Some bad news came for two large retailers at the end of 2011. Sears Holding Corporation, the parent of Sears and K-Mart, announced that it would close 100-120 stores across the United States. With some 4,000 outlets, this amounts to just a small percentage of the total stores. Unlike most of our libraries, retail stores will close if they fail to attract enough customers. As the Sears/K-Mart example demonstrates, even those identified as “marginal performers” will be targeted for closure. Marginal isn’t good enough in the retail industry. Whether it was owing to the bad economy, too much competition, poor selection and service at those stores or other factors, it is tough to survive in retail.

That’s why retailers are often at the forefront of innovation in finding better ways to attract and delight customers. The retail industry was a source of innovation for Commerce Bank (mentioned in the prior DBL post), leading to new services in the banking industry, such as being open 7 days a week and introducing other customer conveniences. While libraries are not subject to the same constraints as retail stores, they can emulate Commerce Bank by following developments in the retail industry. I recently came across several articles of interest that could yield new ideas for libraries that want to offer a better user experience.

For starters you could explore some of the trends sighted in the retail sector that reflect new ideas in attracting customers and giving them a better experience in the store. In the article “Brand New World” Martin Pedersen shares a number of trends he spotted. In major cities the pop-up trend is catching on among restaurants, but now established retailers are giving it a try. Using the cosmetics firm Aesop as an example, Pedersen shows how retailers can get beyond the same look as every other store in the mall. Consider that counters are composed of old newspapers stacked upon one another. Aesop’s president said that “People want to be stimulated visually and intellectually, and our signature stores offer an element of surprise and discovery.” As always, try to be different, and retail may provide some clues on how to do just that. Department stores are innovating by making every level a different experience, not merely two floors for women, a floor for men, another for housewares, etc. A multi-level library might feature one floor as the technology experience with hi-tech everything, while the next level might be the no distractions zone (no cell signals, no wireless, no computers). Take a look, and read more about “secret locations”, another intriguing idea.

While it’s fun to find out what’s happening on the physical side of retail, exploring the latest strategies for reaching the customer is a fine complement. Some contemporary strategies, such as expanding into China, won’t hold much promise for libraries (although reaching out into new territory within your community is always a potential growth strategy), but the post “New Retail Strategies: Offering a Better Fit for Today’s Careful Consumers” offers ideas librarians might want to consider. Wharton marketing professor Jerry Wind summed up the most important retail strategies right now: create excitement; tap into social networks; allow individuals to customize their own product;empower customers to influence the product producer. Consumer behavior is being permanently changed by online retailing. They expect to have great control over the process, from having wide selection, to competitive pricing, to getting reviews from the crowd. How do librarians offer a competing experience, or at least one that meets the basic expectations? The key strategy for the retailers is to try to stay connected to the customer as much as possible. That may explain those daily email announcements from all the online retailers with whom you’ve done business. The key strategy is to understand the customers and offer them a service operation that meets or exceeds their expectations.

If you wanted to learn how cool retail works, you’d go to an Apple Store. If you wanted to understand the thinking behind the Apple Store you’d go to the guy that made it what it is. “Retail Isn’t Broken: Stores Are” is an interview with Ron Johnson, who designed the Apple Stores, and here he provides the Harvard Business Review with an inside look at the Apple Store concept and his plans for transforming J.C. Penney department stores into a solid competitor for the consumer dollar. The big takeaway for me is Johnson’s recognition that those who serve the public need to be about more than mere transactions:

A store has got to be much more than a place to acquire merchandise. It’s got to help people enrich their lives. If the store just fulfills a specific product need, it’s not creating new types of value for the consumer. It’s transacting. Any website can do that. But if a store can help shoppers find outfits that make them feel better about themselves, for instance, or introduce them to a new device that can change the way they communicate, the store is adding value beyond simply providing merchandise. The stores that can do that will take the lead.

Replace “store” with “library” and “merchandise” with “content”, and you get a better picture of what Johnson tried to do at Apple. It’s all about creating value beyond the transaction. He says “the Apple Store succeeded not because we tweaked the traditional model. We reimagined everything.” He goes on to provide examples of how Apple Stores provide that value. There’s much more here that will inspire you to take a closer look at what Johnson is up to at J.C. Penney, and when you do you’ll see he’s a big believer in the power of building relationships, being a differentiator and and leading the customer.

