Category Archives: User Experiences

Experience Design, User Experiences

A Jobs-To-Be-Done Lens As a Path to Better Experience Assessment

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For many patrons, library interaction could be reduced to a “jobs-to-be-done” methodology. If that is the case, how could librarians best leverage that perspective to design services that are “get-jobs-done” focused and then measure how well jobs-based outcomes are met?

We’d need to start with a “jobs-to-be-done” approach – at least for the jobs where community members have a well defined sense a perfectly completed job.

Community members’ most common library job-to-be-done that requires an on-site visit is to borrow a specific print book or physical media item. Online, the acquisition of a specific e-book, journal article, streaming video or other collection item is a frequent job-to-be-done. For these types of jobs, most library users will take a self-service approach. If our systems are useable and predictable, reasonably fast and efficient, the result ideally is a “job completed perfectly”.

Currently, I would venture to state that most libraries operate on an approach that is more hopeful than capable of consistently delivering on perfectly completed jobs. In the absence of assessment methods that tell us the extent to which our systems – basically “us” since we create/deliver and maintain them – succeed, fail or fall somewhere in between.

In his article “Measure Customer Progress Using a Proven Jobs-To-Be-Done Methodology” Tony Ulwick gives a concise explanation of how a customer would determine the success, on multiple levels, of their job completion. It can be stated as simply as this:

Customers believe they have made progress when they are offered a means to get a job done better and/or more cheaply.

Ulwick suggests using a “progress” lens through which to examine the job-to-be-done approach. He then elaborates on different dimensions on which customers determine progress.

  • Get part of a job done better.
  • Get an entire job done without having to cobble together disparate solutions.
  • Get a job done with a single product.
  • Get multiple jobs done with a single solution.
  • Get a job done more cheaply

Using a library example, consider a community member who has a book title and wants to obtain it. If the library holds the book and it’s readily available, a single product, the library catalog, should get the job done easily. But locating the book is only one part of the job. Another system, such as a self-checkout machine is needed to complete the job. Things get exponentially less simple if the library doesn’t have the book. The community member might stop there and head to Amazon, but if their job demands free access then that member may be willing to pursue an interlibrary loan. How many members, outside of the experienced ones, will even know where to start that process?

When designing user experiences, I think it would be of value use the jobs-to-be-done lens to approach services as those that can be designed with user progress in mind. That is, the community member should easily determine if their job exemplified progress. Another set of job-to-be-done, the ones we know require more intensive support, should be designed with the expectation for human intervention and relationship building. That way libraries could maximize their limited human resources to prioritize where staff enable community member progress.

Another consideration is that community members sometimes come to the library not knowing exactly what job they need to get done – and expect to receive help from library staff to figure out what it is. I’m thinking of students I’ve encountered who have an assignment in hand but are not quite sure what they are supposed to do. You might say their job-to-be-done is simply to find out what to do, but there are times when librarians can get beyond just a task or transaction – in fact that’s what we should hope to do most of the time.

Ulrich also shares ideas for how measure if customers are making progress towards getting their job done. He suggests using three dimensions: speed (how fast), reliability (consistently free of errors/failure) and efficiency (little or no waste of time or resources). Too often community members use their library and there is no measurement of their success in completing their job-to-be-done.

I like the “Outcome-Driven Innovation” process that Ulrich recommends. I can envision a fast and easy online assessment where library customers would use a sliding scale, from “Job Not Completed” to “Job Completed Perfectly” to identify how well the library allowed them to accomplish their job. Outcomes are based primarily on speed, reliability and efficiency, but their could be human dimensions as well (e.g., friendliness, welcoming approach, compassion, etc.).

I can imagine asking community members to complete a quick, sliding scale assessment (likely conducted on a tablet or via a follow up email) for measuring how well the library supported the completion of their job-to-be-done. It would not provide an in depth explanation, but would at least be a start to achieve a reliable and consistent method to measure how often we enable community member progress – or fail to live up to their expectations for achieving it.

User Experiences

Creating the “Hyper-Relevant” Digital Library Experience Will Require Trust

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Librarians have at one time or another attempted websites that allow community members to personalize the digital library experience.

One experiment that comes to mind was conducted at North Carolina State University, circa 1999. MyLibrary allowed a student or faculty member to customize their library home page.

