. Test players/patrons to the outer edges of their abilities so that challenges are not too difficult or too easy.

  7. Ask players/patrons to consider situations and relationships, not just facts.

  8. Foster empathy for a complex system (the library?) by making players/patrons a part of it.

  9. Give verbal information just in time to be useful.

  10. “Situate” meanings by enabling patrons to associate the meanings of unknown words and symbols within proper contexts. (As an example, Gee mentioned how difficult it is for students to learn Geology terms because they’re given word definitions for phenomena they have never personally experienced or have a frame of reference for).

  11. Encourage “modding,” or allowing players/patrons to change what they don’t like about a situation to better fit their preferences.

  12. Give feedback and assessment. (The Ann Arbor District Library knows just how important rankings are among gamers, which is evident in their popular tournament leaderboards).

Maybe it seems unrealistic to incorporate every one of these principles into all of our services, but it is striking just how few of them we seem to apply. As Lisa Hinchliffe pointed out in her GLLS talk, the OPAC, for example, is not reaffirming for patrons because it doesn’t let them know whether or not they conducted a successful search. If we employ the above principles to our OPAC including giving assessment, allowing modding, providing needed information just in time, and so on, we could improve patron’s search skills while making research more enjoyable.

 

When designing library services, play is a serious consideration. Play enhances enjoyment, encourages people to develop skills, improves learning outcomes, and forges emotional bonds between patrons and libraries. Thinking about how these 12 principles can improve our services is a good place to start for more playful library designs.

Ethnography, Uncategorized

Perhaps More Librarians Will Pay Attention To Design

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Last week the Chronicle of Higher Education featured an article that received a good amount of buzz in the library community. It was a profile of the ethnographic research study of undergraduates conducted by the academic librarians at the University of Rochester. What probably caught the attention of the library community was the novelty of employing an anthropologist to study the research behavior of students. I’m sure this was a radical new idea for many academic librarians, but it shouldn’t have been. This research project was a topic of discussion more than a year ago at the Blended Librarians Online Learning Community. In the sping of 2006 the Community featured a webcast on the UR project and our guests were some of the same folks mentioned in the Chronicle article (sorry, there is no archived recording – we were not allowed to record). I’ve also blogged about the project at ACRLog at least two times in the last year. So it came as a bit of surprise to me that this was all so new to librarians when the word has been out there for some time now.

I’m not writing about this to chastise my fellow librarians for not doing a better job of keeping up with what I’ve been writing about at ACRLog and promoting at the Blended Librarians Online Learning Community. I know it’s hard to find the time. Actually I am hoping that this article will bring more attention to the topics that we’ve been discussing here at Designing Better Libraries. We’ve brought your attention to the value of anthropological approaches to study user communities, and identified sources for learning more about using ethnographic methods of research. In fact I just came across another good article that features an interview with a designer at Nokia who talks about the role of ethnographic research in the development of their products. I hope the Chronicle article will get more librarians excited about the possibilities of new methods for understanding our users – and then using what we learn to design better library user experiences.

It would be a shame if those who read the article see the ethnographic research method as an end in itself and not just the first stage in a broader project to design a library that does a better job of meeting end-users’ needs. I can only hope a few of those who got enthusiastic about the article will find their way over to this blog where we are continuing the discussion and exploring how these methods are being used to create great library user experiences.

User Experiences

A Graphic Representation Of Creating Experiences

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Though it can be a bit difficult to read you may find this of “approach to creating experiences map” of interest. It was developed by David Armano of Logic+Emotion. In fact, he recently offered a gallery of his favorite graphics and you may find something there that is also useful for better understanding design and user experience concepts.

For librarians that ask how they can organize themselves to create an experience for their users, the graphic gives five steps for moving through the experience development process as a team. The key things I like here…”start with the customer” and “teams must experience it for themselves” are steps in the process that strike me as being essential to understanding the users and how they experience the library. Once we grasp that, then we may begin to develop a better user experience for them.

Creativity & Innovation, Uncategorized

Feed Your Hunger For Innovation Inspiration

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Innovation doesn’t always come easy. What if there were some ways to get the creative juices flowing to help stimulate innovation? You could take advantage of the occasional tips and suggestions that experts are sharing to promote the innovation process within individuals and/or their libraries. There are several innovation blogs and websites that can be just the thing you need. Here are some blogs worth exploring:

Ideas 108 – This blog is dedicated to providing you with a steady stream of creative problem-solving tips and techniques.

The Innovator’s Digest – Gerald Haman’s new weblog, which appears to be focused on helping to promote his new Innovation Tool of the Month Club. But it also contains weekly “question banks” that can help you to come up with creative ideas to help solve the challenges you face, and various posts on the value of creative problem-solving tools and techniques. It’s good to see you in the blogosphere, Gerald!

Think Differently – The catchphrase for this blog speaks volumes to me. It says “get ahead by doing something different — not what everybody else is doing or what you’d always be doing.” That seems like a great way to express what innovation is about, and to make things better this blog actually has a category for Design Thinking.

Innovation Weblog – a meta-index of the latest innovation trends, news, technology, resources and viewpoints. It covers topics including innovation research and best practices and strategies, innovation management, business use of Weblogs for ideation and collaboration, and much more!

Though I did a bit of browsing through innovation related blogs, these seem to be among the best. There are others. You can find more by checking the blogrolls of innovation blogs you discover. Of course, you may know of one not mentioned here. If so, share your innovation blog recommendation in a comment to this post.

