Perhaps the most basic premise for delivering a great library user experience is knowing what members of the user community want from the library, and being able to articulate their service expectations from the library. Then, using that knowledge, the librarian’s responsibility is to design an experience that delivers on those expectations and exceed them [...]

“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 [...]

Last week the Chronicle of Higher Education featured an article that received a good amount of buzz in the library community. It was a profile of the ethnographic research study of undergraduates conducted by the academic librarians at the University of Rochester. What probably caught the attention of the library community was the novelty of [...]

We’ve highlighted articles on ethnographic research a few times here at DBL for good reason. It is becoming more widely recognized as an approach that designers will use at the beginning of their research into understand the design problem. Before solutions can be developed it’s important to understand how one’s user community is experiencing the products and [...]