It certainly seemed like a cool idea at the time. For one reason or another it never caught on. Perhaps the community members were fine with the existing page and found little added value in taking time to set up a personalized library home page.

I suspect personalization technology is now far more advanced. We can probably offer some even cooler forms of customization. The cost it comes with is privacy – and earning consumer trust.

In an article about consumer digital experiences at Digital Content Next, Michelle Manafy writes “Today’s consumers are more worried about data privacy than they are about losing their income. At the same time, they expect increasingly personalized digital experiences.” If fear of giving up too much personal data is what kept MyLibrary from catching on, then the “the more things change the more they stay the same” speaks volumes.

Manafy points to user studies that claim the majority of consumers are willing to share their data with companies – but with a caveat. First, they want something of value in exchange for giving up their data. To me that sounds like some sort of rewards system where consumers earn points redeemable for free goods and services. Second, it only works if the system is completely trustworthy.

In an age of data breaches, just how much can consumers trust corporate data systems? They could hardly be blamed for having doubts.

There’s also a considerable difference between “MyLibrary” and today’s personalization. It’s called “hyper-relevance”. It’s more than just allowing your community members to customize what appears on their library web landing page. What makes it hyper-relevant? It’s always on. It is a dynamic type of personalization, constantly changing to reflect the user’s latest activity and always evolving.

What might that look like for a library? Let’s say a faculty member’s Research Information Management system profile changes to reflect a new interest or collaboration. The hyper-relevant website would adapt itself to accommodate that change and immediately start serving up relevant content.

Here’s the catch. Hyper-relevance requires hyper-data collection. Here’s how Manafy describes it:

Data gathered from website visits, social media posts, or previous purchase histories will not suffice. Rather, what’s needed is information that is much more personal in nature—such as health data transmitted via wearable biometric technologies. Needless to say, that’s getting highly personal. And when things get that personal, the potential rewards go up immensely. However, risk also rises.

Now that may require a level of technology not yet found in most higher education institutions. But with rapid technology change and the type of data available about students and faculty, it’s hardly farfetched.

Achieving hyper-relevance requires three actions on the part of those seeking to build hyper-relevant digital portals:

1. Look beyond the traditional customer journey. Get creative about what this new world of personalization could make possible. Just miss your flight? What if you immediately received an email or text providing all the possible options – and making it easy for you to pick. While the hyper-relevance system is at it, why not rank the options from best to worst (let’s say using “hassle-free” as our rating criteria).

2. Rethink data to the point where users have full control over it at every touch point. Hyper-relevance will absolutely require predictive analytics based on the latest user information, behaviors and preferences. As stated above, it will also require a level of data security that wipes out the possibility of data breaches. Otherwise, how can data trust be achieved. In a world where hackers are constantly upping their game, this is no easy task.

3. Trust is the key to it all. Delivering on the hyper-relevance personalization experience means establishing a level of trust between data owners and data collectors that just doesn’t exist right now. The first organization that can deliver on sustainable data security, especially when handling the type of data needed to drive hyper-relevance, may be able to build the type of trust that makes it all work.

It’s exciting to imagine the type of personalized experience that a hyper-relevant library could deliver. In our current environment, with many librarians expressing their privacy concerns about big data, analytics and other services that depend heavily on collecting and manipulating community member data, hyper-relevance will be a tough sell. It also requires getting students, faculty and community members on board and feeling totally comfortable sharing the type of real-time data on which hyper-relevance depends.

My guess is that we’ll be looking to the business world to see how this hyper-relevant digital experience scenario evolves. If it works there and the necessary level of trust can be built, then it may be that librarians would find their community members expecting a similar hyper-relevant experience. We should try to be ready…just in case.

Higher Education, User Experiences

Delivering an Amazon-Like Experience

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Does your library deliver an Amazon-Like Experience?

Assuming we even knew what that was, would that be the experience you’d want to deliver at your library?

“Amazon-Like Experience” is a phrase that is relatively new to me. I first encountered it when reading a higher education newsletter and came across this article.

Out of curiosity I did a Google search to see if “Amazon-Like Experience” is an actual thing. While “a thing” is probably not the best way to put it, there are certainly a number of references to the phrase. One comes away with the impression that “Amazon-Like Experience” is some sort of user experience gold standard.

