Category Archives: User Experiences

User Experiences

Libraries Can Learn From WoW Providers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

User Experiences

What’s Your EBS?

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

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

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

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

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

User Experiences

Join A UX Book Club

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

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

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

User Experiences

UX: Strategy, Flow & Affordance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Design Thinking, Ethnography, User Experiences

Designing the premier group study experience on campus: The Georgia Tech Library, 2West Project

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“I just hope you guys don’t screw it up.” That is what a concerned student shared with me about an ongoing renovation in my library. The construction crew is at it right now, tearing apart a very popular floor— an area that has largely been untouched for over forty years. I hope we got it right too.

I’ll be honest, our Second Floor looked horrible. The picture above doesn’t do justice to how off-putting the space truly is. The colors, the tiles, the chairs, the lighting—it’s a terrible mess…. and yet, night after night it seats hundreds of students. Night after night it is one of the most exciting places in our building. Sure our East and West Commons look more appealing and are home to hundreds of students, but there is just something intrinsic about our Second Floor that draws students together. There is something special and natural about rows and rows of open tables.

Despite everything it has working against it, the space works. That’s why I take that student’s comment so seriously. Our goal was renovate without disturbing the core ecosystem that existed.

There are a lot of great articles, books, and stories out there about designing new learning spaces. (Maybe Steven and I will do a ’10 things to read’ post next month on this theme?) At Georgia Tech we used many of the techniques that are becoming quite common:

·     Focus Groups

·     Interviews

·     Observational Studies

·     Polling

·     Surveys

·     Design Charrettes

·     Photo Diaries

·     Mind Mapping

·     Open Forums

·     Furniture Demos


But there are several things we did that are a bit unique. I’ll touch on them briefly:

 

·         We started with a mission statement: “let’s build the premier group experience on campus.” That was our goal. That’s what we studied. How did groups function? What did they need? Where else did they study? What all did they do to finish their assignments or tasks? Once we had a sense of these groups dynamics, then we could start talking about reshaping our space.

 

·         During the Spring Semester (2008) I had to evacuate my office due to a major HVAC renovation. I decided to use this time as an opportunity to immerse myself in the culture that I was studying. Arming with a laptop and my cell phone I “lived” for several hours each day in the library’s public spaces. I encountered their experience: The good and the bad. The noise. The furniture variety. The power supply issues. The printing. The supportive energy and excitement. All of it. There is a lot of discussion these days in the library profession about ethnography and observational studies, and that is good, but my takeaway was that just watching and talking to users isn’t enough. Living, working, and going native was a tremendous benefit for me—not only with this project but for a richer understanding of students and their library usage. It’s one thing for us to talk about the library, but another to actually use the spaces and services that we provide.

 

·         One of the most important tools we used was an online message board. As we gathered data via various methods, such as surveys or focus groups, I posted the findings for users to comment. This kept us honest. It also gave more people the opportunity to participate. This was helpful for exploring abstract concepts, such as workflow and aesthetics, as well as more concrete matters like furniture and equipment needs. It was also a good method for displaying potential floor plans and collecting feedback.

·         Storyboarding was another technique that we applied to the process. There were a number of user segments that we focused on, creating a social narrative around them and how they used the area. What was good, what was bad, and what was missing? How did students discover the space? How did regular patrons vs. occasional patrons use the space differently? What is it like at night compared to the afternoon? What is it like when it is totally full and you’re searching for a table? What about when it was completely empty? How did people meet up there? How did they feel when studying together? What was the conversational flow like? How would they react if we setup the tables and chairs differently? These might not be the typical questions asked, but for us this was very enlightening. I found that having stories, instead of just statistics, to be extremely more helpful in understanding the culture and how they interacted.

·         We also relied heavily on prototyping. We started with a blank sheet of paper and asked students for sketches helping us to imagine “the premier group study space on campus.” We also trekked outside of the building to observe other congregation spots. And we looked at examples of imaginative learning environments to help us further brainstorm. After soaking this up we produced six core concepts and tested them thoroughly with faculty, students, and library staff. This was done with individuals, small groups, as well as online commenting. Working through the feedback, we mixed and matched, turn and twisted, and finally arrived at two layouts that seemed on point. Both had their merits and flaws and the final design was a combination of the two.


This effort took us a long time, but I feel it was worth it. The student newspaper noticed our work and wrote a favorable editorial in which they stated:

“Allowing student input in the environment where they learn is an exceptional idea that will hopefully create positive results both in the design and in the study habits of students who use the space”

So did we “screw it up?” I don’t think so, but we’ll find out. The Second Floor is scheduled to reopen in late August. We’ll see how all the ideas translate into the physical space. For my part, the process was invaluable. I learned a lot about assessment, about students, about libraries, and myself. I know it sounds corny, but this project was transcendental for me. I didn’t just approach it as “I’m doing assessment so that we can renovate the library” but rather in the manner of “I’m changing the way people worked together.” I really tried to focus on redesigning the experience, instead of just redesigning the space.