Examples of good experiences and models for innovative service delivery will be found in a variety of industries, but these three articles demonstrate that librarians have much to learn from the world of retail. I’ll leave you with a suggestion to check out this slideshow to see more examples of how retailers are taking new approaches to reinvent how they connect with their customers. The rest is up to us.

One of my job responsibilities at the Temple University Libraries is to serve as the official complaint department. That’s right. The complaints and suggestions are funneled to me. I investigate each one personally or will assign a staff member to look into it. We explore what went wrong and then work to resolve the problem or at least acknowledge it and explain the issues – and when appropriate acknowledge where we failed and what we will do to improve.

Of course, at one time or another most every library worker who connects with members of the user community will hear complaints. It may just be about the lack of paper towel in the bathroom, an improperly imposed fine or the lack of open computers. Many of these complaints are resolved on the spot, or staff will do their best to avoid having a minor problem become a major issue. I always encourage my front line colleagues to refer any one with a complaint to me. I enjoy the challenge of turning a community member from someone who is angry at us into someone who becomes an advocate for us.

By advocate I mean a person who will actually promote the library in the community. We can do all the marketing and promotion we desire, but there’s nothing quite like building a base of loyal advocates who will be energized enough to tell their friends, colleagues and others how great the library is and what it has to offer that can’t be had elsewhere. How about when the library experience we deliver is mostly negative? What do we create when we fail to deal effectively with complaints? Badvocates – that’s the opposite of an advocate. A badvocate may be a chronic complainer who has nothing good to say about the library, but more likely the badvocate is a community member who just had a bad library experience that’s going unresolved. The problem is that the badvocate goes out of their way to spread negativity about the library to the rest of the community or beyond. We all know that members of the user community are much more likely to complain than praise, so it demands extra effort to avoid bad experiences – and we must respond quickly because the word can be spread rapidly via social media.

I first encountered the term “badvocate” in this Mashable post titled “Deal with Negative Online Sentiment About Your Brand” and it immediately resonated with me. The author, Maria Ogneva is the Head of Community at Yammer, where she is in charge of social media and community programs. She spends a fair amount of time dealing with badvocates and trying to prevent them from rising up. She provides three main causes of badvocacy, and you know they happen in your library:

* Inconsistency across channels and touchpoints – this happens when library users have a great experience with one part of the operation but a far worse one at another service point. For example, receiving great service at the desk, but then getting lost in the stacks and finding no one who can help. Or a staff member confirms by phone that a book is available but when the patron arrives the book is impossible to locate.
* Inconsistency with expectations – you know the feeling; you get information off the library website or from a staff member, and then the reality falls far below what was expected. That leaves community members feeling bitter and hostile.
* A negative relationship with library staff – all it takes is one low-morale, uncaring or angry staff member to create that negative relationship. I recently stayed at a hotel and every single employee went out of their way to build the positive experience. It was refreshing to receive such attention, but I was quite sure it was the result of extensive staff development and designing a consistently great experience that helps to avoid negative relationships.

What Are Your Badvocates Saying About the Library? (source: Extractable.com)

You probably know who some of your chronic complainers are, and you also monitor various social networks to see what’s being said about your library. What can you do when someone is trashing your library and its brand? Sometimes the immediate reaction in the library is to dump the complainer into a bin we call “difficult patron”, “problem patron” or what a co-worker once call her “MOP File” for “most obnoxious patron”. This always bothered me because even though there are some individuals who you can’t please no matter what you do, the odds are that whatever is causing the complaint is something that’s broken in our operation.