What is the experience? If you’ve ever used Amazon – probably everyone reading this blog has – you have a good idea. Convenience. Ease of Use. Vast selection. Quick problem resolution. Usable and user friendly website. Overall, it’s an experience that is tough to match.

According to this article on online education, “Amazon has set the standard for eCommerce engines. Non-traditional, adult learners, expect an Amazon-like experience since they are searching for, and purchasing, courses online.” Granted, user expectations are definitely shaped by high-quality experiences received at both brick-and-mortar and online retailers and service providers that excel at user experience. But when we say that someone is expecting an “Amazon-Like Experience” what exactly do they want? What does it look like?

Start with ease-of-use. Literally anyone can use Amazon with a single instruction or prior knowledge. We talk about an experience being based around “the jobs to be done” and Amazon allows users to do their jobs with a minimal number of clicks. They can find what they need and order it quickly. There are features galore that allow users to see past activity, to identify future purchases or have items recommended to them.

There’s no question that for online retail, Amazon sets a mighty high bar for user experience. Most library search systems, from the local discovery layer to the largest global database, are currently far from an Amazon-Like Experience. That said, Amazon is a good model in many ways for great online learner experience. Except for one thing.

I’d venture to say that most Amazon customers feel little personal connection with the company. It can be a challenge to get personalized assistance when you need it. Problem resolution is quite good, but sometimes human intervention is needed and that can be difficult to get with Amazon. If that is also part of the Amazon-Like Experience, then librarians can do better.

That said, Amazon is branching out into brick-and-mortar retail with its Whole Foods acquisition and the establishment of some physical bookshops. If Amazon can develop the Amazon-Like Experience at their physical locations, that may give entirely new meaning to delivering an Amazon-Like Experience. I suspect Amazon will seek to make sure it’s physical experience is every bit as Amazon-like as what its customer have come to expect.

Engagement, Experience Design, User Experiences

Planning Experiences Around Moments

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When I received an email a few weeks ago from Chip and Dan Heath, I was pretty excited by the news they shared.

It announced that after several years since their last book, Decisive, a new one was on the way. For a fan of their books, that’s already great news. But it gets even better. The subject matter of this new work has me eagerly awaiting the book.

What topic did the Heath brothers decide to write about this time? Experiences!

That alone would be incredible for someone, like me, who is student of user experience. As an added bonus, Chip and Dan Heath are exploring the “moment” and the power of a defining moment. This resonates strongly with me because my leadership book is based on this idea of the importance of moments, which I refer to as crucible moments.

In the email they described this new book, titled The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact, this way:

Research in psychology teaches us that our memories of experiences are not like films that we can rewind and watch beginning to end. They are more like snapshots or snippets. Fragments. In memory, we cling to particular minutes or hours that rise above the surrounding weeks and months. What makes those moments so memorable and meaningful? That’s a critical question for anyone who wants to improve the experiences of others: the customer experience, the employee experience, the patient experience—not to mention the experience of your kids. Because what you’ll soon discover is that when we talk about “experience,” we’re really talking about moments. Moments that serve as peaks in time.

I’ve written about the link between experiences and memory previously at DBL. We not only remember things differently from what actually happened, but we selectively remember parts of our experiences more powerfully than others.

The tendency is for people to remember how the experience begins and how it ends more strongly than other parts, which is why we want to design the experience so it gets off to a good start and ends on a high note – particularly the finish because that’s an opportunity to recover from anything less memorable or negative that happens after the start.

The book’s intent is to both help us to understand the important of these defining moments to the success of an experience – and to develop insight into how to design them into experiences so they are more likely to occur. They define “defining moment” as “a short experience that is both memorable and meaningful”.

Those are two word that figure prominently in numerous DBL posts. Is it possible for librarians to create user experiences that are memorable, meaningful and that build emotional connections with community members that lead to loyalty? With help from the Heath brothers, we may learn more about how to do this.

I finished reading chapter one (a preview sent only to those on the Heath mail list) and I’m eager to learn more about the four elements that go into creating a defining moment: elevation; insight; pride; connection. As with other Heath brother books, based on this first chapter, it should be immensely readable, chock full of stories and examples (these are the guys who wrote Made to Stick) and offer takeaway ideas that you can put into practice.