Now you have no excuse not to raise your IQ (innovation quotient). 

User Experiences

Simplicity Is Not Merely The Absence Of Complexity

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There is an ongoing conversation in the library profession about the need to make things – our web sites, our OPACs, our databases – more simple. Simple is good. Pondering how the library profession finds a balance between simplicity and complexity has been an interest of mine for a number of years now. In several of my past talks I’ve made mention of the simplicity-complexity conundrum which challenges academic librarians. In a nutshell, the research process and library research databases (and using them) offer some inherent complexity, yet we dwell in a world where the quality of the user experience is often judged soley by its simplicity. How do we resolve the need for complexity with the desire for simplicity? I don’t quite have the answer, but I do like to read about this issue as it helps to better understand the issues.

So I was glad to come across an article from boxesandarrows titled “Simplicity: the Distribution of Complexity.” Author Rob Tannen offers his own views on the simplicity discussion, prompted by his reading of the John Maeda book The Laws of Simplicity (just 100 pages and well worth reading). Tannen’s argument is that it’s not possible to engineer simplicity into products by starting a pre-defined set of parameters (e.g., this webpage will only have 10 links and 1 search box). Rather his philosophy is that “true simplicity is determined by a set of decisions made during the design process that respect the nature of the subject being designed.” Sounds a bit nebulous, but Tannen provides some amplification with the primary focus on achieving simplicity by relocating or redistributing the complexity so that what’s left offers simplicity. 

*  Aim for redundancy in design over uniqueness. What functions are critical and should be made available to users in multiple locations? Make sure they are available in multiple locations so they are readily found.

*  Choose dedicated over multi-function controls. What are the features that users want to use immediately and repeatedly? Make that feature crystal clear to the user.

When making these decisions during the design process “user research methods (ethnographic approaches) guide design decisions for the appropriate balance and placement of simplicity…and the exposure of complexity to the end user.” The goal is to displace complexity so that it doesn’t detract from the users’ experience.

So can Tannen’s advice help librarians to resolve their own simplicity-complexity conundrum? I think it can help in two ways. First, we should be thinking about the simplicity-complexity balance during the design stage when developing web pages, instruction products or making interface choices. Where in the process can we relocate or redistribute the complexity? Second, we should accept that, as Madea writes, “some things can never be made simple.” We need to understand that our users will find some of our resources complex, and there may not be much we can do to design that complexity away. In such cases we may explore user education as a device for helping the user to overcome complexity. Accepting the inherent complexity of the research process and its associated resources may help us to stop debating whether we should simplify and how to simplify. Instead we should focus our efforts on the things we can do to design some simplicity, and stop wasting time on that which will never be made simple and instead focus our efforts on user education.

 

Creativity & Innovation, Design Thinking, Uncategorized

Put The Focus On Design Rather Than Innovation

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A recent ALA program featured a debate on innovation, and sought to answer the question “Are librarians and libraries innovative?” That’s certainly an interesting question, but I would pose that it’s the wrong question to be asking. We could argue whether librarians achieve sufficient levels of creating or adopting new technologies in an effort to develop new services or reach new end users of library services (I’m thinking more deliberately about how I use the word “patron” these days). We might further explore the rates of technology diffusion to better quantify the time it takes new technologies to achieve implementation in library settings. A past post of ours pointed to an article that suggested there are multiple levels and forms of innovation, such as incremental, evolutionary and revolutionary innovation. Examples of libraries demonstrating all three forms of innovation are available.

But this question of whether we should even be asking about innovation at this point is inspired by a recent post by Bruce Nussbaum over at Nussbaum on Design (highly recommended). The gist of his post is that business executives must move from conceptualizing design as just being about interiors to a mentality better informed by design thinking. He says that “design goes way beyond aesthetics…that it is a method of thinking that can let you see around corners.” Rather, Nussbaum suggests, these executives prefer the term “innovation” because it has a masculine, military, engineering, tone to it.”

I agree with Nussbaum that it’s time to move past the discussion about being innovative. Based on the recording of the ALA program, at least the parts I listed to, everyone has a different perception of what innovation is and how we might recognize or measure it. Is it just taking risks? Just trying new things to see what sticks? Adopting a new practice for your library, even if it has been done to death elsewhere? What we should be asking or debating is not “Are librarians innovative?”, but “Are librarians ready to become design thinkers?” Here’s how Nussbaum describes that:

Design and design thinking – or innovation if you like – are the fresh, new variables that can bring advantage and fat profit margins to global corporations [sb – or more passionate end users to libraries]. Being able to understand the consumer, prototype possible new products, services and experiences, quickly filter the good, the bad and the ugly and deliver them to people who want them – well that is an attractive management methodology.

Nussbaum goes on to say that a significant trend we must pay attention to is social networking. Librarians have been doing just that, but have we been doing so to the appropriate end? Most of our efforts, it seems, are focused on creating outposts of the library within social networks. But Nussbaum points out that the critical factor is listening to our users and understanding what they have to say. People increasingly want to design their own products, services and experiences, or at least have those who do design them understand what is desired. So I would advocate that rather than worrying about whether we are innovative or not, we should be focusing our attention on how well we apply design and design thinking to better understand our users and create environments that deliver great library user experiences. I think our users care more about that than how innovative we are.