That is why the first response or action, according to Ogneva, is to “understand who your badvocates are, what they are saying and where they are saying it. The process is about listening, much like finding anything using social media”. That’s the first step in the IDEO design thinking process. Before you attempt to solve any problem, first identify what the problem is – and that often happens when you listen to the person complaining about your library. Beyond properly understanding your badvocates and the root causes for their issues, here are some other strategies recommended by Ogneva:

Reach out – Reach out and acknowledge their pain. Most problems get resolved quickly because the person just wanted someone to talk to.
Respect privacy – Know when to take the conversation private. After the initial public tweet, you should reach out in a private channel to really dig in and see if you can make a difference.
Offer an individualized solution – In customer service, there’s no “one size fits all,” because each case is different. Offer an individualized solution, which may require you to work with the right people within your own organization.
Don’t let it stew – Address sources of conflict quickly. Because most people just want to be heard, cared for and helped, the faster you can reach out, the more likely you will prevent the situation from festering.
Never make it personal -If and when conflict escalates, never make it personal. Never attack the person, even if he or she attacks you personally. Keep the conversation focused on the issues.
Take action, close the loop – Communicate back to the customer what has been done, or how soon to expect something to be done.
Never lose your cool – Just like you shouldn’t make things personal, you should never lose your cool. Choose your words wisely.
Watch advocates come to your rescue – If you have done your job cultivating advocacy, in an online conflict, your advocates will come to your rescue.
Treat them equally – Make sure you don’t just help badvocates with high influence scores. Every distressed customer is a potential badvocate.

But why get to the point where you need to utilize these strategies to turn your badvocates into your advocates. The best defense against badovacy is a great library user experience. As Ogneva says, “Just as badvocacy is caused by bad user experience, advocacy is caused by excellent experience.” She goes on to say that “Advocates are created when there is a two-way dialogue around their need, and users have a direct input into the future of the product.” Her final piece of advice for creating advocates is to “humanize the brand.”

This makes excellent sense and reinforces what I’ve said previously about making the library about the people who work there and their relationships with the community. If the public only sees the library as a building with books and a website with links to databases, what’s the harm in telling your network how much you hate it and how badly it sucks; it’s not like anyone is being hurt. If members of the user community have experienced the library as engagement with humans they are less likely to be critical and are more likely to see the library as a place where they can take up their problems with people like themselves.

If you have a story to share about turning one of your badvocates in to an advocate – or other ideas for dealing with badvocates – please share it with a comment.

Two things happened this past week that stood out for me as signposts that more librarians are becoming familiar with the user experience concept. It is mixed news. It is good that more librarians in all spheres of the profession are gaining awareness about library user experience. What is not so good are the signs of skepticism and misunderstanding about library user experience. Even with the ups and downs, it is encouraging that a broader group of colleagues is engaging in the conversation about user experience.

The first was a discussion over at Friendfeed. A librarian I follow (Nicole Engard) had re-tweeted something a conference speaker (Aaron Schmidt) said during a talk about UX which was quoted as: The future of libraries isn’t a book mausoleum; it’s providing EXPERIENCES. This ignited an interesting conversation because at first there was some offense taken to the “book mausoleum” reference – given that books still are and will continue to be an important part of the experience for many community members. But then it morphed into a conversation about user experience, and that’s where the skepticism appeared in the following types of statements:

“I don’t want my library to give me an experience”; “the experience thing is overblown”; “I am firmly against the experiences movement”; “what I have seen around “experience” in libraries has to with what seems like a relentlessly retail-centric model of what kinds of experiences we should imitate and foster”.

That’s just a sampling. Do keep in mind that these quotes are out of context, and that those who wrote them raised good questions and made good points. I am fine with the skepticism and lack of enthusiasm for user experience when I come across it. That’s because it challenges me to work harder to find better examples and to write more effectively in sharing what I know and believe about the value of designing better library user experiences. While I believe in it, I don’t think everyone else has to, and if there are colleagues who have no interest I’m not about to try to convert them to the accept the gospel. But I would like them to at least better understand what library user experience is really about, and not simply write it off as a business fad, an effort to mimic Starbucks or Zappos or even worse a ploy to psychologically manipulate community members. Here’s what I added to the conversation:

It’s true that no one goes to the library for an experience. But once you get there and use it, you’re going to have an experience. The experience starts as soon as you walk in the door. What are you smelling, seeing and hearing? Is the carpet dirty? Did anyone say hello to you? Make eye contact? Acknowledge that you exist? Was the reference librarian attentive – take an interest in your question? Very helpful you say. What happens when you get lost in the stacks or the person checking out your book is having a bad day? Maybe looking up the book on the OPAC frustrated you. Every single thing that happens is part of your library experience. Good experiences are not random – or if you don’t pay attention to the experience and just let it be random – then bad things can and will happen to degrade the experience. UX isn’t about trying to copy what malls do or Disney or Las Vegas. It’s about being thoughtful to put into place, as Cecily said, the design elements that will help to facilitate good experiences. No one can create an experience for someone else because everyone experiences things in a unique and personal way. But you and your library colleagues can think about the totality of the experience you facilitate so that library community members have a good experience at every touchpoint.

I have no idea if that changed anyone’s mind, but I suggested that folks take some time to visit here and check out the posts that DBL offers on UX. I hope it might get some doubters at least considering the possibility that there could be some value in designing better library experiences. The other positive outcome I took away from the conversation is that a few folks did ask for suggestions for books or other readings that could allow them to learn more about user experience. It’s great to encounter open mindedness about UX. My own suggestion was Subject to Change.

The second sign was a new ARL SPEC Kit survey on – guess what – user experience. Unless you are working at a library that is a member of the Association of Research Libraries this might not mean much to you, but this is the first time a SPEC Kit, which is essentially a survey of activity at all the ARL Libraries, has covered the topic of user experience. So it was great to see this international organization of academic libraries recognizing that we need to know more about how we are studying the user experience in our libraries. Because the survey was just issued, and it will be quite a few months until the final report is issued, I’m not about to pass judgment on this SPEC Kit. I will say that I was mildly disappointed in that, for me at least, it didn’t go quite far enough in asking questions about developing user experiences in the way I tend to think about it. Many of the questions were focused more on assessing specific parts of the library user experience, such as the reference service, the website, etc. So to a certain extent it felt more like the survey was asking what assessment was taking place and what methods were used to conduct the assessment (surveys, focus groups, ethnographic studies, etc.). I would have liked to seen a few questions about projects targeted at developing a library-wide user experience or efforts to get staff thinking more about the user experience, but perhaps that might have created more confusion. Maybe next time.

Despite this, the appearance of the SPEC Kit is another signpost that there is a growing recognition of the user experience concept and its practice, and that’s a good thing. I will be looking forward to the publication of the report. If you’re seeing other signposts of the growing awareness or recognition of the library user experience, share it here.

When I want to share and explain the concepts of design thinking with an audience of librarians I often make use of the video “The Deep Dive.” It was originally an episode of Nightline shown in 1991, and it profiles the firm IDEO. In the program the IDEO folks are charged with redesigning a supermarket shopping cart. Watching the IDEO folks, an eclectic mix of professionals, go through the process illustrates the basic concepts of design thinking in very practical ways. I’ve owned the DVD that I bought from ABC for a few years. But now, thanks to someone who put event online (paying no attention to the FBI warnings about copying the video) you can watch the entire Deep Dive on YouTube. If you haven’t seen it, spend 22 minutes watching it (in three parts) before it is taken down.

IDEO is a firm highly associated with design thinking, but there are other design firms that use this technique as well. One is Adaptive Path, and I recommend you follow their blog. A lesser known firm is Maya Design, but they’ve done some interesting work, particularly their re-design of the interior of the Carnegie Public Library. We featured a designer from Maya on a Blended Librarians Online Community webcast a few years ago. I recently noticed an article about Maya Design in the latest issue of Fast Company that discusses their 3-day design boot camps. Seems they are now teaching others to become design thinkers. Sounds like a program I’d really like to attend.

What also caught my attention this past week was the announcement of two UX-related resources in the library community. One of my favorite events at any ALA conference is the Friday afternoon OCLC Symposium. This year the main speaker is Joseph A. Michelli, Ph.D, (The Starbucks Experience: 5 Principles for Turning Ordinary into Extraordinary) who will “engage the audience in a conversation that explores ways to bring a unique customer experience to the library.” I’m already registered and will hear what Michelli has to say about Starbuck’s recent challenges and the resiliance of the user experience in a recession. But just the fact that OCLC is turning its attention to UX is interesting to me.