After I read the book, I hope to have more ideas to share on how we can create defining moments for library user experiences – but I hope other librarians will read it as well – so that we can come up with even more ideas for designing better libraries.

Engagement, Experience Design, User Experiences

There’s a Reason Why Eye Contact and Smiling Improve the Experience

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It is almost a cliche for good customer service in libraries.

Smile. Make eye contact. Signal to the community member that you are engaged and eager to help.

We want our community members to feel like they are the most important person in the world in that moment.

Let’s treat them as if they are world famous.

Have you heard that one before? It sounds good. It certainly would communicate to a staff member that their job is to give each community member their undivided attention, to allow no distractions to interfere and through our verbal and non-verbal gestures to deliver the best possible experience.

And if we do that well, again and again, they will return and tell friends about the good vibe they get at the library.

I stole that “treat them as if they are world famous” experience statement.

It’s actually the experiential brand statement that the Pike Place Fish Market in Seattle came up with when they were working with Joe Michelli on their statement. That’s how they wanted the experience to feel for the customer. That’s the experience they decided to deliver on – and we all know how that turned out.

Of course, it helps if you can come up with something clever and interactive, like having your customers throw and catch fish. That doesn’t translate particularly well to a library.

So what can librarians do to treat people as if they are world famous? How about more eye contact, smiles and nodding.

How would that make a difference you ask?

According to Baruch Sachs, in the article “How Smiling and Nodding Affects Our Interactions“, it can make a significant difference and leave community members perceiving library workers as more trustworthy and deserving of a relationship. That could turn a routine transaction into a memorable experience.

Sachs shares his own experience with smiles and nods as critical elements of an interactive exchange. But what he’s learned about these actions is more than just anecdotal. “There is plenty of research out there to back up the notion that our small gestures are important—not least in the area of building trust. Sometimes building trust takes just a smile and a nod.”

With computers, tablets, handheld devices and other distractions at our library service points, it’s easy for library workers to fail to quickly and adequately acknowledge another person’s presence. According to the research Sachs references, when subjects in a social experiment received no acknowledgement from a stranger they felt disconnected and rejected. It only takes a small trigger or gesture, such as a smile, nod or eye contact to avoid communicating rejection and establishing a foundation for rapport.

That sounds like the exact sort of aura I want to give when a stranger approaches me to ask a question, whether it’s just giving directions or assisting with a more complex research question. In a way, these simple gestures are a microcosm of user experience for the entire library organization. The totality of a library user experience fails if it is unexceptional at any service touch point.

If I, as an individual library worker, fail to connect with a community member through my lack of appropriate gestures or inattentiveness, then everything else I do from that point on in the interaction could fail as well. My smile, eye contact or welcoming nod gets things off to the right start by building that basic trust needed for a relationship to happen – even if that relationship exists only for the time in which we engage at the service point.

Library workers in public service contact points need to recognize that their behavior has a significant and contagious impact on others. That’s why our service principles document, in the “five steps of service” starts off with “make eye contact; give a greeting; share your name” and then in step two states “be in the moment; eliminate distractions”. These reinforce Sachs’ message about establishing trust (which just happens to be step three).

Delivering on a well-designed library user experience is no easy task. Simple gestures like eye contact and smiling, on the other hand, are among the easiest things any library worker can do to contribute to the totality of the library experience.

Happiness, User Experiences

Happiness or Meaning: A Library Experience Can Deliver Both

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Achieving happiness and meaning are two different things.

Different, but not necessarily mutually exclusive. It is possible to have an experience that results in happiness but also contributes to a life of meaning.

Finding and borrowing a book from the library could certainly qualify. For those who enjoy reading, finding a good book at the library could certainly deliver some happiness. Depending on the book, it could have a mind opening, life altering impact that contributes to an individual’s search for meaning.

It helps to have a better understanding of what we mean when talking about both happiness and meaning. What contributes to each? What have researchers learning about happiness? How would we know if a community member has a meaningful interaction with the library?

In this article I shared insights into what researchers have learned about happiness. While material objects and money can deliver some happiness, those things tend to have only a limited impact.

It’s really the small things that count. Helping others. Enjoying a walk. Memorable experiences count too. Do these experiences also deliver meaning, or is there more to it than just satisfying the search for happiness?