More project details here.             Design Charrette Video

Design Reviewgt_feedbackgt_focus1gt_furn_demogt_mapgt_map2gt_story

User Experiences

Three Ways Libraries Can Be Different

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In a recent post I discussed the importance of differentiation to the process of designing a user experience. So how exactly could a library differentiate itself from other providers of information such as Google, Wikipedia, YouTube and even Twitter – now being touted as a search engine? In the minds of our user communities the library may already be differentiated, but not in a good way. The library is likely perceived, in comparison to these other services, as being mostly about the printed book, less convenient and less technologically sophisticated. While the library is less convenient – quality research does takes time – it certainly is about far more than books and many are innovating with technology. How do we eliminate the negative differential factors and replace them with more positive ones?

In this post I’d like to suggest three things we librarians can do to position the library as substantially different from those other organizations that gather information for retrieval:

* Totality
* Meaning
* Relationships

The good news is that most libraries already have some areas of their operation that deliver a good user experience. It may be a service desk where the customer service is outstanding. Or the experience of getting from the front door to the stack location where a needed book is found is pleasantly unexpected; let’s face it, many people probably look forward to finding books in the library as much as they do a visit to an IRS audit. The challenge in designing a library experience is achieving totality. That means delivering a good experience, one that really exceeds user expectations, at all the points where the user touches the library. That includes using the library website, the online catalog, getting a DVD, finding today’s edition of the local paper, and much more. But think about your library. Do users have a great experience at all of these touchpoints or are many of them broken? Admittedly, with limited resources it’s unlikely any library could eliminate everything that’s broken, but we need to think in terms of a total experience and doing what we can to make sure as much as possible works well and blends together for maximum totality.

Meaning is a vague concept. What exactly does it mean to deliver a meaningful experience, and wouldn’t every person have a different sense of what is meaningful to him or her? As you go about designing a user experience that seeks to deliver meaning to members of your user community I suggest that you first read the book Making Meaning: How Successful Businesses Deliver Meaningful Customer Experiences. To help the reader better understand how meaning can be delivered the authors relate a study of thousands of individuals around the globe who were asked what creates meaning for them. Fifteen attributes of meaning were identified. As I read about them I see many types of meaning that libraries and librarians deliver every day: accomplishment; beauty; creation; community; enlightenment; freedom; truth; wonder. We help students accomplish academic success. Libraries help people discover beauty through books about art and nature. We provide information that helps researchers create new knowledge. Libraries are a cornerstone of their communities. In all these ways libraries bring meaning to people. What we need to do better is harness this power and integrate it into a well-designed experience. The current economic crisis, in which individuals are shifting their priorities from materialism to meaning may be a time of great opportunity for libraries.

Creating relationships with members of the user community comes naturally to librarians. I don’t doubt that nearly every library worker has established some great relationships in the course of their careers. The building of relationships intersects with providing meaningful experiences. For many individuals a relationship is a source of meaning. Of the many different resources people might use to acquire information only the library can provide a real relationship. Someone Googling for the population of Switzerland doesn’t get disappointed because he or she has no one to make a personal connection with at Google. The same goes for libraries. Not everyone needs a relationship for every library transaction. But the more often library workers can reach out to the user community and establish even a small personal connection, that can make a difference. Creating relationships requires that we understand our users and their concerns, and identify the commonalities between their issues and our own. For example, both faculty and librarians share the goal of wanting students to achieve academic success, stay matriculated and graduate on time. Shared goals like these can serve as the foundation for building a relationship.

Creating a total user experience, creating meaning for others, and creating new relationships are all hard jobs. It’s easy to camp out in the library waiting for users to come for help. It takes little effort to answer their question propmtly or politely direct them to the microforms section. What does take considerable effort is getting out of the library and into the community in order to better understand the users and their needs. Seeing the library from the user’s perspective and trying to identify and fix what is broken is hard work as well. But I think if we can do these things it will be well worth the effort. In the long run it will help to differentiate the library from all those other information providers, and being different is an important step on the long road to designing a better library user experience.

User Experiences

Differentiation Is At The Core Of The Library Experience

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I hadn’t thought much about the the differentiation factor being an important component of a library user experience until I attended a presentation by Bill Gribbons, a user experience consultant to industry. He made a good point. In any industry where it has become difficult to compete on price, quality, speed of delivery or any other factor where all the competitors are perceived as relatively equal, establishing differentiation is a competitive strategy. Think about it. If people searching for information perceive all sources the same in terms of the quality of the information, why should anyone bother to make use of the library’s information resources. If there’s no difference between the information I can get from a Google search, a Wikipedia article, a request for help from my Twitter followers or any other web-based service – and all of them require less work and effort than a trip to the library – what’s the compelling reason to use a library at all?