I also came across a slideshow from a presentation by John Blyberg, Darien Library’s Assistant Director for Innovation and User Experience, on the topic of user experience design in libraries. If Blyberg is discussing UX in his conference presentations that will help to get more librarians interested in these ideas.

I’m hardly a gastronome. I’ll eat just about anything, and I’m happy with simple foods – anything from mac & cheese from the box to a grilled piece of fish tossed from the skillet to the plate. But at the ALA Midwinter Convention in Denver a vendor invited me to dinner. I could hardly decline the generous offer.

So we trundled off to what I believe is one of Denver’s tonier dining establishments. It was small, crowded and gave the air of exlusivity. Not what I’m used to by any means. Take me to a beer & pizza joint. I didn’t quite know what to expect.

A look at the menu revealed a number of concoctions that left my head spinning. Anything I could have chosen would represent an entirely unfamiliar dining experience. That could be a good or really bad thing. I wasn’t even sure how to start narrowing down the puzzling options. But that’s not what happened.

My hosts decided to opt for the seven-course tasting menu. Now don’t get the wrong impression. It’s seven courses, but the portions are “tasting” size. At first I was thinking how hungry I was going to be after seven courses of tea room size portions. I was pretty hungry after a day of trudging around Denver from meeting to program. Next I was worried about what I was going to get to eat. Turns out the chef just does whatever he or she likes for the tasting menu. – stuff they don’t even advertise on the menu.  How did I get myself into this mess? I said I’ll eat just about anything, but I tend to draw the line on raw foods, super hot surprises and tentacled creatures.

I don’t think I was the only one having doubts. In fact, that was later confirmed at the end of the marathon meal when one of the hosts uttered “I’m wondering if we should have just stuck with the regular menu?” But once we put in the order there was no turning back.

Now unfortunately I have no way of relating to you what I ate. First, after seven dishes in a row you can hardly remember anything. Second, I never saw the names in writing. Third, all I know is that a snooty waiter rattled off the names faster than Google can find a billion hits on Britney Spears. I can tell you that it started with a plate with four different minuscule appetizers. Two of them tasted pretty good. The other two – well to paraphrase the famous words of Homer Simpson – “We shall never speak of those appetizers again”. Did it go downhill from there?

That’s not the important part of this post. Sure, we went through the shellfish, pasta, meat, fish and I-have-absolutely-no-frickin-idea-what-was-on-the-plate-courses, and there was even an interlude for a sake/lime liquid that served as a palate cleanser (actually pretty darn tasty). What is important is how this meal gave me a completely different perspective on the value of design in creating a great user experience.

This was no haphazard, just put something on the plate meal. This was an exquisitely well thought out, well designed and well executed meal. Everything had its place. Everything had to be in the right order. Everything had to have a certain appearance and taste. Here’s the surprise. Not only was I not hungry at the end of it all, but I wasn’t feeling stuffed either. It felt just right. Total satisfaction. And although there were a few things that went in my mouth that just didn’t feel right, the overall impact of the combination of different tastes, textures, colors, and portions resulted in a perfect dining experience.

It was in the cab ride back to the hotels when the question about whether or not the tasting menu was the right choice surfaced. I kept my thoughts to myself. As I walked back to my room I reflected on the experience, and decided that given the choice I’d opt for the seven-course tasting menu again. It gave me some real insight into design and user experience. If you want those you serve to have a great user experience in your library, design thinking needs to happen on the front end. It was clear to me that the chef who thought up that meal had to be very intentional in the food selection and presentation. He or she clearly wanted to differentiate it from the regular menu items.

It certainly would have been easy enough to just drop a smaller portion of each of those regular items onto smaller plates and serve them up. That’s why great user experiences don’t come easy. They require real thought, an appreciation of the consumer, prototyping (I’m sure the chef has to experiment until he or she discovers the best combinations), solid implementation, a crew of staff that completely get the totality of the experience they are delivering (the chef is the chief designer but if the servers don’t get it the whole thing fails) and a total commitment to the consumer having a great all around experience. I learned things of great value thanks to that seven-course meal. All learning experiences should be so tasty.