The answer is…it depends.

According to Emily Esfahani Smith, author of the new book, The Power of Meaning: Crafting a Life That Matters, finding meaning trumps experiencing happiness. On further inspection, the two have some commonality between them.

Esfahani identifies four pillars of meaning:

* sense of belonging – being in a relationship or a member of a community
* purpose – having a mission and pursuing it
* storytelling – your story; who you are; where you are from; where you are headed
* transcendence – resilence; having the ability to overcome adversity

You start to get the idea that the difference between the two is about direction and effort. Happiness is about something happening to us versus meaning being about making something happening for others. Esfahani states that “the big distinctions between a meaningful life and a happy life is that a meaningful life can be a hard life. When you’re giving back, you’re making sacrifices.”

In that sense, the library is a place that can serve to facilitate both happiness and meaning. If we are seeking some happiness, we can get it at the library. Finding a good book and enjoying reading are the type of small, everyday pleasures that bring happiness. I don’t think that Esfahani thinks there is anything inherently wrong with seeking happiness. She just wants us to transcend happiness as we pursue meaning.

And the library is a place where it can happen. It’s a place you can belong to and be a part of your community. It’s a place where you find and pursue a mission. It’s a place where you can discover your story. It’s a place where you transcend the ordinary and the meaningless.

Happiness or meaning? Why choose when you can find both at the library.

User Experiences

UXF: Where’s the Friction at Your Library

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No. I did not make a spelling error. That’s “friction” not “fiction”.

I know you know where the fiction is. But you may not know where you’re adding the friction to the library user experience.

Friction is a UX terminology that basically means you are doing something to screw up the user’s experience. It’s not what it ought to be.

That could be anything from a web page design that adds steps to a transaction to poorly designed signage that makes building navigation more difficult.

Here’s a more formal definition of UXF (user experience friction) from The Pfeiffer Report:

User Experience Friction is basically anything which separates the device we use from that ideal user experience: we all KNOW what User Experience Friction (UXF) is when we experience it, (although of course UXF may represent something completely different for every one of us.)

On the most basic level, UXF is the slow-down or friction that occurs when the user experience of a device deviates from our expectation or knowledge – and it can occur in every are of our life. If you rent a car that magically has reversed the side of the blinker on the steering wheel of the car, we experience friction: where the hell is the blooming thing? When you press the wrong button in an elevator because it is badly labelled: UXF again.

Poor design is an obvious cause of friction, but it also happens when human agents perform below expectation. Even if my rental car has great design and everything is exactly where I expect it to be, if the customer representative misplaces the keys or botches the rental process that friction is going to slow me down and detract from the entire experience.

I suspect you can point to contributors to friction at your library as easily as you can find the fiction. Some may be things that are broken, accidentally or intentionally, that need fixing. For those less obvious friction points, can you find them and then grease them up to create a frictionless experience.

Perhaps we can all learn something from Amazon’s friction-killing tactics.

Start by determining what category of friction you are dealing with. According to Kintan Brahmbhatt, who has designed and developed product strategy for Amazon’s music service and Alexa, there are three:

Friction due to unfamiliarity. A customer’s first-time experience with your product automatically contains friction when they don’t know how to use it. This is one of the biggest hurdles to get over when launching a new product.

Friction by design. There are times when you have to intentionally build friction into a product. If your product has a learning curve, you’ll have to design that experience thoughtfully.

Friction due to misalignment with human behavior. Here’s where design can come back to bite you. Poorly placed app controls, failing to anticipate how consumers will use the product and badly designed navigational tools will cause this.

Library workers are most likely dealing with the third type, where library design accommodates our view of the world but fits poorly with the way our community members would most naturally use the library and its systems. For example, library catalog messages. “In transit” or “Request from Depository” may mean something to a librarian but it’s likely to leave a community member scratching their head wondering what to do next. It’s not the language they expect.

Brahmbhatt offers several tips for how to discover, as he puts it, “where friction hides”. Some of the ethnographic research suggestions, such as observation techniques and scanning social media, may be familiar to you. He says “Think about friction as the simplest way for your user to get where she wants to go…Reducing it is about creating a path of least resistance” that maps closely to that easiest route users naturally take. Once you find your friction, try these steps to eliminate it.