Identifying how the library can differentiate itself from all the other services that provide access to information is a critical challenge in designing a library user experience – and if we can create that differentiation it may help us attract a new generation of library users. But a recent study reports that the ability of companies to differentiate their services and products is on the decline. Consumers find less differentiation in the marketplace and more mediocrity. What exactly is differentiation? You probably know it when you see it or experience it, but what is the quality of being different? According to a post on differentiation at the Branding Strategy Insider blog it “exists on the basis of a product or service owning values – real or perceived, rational or emotional – that occupy a place in the consumers’ minds beyond the consumers just being aware of them”. I like that definition because it is based on having some core values that the consumer recognizes on some level and that in their mind sets that product or service apart from similar products or services. As Gribbons stated in that presentation, building a user experience starts with having a clear set of core values and understanding what your business is.

The BSI post then comments on the Brand Keys analysis of nearly 2,000 products and services in 75 categories in which consumers were asked for their response or reaction to them. What this created was a continuum on which the products and services were placed based on their degree of differentiation. The study found that only 21% of all the products and services examined had any points of differentiation that were meaningful to consumers. Gribbons made a good point. There is far less differentiation between products and services (there was a 10% drop in this benchmark since 2003), and those who can really differentiate their product or service are likely to attract more consumers with a unique experience. You can read this blog post to learn more details about the study and the four categories of differentiation (commodity, category placeholder, 21st century differentiated brand, human brand). One important detail is that the differentiation factor can really vary between industries. Among bar soaps of all things there is 100% brand differentiation. But in banking and 20 other categories there are no differentiated brands. People may know the name but they find nothing particularly different about that company, product or service.

I have to wonder if the study included the information industry and companies that are search engines or information portals. Perhaps not, but it would certainly be interesting to learn more about whether there is any perceived difference in these services as sources of information. In a future post I’ll focus more specifically on the three things I think our libraries can do to differentiate themselves from other information providers.

User Experiences

Managing The Higher Ed User Experience

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A better library experience in an academic institution would hopefully be part of a more holistic and superior experience designed to provide students with an overall learning experience. That experience would be memorable, different and would encourage students, if asked, to indicate they had received a superior educational experience. But if the experts at Bain and Company are right “80% of organizations believe they deliver a superior customer experience but only 8% of their customers agree.” Not good.

So we all need to do a better job of creating an environment in which our community members – many more than just 8% – believed they had a great experience at our institutions. According to Robert Sevier, writing in University Business, great experiences don’t just happen. There has to be intent. A superior customer experience has to be designed or managed as Sevier likes to put it. In his article “Managing the Experience” Sevier shares ideas on how organizations can move from just letting experiences happen to actively designing them.

Right at the start Sevier makes an important point that we’ve also made here at DBL: user experience is not the same thing as customer service. He says “experience management is much more strategic and begins with the big question: Are we offering the right experience?” But it’s more complex than that because the student college experience includes “the academic experience, the campus life experience, the resident life experience, the athletic experience, and myriad others.” That list would also include the library experience. In fact, in research conducted by Sevier’s firm they discovered 13 sub-elements of the academic experience. The library is on that list.

You could also think of the library experience in the same way. It is made up of sub-elements: circulation; reference; study space; media services; and more. Each sub-element is a touchpoint in the total user experience, and according to Sevier improving the touchpoints most essential to the community can dramatically enhance the overall experience. As you might expect with a design process, identifying what the “right” experience is depends on understanding the community member. Sevier recommends focus groups and individual interviews. Once the touchpoints are identified Sevier offers tips for how to create the right experience.

* Pay special attention to the boundaries between touchpoints; that is where the “broken” stuff happens when no one knows who is responsible. A student gets confused going from the reference desk to the book stacks. Who helps, the desk or stack attendents? We should know if advance how to fix that.

* Best practices are there to borrow from, but from time to time remember to invent.

* Remember that if it cannot be measured, it cannot be managed. What are the metrics for determining the quality of the experience?

* Assign responsibility and authority for each touchpoint to a single person.

Sevier makes a good point though. It’s important to have the right experience well defined and to know all the touchpoints involved. He also points to the importance of engaging, equipping and empowering the people who provide the experience. It’s critical for organizations to acknowledge or reward the individuals who make the experience happen. Put it all together and you’ve taken a step away from letting an experience (probably a bad one) just happen and moved towards designing the right experience for your library and academic institution.