So I am in debt to my gracious hosts for taking me to that restaurant and introducing me to the seven-course tasking menu. And it’s good to have a story that helps to share what great user experiences are about.

Given how the interest in design thinking and design is spreading across disciplines (and a few design and UX bloggers noted their surprise at finding an article about design thinking in a library journal), being efficient and effective at capturing all this potentially valuable literature is a significant challenge. Subcribing to the feeds of the better design and UX blogs (see our blogroll) is one way to spot those occasional articles. But to be more systematic a well-designed journal alert approach may work best. So if you wanted to set up a journal (ToC) alert to capture the latest articles on design thinking, UX and related topics, how would you go about it? On what disciplines should you focus your efforts? 

Having access to one or more academic aggregator databases from companies such as ProQuest and EBSCO can certainly help. Not only do they cover hundreds of potential journals in which this literature might appear, but these databases offer two useful alerting systems. First, it’s easy to set up alerts to capture the table of contents (ToC) of those journals with a reputation for publishing articles in the design fields. You might know a few, but how do you discover others? That’s where the second method comes in. The databases also allow the creation of search alerts. I have constructed several search alerts for terms such as “design thinking”, “user experience” and “design strategy”. Whenver articles with these phrases are added to these databases I receive an alert in my e-mail inbox. Once I begin to see a journal that frequently publishes articles about these topics, I create a ToC alert for that specific title. What about Google alerts or RSS feeds for searches created in Yahoo and other engines? They might work also, but it’s likely that the number of irrelevant web sites retrieved from the alerts may make it a less than effective strategy.

As a result of months of screening the major library databases with these search phrases it’s becoming more apparent that one might see an article about design thinking in almost any discipline. However, I’ve noticed one journal in particular that has established itself as one of my must reads. If your library subscribes to the ProQuest ABI/Inform database, you can set up a ToC alert for it there. Design Management Review stands out as a journal that regularly provides insightful and thought-provoking readings about all the topics we cover here at DBL. The most recent issue, fall 2007, features several articles on design as a source of innovation and strategy. One of them, “Innovation in Organizations in Crisis” (Cherkasky and Slobin) has an excellent definition of innovation: finding new ways of creating value and bringing them to life. Simple and elegant. What if you don’t have access to ABI/Inform? The publishers of DMR do provide a listing of the articles in the latest issue on their web site. If you want to be alerted to the latest articles in each new issue, try using a web page change detection service (some are free) to monitor the page. Whenever the DMR article listing page is updated you’ll be notified by e-mail.

I will continue to highlight any publications I come across that are particularly valuable for keeping up with the latest literature and ideas in the fields of design thinking, UX and others of interest to DBL readers. If you have a particular favorite, please share it by way of leaving a comment.

Information overload isn’t just for librarians anymore. As long as I’ve been in this profession, and especially in the past few years, having more information than I can possibly cope with is name of the game. Now everyone else is catching onto the challenges of capturing the most important information, applying it for decision making, and then storing it for future use. While some may think that the new year will be all about dealing with information overload, I think we’ll be focusing more of our attention and energy on stimulating our own innovation. Here are some signs.

First, even the New York Times is providing insight into if not outright advice on how to improve individual and organizational innovation. In a recent article the Times observed that “As our knowledge and expertise increase, our creativity and ability to innovate tend to taper off. Why? Because the walls of the proverbial box in which we think are thickening along with our experience.” This exact point was made in my post about Thinkertoys – that our expertise can blind us to possible solutions and innovative ideas because we are unable to see things from different perspectives.

Second, I recently discovered two excellent pieces about innovation. If you are looking for ideas on how to create an innovation culture in your organization, begin your reading with an Innovation Labs white paper titled “Creating the Innovation Culture: Geniuses, Champions, and Leaders.” According to author Langdon Morris an innvoation culture is one in which innovation happens, and does so consistently over time. He says organizations with innovation cultures have individuals who fill three essential roles:

1) The creative genius whose insights develop into ideas and then into value-adding innovations.
2) The innovation champion who supports innovation by helping creative people to overcome the obstacles that otherwise hamper innovation.
3) The innovation leader who define’s the organization’s expectations and policies so they favor innovation.