* Reduce Anxiety: Too many options create uncertainty and confusion, but unclear options are equally bad. Eliminate ambiguity about what will happen after users make a choice and the associated fear that they will lose time and/or effort if they make the wrong choice. When community members head to the stacks, they shouldn’t worry about getting lost, wasting time or having to return to ask for assistance. Pathways to content should work the first time.

* Remove Avoidable Steps: Make a list of all the decisions a community member would need to make in order to complete a task. Whenever possible, eliminate an unnecessary decision or pre-select for the user. For example, a library catalog could automatically present only the books available on the shelf – which is usually what community members want. The system could then prompt “Do you want to see books that are already on loan or at other locations?”. That eliminates the avoidable step of scrolling through books that are not immediately available – not to mention unneeded trips to the stacks because the community member failed to notice a book’s location is a distant branch.

* Mitigate Context Switching: This happens when a community member has to navigate away from your website to complete a task. That often leads them to abandon the task. This is a challenge for libraries owing to the use of third-party systems where community members are switched to external databases. Brahmbhatt offers some methods that may or may not work for context switching problems. As much as possible, make it easy for the user to switch back to the original site location.

Brahmbhatt acknowledges there are situations when friction is inevitable. Then, do what is possible to mask it or use design to make that action more tolerable (e.g., a spinner or progress bar; offer human support at known friction points). Do what is possible to make the community member’s journey more pleasant. Got a pothole on your road? Consider filling it and smoothing the trip. We know what to do and sometimes how to do it.

Brahmbhatt offers straightforward – and even familiar – suggestions for how to both identify and eliminate friction. Do we have the desire and willpower to use these friction-killing tactics? A good first step is looking around your library and at supporting systems, observe and spot friction points and then resolve to eliminate anxiety, avoidable steps and context switching. You know fiction. Now it’s time to get serious about user experience friction.

User Experiences, Visual Communication

Creating a Conversational Library Search Experience

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When people encounter a library search system as a novice or relatively inexperienced library user, say the online catalog or a database selection list, they often have little idea what to do to find needed information.

It’s an observation I’ve made throughout my library career. Now I am hearing this from student workers who are doing more initial reference triage at our main service desk. They comment on the inability of their fellow students to perform even the most basic search of our systems.

And they know that it’s us – not the users – that have a problem.

That’s why I have a growing interest in conversational user interfaces (CUI).

It makes good sense. Instead of expecting a user to intuitively know what to do – especially when many of our systems are hardly intuitive – allow them to accomplish their task in a more nature way, through a conversation. Unlike current library chat systems that are manned by humans, CUIs make use of chatbots.

If you have yet to encounter a chatbot you probably will soon. Commerce websites are increasingly using conversational search interfaces. Want to buy a pair of shoes but need some help. Chatbots will try to help you get to the style, color, size and price range you seek – and help to navigate to the end of the transaction.How about ordering a pizza. A chatbot could engage you in a conversation about what you ordered previously, ask what your current order is, ask for your credit card information and more. Domino’s is already using a conversational interface for mobile ordering.

Image of a pizza restaurant mobile phone ordering interface
One example of a chatbot in use by Pizza Hut

How might this technology work in library environment? The applications that come to mind are mostly basic transactions with fairly limited options. For example, renewing books. We already have a way for our community members to do that online. Yet we still see to many of our members who continue to bring their physical books back to the library to renew them.

We want to save them time, but the systems fail to support our efforts. I can imagine the library home page asking “What Do You Want to Do Today?” Then type in “renew my books”. That would start the CUI transaction with the chatbot leading the community member through the process. If the question is more complex and there’s no pre-built conversational path, it is directed to a human.

Taken a step further, if the technology grows in sophistication, it might even be adapted to database searching. Take it a step beyond that, and given voice-recognition technology already in place in tools like Amazon’s Echo, and you can imagine search systems where you simply ask it to find content on a given topic. I can ask my phone to find me the nearest library. Why can’t I ask my database to find me articles on open leadership style.

