Tag Archives: trust

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.

Professional Development, User Experiences

Library Workers Make Libraries Better – Together

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Far too often we associate the quality of our libraries with our collections. We may allow our collections to define us in the minds of our community members. I was recently reminded of this while viewing the presentation Scott Walter gave as part of the OCLC Speaker Series. Based on Walter’s editorial in the January 2011 issue of College & Research Libraries, it takes up the issue of what makes an academic library distinctive. All too often the distinction is based on physical collections. For example, my own library at Temple University seeks to promote the uniqueness of its collections about Philadelphia’s history in the 20th century. We promote this in our literature, and we plan programs and displays around this collection – as well we should since it’s an amazing wealth of content that we are proud of and eager to share with the global community. Walter’s argument is that we should be equally adept at developing and promoting distinctive service programs. It’s just harder to do.

Whether it’s collections or services, creating those that gain recognition for being distinctive requires distinctively good library workers. That’s what we hear too little about. With collections, you need good people with the right expertise who can spot materials that will fit an existing collection of distinction or serve as the basis of a new one. Luck or timing are factors that can bring an unexpected collection to the library, but more often than not it is the result of patient and persistent relationship building – and knowing where to make the effort. Creating library service programs of distinction, to my way of thinking, is much more dependent on enabling teams of library workers to develop unique ideas, then figure out how to fund them, invest the time in creating them, get support for implementing them and then evaluate and determine how to improve them. Collection builders may beg to differ, but for me creating and sustaining these services of distinction is the more challenging of the two. No doubt though, both are ultimately about the library’s human resources.

Based on presentations I’ve heard over the last several months, along with case studies of companies that excel at user experience design and delivery, I’m convinced more than ever that dedicated, motivated and committed staff are the key to better libraries. It’s also become more clear that it is the administration’s responsibility to provide the necessary training, educational opportunities and development that enables the staff to excel. In the tension that exists between control and innovation, the administration needs to move more towards innovation and away from control to empower staff to use their expertise to make the libary better. There’s no point in having great people if the administration ignores their great ideas, and is unable or unwilling to afford staff the freedom to try some of these ideas – and potentially have them fail.

It’s not enough to just have great staff – and even if your staff is good or just all right – it is even more important to get them working together. No lone genius or solo maverick is going to create services of distinction. That’s why Jason Young’s keynote for the ACRL President’s Program really inspired me. Discussing concepts from his book Culturetopia, he provided a primer on how to get people working together. If they can’t work together or, even worse – work against each other, the library gets worse not better. Young talked about the human elements that cause staff to have problems that work against team performance. Key among them are the tension and stress that people experience in their professional and personal lives. One antidote is training and development. The other is improving administrator performance when it comes to leadership and team development.

As I listened to Young I wrote this note: “I want to be the type of leader that people are enthusiastic about working with – they want to be on the team.” Young’s advice for leaders: don’t micromanage; listen; be aware of how your gestures contradict your words; make team members accountable; lower the tension by finding out what staff are doing right and reward it. Perhaps his most important point for building teams of great library workers is that gifted leaders are able to figure out what individuals’ strengths are and can then help staff build on them rather than force staff into areas where they are less competent. Need examples of what good teams can do make their libraries better? See the 28 examples of innovative, team-based projects that were submitted for the ACRL President’s Program Innovative Teamwork Competition.

Young shared his years of experience at Southwest Airlines as a corporate trainer and team builder. He emphasized the importance of helping employees build trust in one another. Simon Sinek amplifies and elaborates on that theme in this presentation “If You Don’t Know People You Don’t Know Business“. Establishing trust is critical to building great workplace teams. According to Sinek trust emerges in two ways. First, we have common values. We trust the people who share our world of experience. Second, we trust the people who believe what we believe. That’s why authenticity is so critical, says Sinek. We practice authenticity when we say and do the things we actually believe; they are the symbols of who we are. These are the signals we communicate to others who will then decide if we share common beliefs – and if we do then we have the basis for a trusting relationship.

That’s why we need to pay attention to this Project Information Literacy report (see pg. 7). It tells us that when students seek resources for course-related research they consult instructors 83% of the time, friends 49% of the time, and librarians only 30% of the time. The students don’t perceive librarians as sharing their values nor believing what they believe, so there’s no trust – and if you don’t trust someone you don’t seek them out for help or take their advice – you ignore them (RE: Sinek’s story about making the decision to buy a televison). Listen to Sinek’s presentation, especially the part (about 19-minute mark) where he talks about what really gives us fulfillment in our work. It’s not when we do something great. It’s when we help someone else do something great. It’s when we are generous and help someone else, expecting nothing in return. That’s the nature of a great team, when we help each other to achieve a single goal that is more important than ourselves. Sinek has advice for leaders similar to Young’s: The goal is not to fix others’ weaknesses; the goal is to amplify their strenghts and surround them with the people who can do what they can’t do. When team members find their common values and beliefs, and they begin helping each other to achieve that common goal, you know its going to make the library better.

There are other good examples out there. We can learn from businesses that invest significant effort on staff training so employees develop common values and beliefs. Joe Michelli’s book The New Gold Standard is all about Ritz-Carlton Hotels and how from day one each employee learns the common set of values and beliefs – it’s all documented and shared throughout the organization – and no surprise there’s a chapter dedicated to building trust in the workplace. Or this article about the Pret A Manger. A common set of values and beliefs among staff can lead to great service, whether it’s a luxury hotel or a fast food chain like Pret A Manger. According to the article “Pret has managed to build productive, friendly crews out of relatively low-paid, transient employees. And its workers seem pretty happy about it. Its annual work force turnover rate is about 60 percent — low for the fast-food industry, where the rate is normally 300 to 400 percent.” It’s all based on staff training and development.

No doubt we would all want to do everything we can to help our library workers be their best, knowing it would contribute to a better library. The challenge is in finding the time to create and implement the staff development programs that make it possible. Here, I don’t have the answers, but I do believe there are good models out there and hope to share more about that in the future. So much of what I’ve been reading and watching of late focuses on the importance of library workers and the necessity of building trusting relationships throughout the organization, from the administrative offices to the front line service desks. If we fail to build this culture of trust, if we fail to establish a common goal in which we all believe and work towards, then we have little chance of creating the great teams of library workers that make libraries better. That’s ultimately what leads to libraries of distinction.