Events, User Experiences

Fish Toss Fun In Seattle

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If you want to get across the message that differentiation is an important concept in designing a user experience, then it would make sense to have a conference presentation about UX that is well differentiated from the rest. I think my fellow presentation panelists, Valeda Dent and Brian Mathews, and I did a good job of that at the recent 14th Annual ACRL Conference in Seattle. Rather than starting out by wading right into the basics of user experience we decided to start off with a fun – and relevant - activity for the crowd. If you attend the ACRL Conference, well, starting off a program with something fun and interactive would definitely be different.

Our program was titled “If Fish Markets Can Do It So Can Academic Libraries: Designing Memorable Library Experiences for Faculty and Students“, and we presented on a Sunday morning at 9:00 am. So we definitely wanted to kick things off with something different to get the audience engaged. After a quick start-off story about George Eastman’s Kodak camera and a “the experience is the product” message we jumped right into a 30-second video of the action at the Pike Place Fish Market in Seattle.

We used the metaphor of the fish market experience throughout our session, and tried to get our audience to think about how they could create experiences at their libraries.  At the end of the video we jumped right into the first ever ACRL Fish Toss Competition. We invited four of our audience members to the front of the room to try their hand at throwing fish. Of course our fish were just stuffed bean bags, but everyone got the connection with the fish market. We were a little worried about getting volunteers, but loads of hands went up. I guess it didn’t hurt that we were offering some t-shirts and Starbucks cards to the participants.  You can read more about the fish toss and the session here.

Obviously a good deal of behind the scenes planning went into the conceptualization and implementation of the program, right down to the timing of each activity and each panelist’s presenting time. But the time spent in advance paid off. I’d like to think that we delivered a unique and memorable conference experience for our attendees. At least one of them plans to make it a discussion topic in his library. Perhaps you will too.

User Experiences

Fidelity = The Totality Of The Experience

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When I first read Kevin Maney’s discussion of “the Fidelity Swap” I have to admit I was puzzled by his use of the word “fidelity” as a way to describe a user experience. I thought perhaps there was a certain meaning of fidelity that I somehow overlooked. But the closest I can come is the use of fidelity to describe the accuracy or overall effect of audio or images. High fidelity is superior to low fidelity. So a high fidelity experience would be superior to a low fidelity experience. Maney takes it beyond that though. He describes fidelity as the “the total experience of something.” Confused yet? Perhaps the simplest way to express it is that high fidelity represents a complete and all encompassing experience. This idea of fidelity resonated with me because I have previously observed that while WOW experiences are valuable, UX needs to involve a totality of experience. It needs to encompass all that happens in the library.

Somewhat opposite or contrasting to fidelity is convenience. Think of convenience as things that are simple, easily available and at a cheap price (which makes it accessible). According to Manley the most successful products and services are at either end of the spectrum. They are super high fidelity (iPhones, Cirque du Soleil) or super high convenience (text messaging, convenience stores). His advice is that you should never try to be both high fidelity and high convenience.

Take Starbucks for example. Their coffee experience was high fidelity but when they tried to add high convenience by adding many additional outlets (well ridiculed here). That strategy was a serious setback for the company. He also observes that advances in technology and innovation push the boundaries of  fidelity and convenience further out over time. For example, music CDs  and players surpassed the fidelity of cassettes and their players. CDs were then surpassed by digital music.

Not that libraries were ever sterling examples of high fidelity, but they were certainly surpassed by the fidelity and convenience combination offered by Internet search engines. I would not describe search engines as high fidelity owing to their lower quality and inconsistent results. But for most people they are high on the convenience spectrum.

Maney suggests that we can chart the most successful products in any industry with something he calls the Fidelity Swap. Those top products are either super high fidelity or super convenient. Keep in mind that fidelity is a mix of both tangible and perceived quality. I played around with the Fidelity Swap in an attempt to chart libraries and search engines – two players in the information retrieval industry.

 

A fidelity swap chart for different products and their UX
A fidelity swap chart for different products and their UX

Because of actual convenience and perceived quality I believe that a search engine like Google could very well defy Maney’s caution against being both high fidelity and high convenience. For college students Wikipedia could be an even better example of high fidelity and high convenience.  According to a recent paper from Project Information Literacy students overwhelmingly visit Wikipedia to start their research. So how do libraries fare? I’d put libraries high up on the fidelity scale but given what we hear from users it’s difficult to justify a high score on the convenience scale. The library could have a convenient location. The library could offer everything for free. It could make access to resources convenient. But what ultimately drags the library down are the databases and the challenges associated with using them to find information. Search engines have permanently altered the end user’s perception of perceived quality. 

Whether you think about it as the totality of experience or fidelity, our libraries need to keep in mind the Fidelity Swap. It should remind us that users judge the experience we deliver on multiple levels. If we can’t be as convenient (free, easy to get, easy to use) as search engines perhaps we should take Maney’s advice and aim for high fidelity and not worry about convenience. It all comes down to thinking strategically about how and where we position ourselves in the information industry.