I’ll be looking for more CUIs that I can try but for now, for more on conversational UX take a look at:

https://uxdesign.cc/ux-trends-2017-46a63399e3d2#.qri5fwl9r

https://medium.com/chris-messina/ux-of-bots-e565fb7c4d4e#.7y6hfb7mu

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/600766/10-breakthrough-technologies-2016-conversational-interfaces/

Research Studies, User Experiences

When Libraries Don’t Provide Value

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Librarians of all types, but especially academic librarians, know how important it is to communicate how the library adds value to the community. Librarians increasingly aim to gather data and stories to demonstrate, both quantitatively and qualitatively, that the library contributes to the success of community members – and does so in different ways to deliver what community members need.

While there is general agreement within the profession that establishing the library’s value is something we all need to do, there is likely less agreement on exactly what value is and the best ways to gather and share the appropriate evidence to support claims of value.

One way to better communicate the value libraries provide is to understand how our community members would define value and then build the capacity to explain our value on their terms.

Research by two customer strategy consultants has identified 30 things that could be described as components of value. While the authors of “The 30 Things Customers Really Value” acknowledge that what constitutes value can vary from person to person, they believe their 30 building blocks of value cover most fundamental human needs.

Looked at this way, how many of those components of value do our libraries deliver? Assuming there is capacity to deliver on only a limited number of different types of value, what do we then prioritize? With only limited resources how might we transform our efforts to deliver value of great meaning to most of our community members – the ones that give them the greatest reward.

The authors identified four categories of values. At the base of the value pyramid is functional value. These are fairly basic services such as save people time, simplify things for them or facilitate their organization (think the Container Store).

The next highest order value is emotion. When a company like CVS offers wellness services or Disney offer fun experiences it appeals to our sense of emotional well being. When community members express affection for their library (e.g. “I love my library”) that signals an emotional connection. Engaging community members in ways that connect them to our libraries emotionally provides a unique value element.

Beyond emotion lies life changing value. Educational organizations offer the value of acquiring new skills or abilities that can lead to life changing opportunity. Offering a community to which members can belong is valued by those who with to be a part of something bigger then themselves – and it can be life changing. A library literacy program volunteer achieves life changing value by contributing to an organization that does change lives and improves the quality of the community.

At the top of the value pyramid is social impact. There is only one value associated with this category, self-transcendance. This is comparable to Maslow’s self-actualization on the hierarchy of needs. Few of us achieve it, and far fewer organizations can deliver this type of value.

TOMS is a shoe company that donates shoes to charity for each pair purchased. It provides value to its customer by making a social impact. Consumers see value in contributing to world betterment, as much as that is possible with a shoe purchase. It is within the realm of possibility to believe that libraries can move community members along the path of social impact by contributing to the betterment of lives through education, offering a safe place and community improvement.

My big takeaway from this HBR blog post and the longer article on which it is based is that when it comes to value delivery, libraries that seek to design for a better experience must go beyond just talking about value, as in “our library brings value to community members”. Noble ideas and statements don’t deliver value.

Programs and services with linkages to the value pyramid do. We need to be more explicit about what that library value means, how exactly we deliver value and to intentionally design for value delivery.

If librarians are unable to articulate what elements of value they provide to the community – and exactly how it is accomplished – then perhaps we don’t provide value. And when we do say we provide value we need research to confirm what we do and how it brings value to the community.

Since no organization can promise all 30 types of value, the authors recommend targeting those values that would be most important to community members based on their expectations. Then intentionally design operations to meet or exceed delivering on those values. We can also be clear on values that we are unable to offer, such as supporting profit making or offering sensory appeal.

What might that look like for a library?

Functional Value: 1) saves time; 2) informs; 3) connects; 4) reduces effort; 5)organizes

Emotional Value: 1) Provides access; 2) Wellness; 3)Fun/Entertainment

Life Changing: 1) Provide hope; 2) Affiliating/Belonging

Social Impact: 1) Self-transcendence

You might argue with some of these choices, but it appears that we mostly deliver functional value. That’s worthwhile, but like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Need, how do we deliver higher levels of value that get community members emotionally engaged with the library?

Let’s continue to deliver cultural programming that invites community members to engage with authors, local artists or faculty research. Let’s be the unique community resource that offers stress-busting programs, such as therapy dogs or on-site massages. Let’s offer educational opportunities, such as literacy and reading appreciation programs, that can be life changing for community members.

Then there are those ways in which libraries deliver value just by being what they are – collections of information and community centers of knowledge building. Libraries provide access to collections that alone can create both life changing experiences and opportunities to explore and discover a self-transcendent path.

I am reminded of the story of Marla Spivak, who during her TED Talk on bee colony collapse, shares how she originally became interested in bees – which led her to become one of the world’s most prominent bee experts. She tells the audience that she was in the library one day as a teen, found a randomly placed book about bees, and just picked it up for no particular reason. The rest is history. Her story encapsulates all that we need to know about the types of value that libraries can deliver. Libraries can change lives. Libraries do have social impact.

Research Studies, Service Design, User Experiences

Staff Expertise Makes A Difference

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If there was one thing you wish everyone in your community knew about the library that you believed they needed to know – and didn’t – what would that be?

That you had hundreds of thousands or even millions of books from which to choose? That you had private study rooms and seven different types of chairs and desks? That an interlibrary loan article can be had within 24 hours? All good things for community members to know, but I believe the answer would have little to do with those material resources and everything to do with your staff.

I want our students and faculty to know that our staff members have expertise to help them save time by reducing the effort spent searching for the content. Then they can better invest their time in study, analysis, writing and completing their knowledge products. Whether we are referring to a librarian subject matter and research expert or a staff member who can help find just the right video segment, the core of the library experience – the product we can deliver – is staff who make a difference with their expertise.

Where the experience is most apt to suffer is when staff members lack the appropriate skills and fail to adequately meet the information needs of the community member. This is a significant problem in the retail sector because if the store representative fails to answer the customer’s questions there is a loss of confidence.

In response the customer is likely to look elsewhere, mostly online, for the answers. If and when they are obtained, an online sale will likely follow. Thinking back to the Great Retail Shopping Experiences of North America, one of the most significant customer expectations was “executional excellence” which means:

Having product knowledge and the ability to patiently explain and advise while providing unexpected quality

So what are brick-and-mortar retailer’s doing to prevent the loss of sales to online competitors? Two words: staff training

That sounds like an old, time-tested concept. If staff are expected to gain the expertise needed to achieve executional excellence then the experiential leadership must develop and implement an effective staff training program.

This is critically important for those retailers owing to the showrooming behavior of consumers. According to research shared by Knowledge@Wharton in their post on “Want to Stop Retail Showrooming? Start Training Your Staff“, physical retailers need to offer sales expertise at a level that simply is beyond anything online sellers offer. Four things matter most:

* highly visible staff that are eager to help
* staff that are highly knowledgeable about the products
* staff are able to immediately deliver what the customer wants
* transactions that proceed smoothly with minimal wait time

Among these four things the hardest to control for consistent quality is highly knowledgeable staff. The post goes on to explain how even a limited amount of staff training can lead to increased productivity and improvements in the service experience.

The lead researcher, Marshall L. Fisher, professor of operations, information and decisions at Wharton, believes the value of staff training goes beyond helping retailers challenge showroomers:

I think it’s broader than just retailers. I think it applies to lots of service industries, that if you have an associate who is dealing with one of your customers, you want that person to be talented and engaging. And you want that customer to have a good experience.

From his team’s extensive research on the impact of training to improve staff’s executional excellence Fisher concluded:

If your sales associates are well-trained and can answer customers’ questions knowledgeably, that’s one weapon in your arsenal against showrooming. I think customers often times don’t intend to showroom, but end up shopping online because they get better information online than they’re getting in the store. Retailers can defend against that through better training of their sales associates.

Many library staff find it off putting to think of themselves as selling anything and would hesitate to take away lessons learned from research on retail sales associates. But time and again I hear library workers gripe about community members who are unaware of all the services and support the library offers. Yet those same members are intimately familiar with ways to obtain information via online Internet resources. Perhaps we would do well to think of ourselves as sales associates with something much better to offer our community members.

Our problem is somewhat different. We need to get community members into our showroom so we can show them what we can do for them and all that we have to offer. What’s similar is that executional excellence can be the key to turning a community member into a passionate library user who has established an emotional connection with us.

Let’s not underestimate the value of providing the training needed to develop staff who are truly the information experts in the community. When we do encounter community members at any library touchpoint, we can’t afford to lose a single one because we failed to demonstrate the high level of knowledge about our products that community members expect to receive when they shop or receive a service.