After discussing each of these three roles in greater depth, and supporting it with examples from the world of busines, Morris concludes by explaining (via his Innovation Culture Table) that most business practices exist to maintain stability and standardization while extending the status quo. Does that sound like a library for which you’ve worked? If an organization is able to start its innovation culture by bringing together these three roles, then it should begin to remove the obstacles that inhibit the growth of the innovation culture.

Though its scholarly approach (and length) makes for more challenging reading, the article “Innovation as a Learning Process: Embedding Design Thinking” is worthwhile for its attempt to better understand the innovation process by blending ideas about design and learning – two skills set that are of increasing importance to the work of librarians. The article was published in the fall 2007 issue of California Management Review (available on Ebsco). This blending results in a model that explains the innovation process as a set of four stages: 1) observation (contexts); (2) frameworks (insights); (3) imperatives (ideas) and (4) solutions (experiences). The authors, Sara Beckman and Michael Barry, focus more on the work of teams in this article. The learning styles intersect with design within the innovation team itself. The most effective teams include a leader with a concrete experience style, an artist with reflective observation style, a writer with abstract conceptualization style, and a speaker with active experimentation style. These are somewhat foreign sounding learning styles and the authors don’t do much to explain them, but there are a few good case studies which help to clarify things a bit. This is the sort of article that will demand a few more readings.

Perhaps what one can take away from all these articles on innovation is that good innovators are good information managers. They have methods that make the best of information received, and they are good at identifying worthwhile resources, applying appropriate filters to channel the most appropriate information to themselves, then screening the incoming news to identify the most salient information, and ultimately disseminating that information to their colleagues or team members. So for all the talk about 2008 being the year of information overload, I’m going with 2008 as the year of innovation. 

To make my life even more exciting I’ve signed on to guest edit an issue of Urban Library Journal. But I’m especially excited about this issue because the theme is “The Creative Library.” So I encourage you to consider submitting a proposal or share this with a colleague who you think brings a creative approach to their library work. Here are some suggested themes for articles, but use your creativity in developing an article proposal.

 

If you need more information about the issue or how to submit your proposal, take a look at the full call for proposals.

 

That’s what I originally titled a new article I authored for American Libraries. The editors at American Libraries renamed the article “Design Thinking” and published it in the January-February 2008 issue. Some of you may get AL, others can pick up a copy at the American Libraries Association Midwinter Conference in Philadelphia (they give out copies of the latest AL issue there), but if neither of those options works for you I have received permission from the folks at American Libraries (much appreciated!) to make a copy available on my website. I hope you enjoy the article, and look forward to any feedback or comments. I’m always open to your ideas for what I can do better to more effectively communicate about design thinking and its applications for the library profession.

Since this is the break week for lots of us I thought I’d keep it light with a few quotes that I came across recently that got me thinking. I could have chosen a line from any of these quotes for the title of this post, but the one I did choose, from Roger Martin, I think speaks best to this blog’s first year of existence. In the past, as a librarian, when it came to the word “design” the only option was a discussion of building interiors or exteriors. DBL has created a new option that, for many, did not previously exist. Now design can enter our vocabulary as a way to discuss a process for thinking about ways to improve our workflow, our services, the way we innovate and the overall user experience we deliver. We hope that reading DBL has changed how you think about the word design, and has provided some new ideas for thinking about how you approach problems and develop the solutions. Thanks for your readership.

“It does not take vast resources to create buzzworthy experiences. And the events themselves, like the campus visit experience I described, can be commonplace. All it takes is a willingness to identify and enrich key touchpoints, to equip and engage faculty and staff, to train well, and to continually improve. But first, there must be a willingness to change positions with your students, donors, and other audience groups, and to work at seeing those experiences from their perspective.”

Robert A. Sevier from “Delivering on Your Brand Experience” an article about experience marketing and how it can be used to turn routine experiences into memorable ones.

“I’ve become conviced that many innovative ideas fail to be commercially successful beacuse we haven’t understood the role of design. Design isn’t decor. At Stanford, we teach ‘design thinking’- that is, we put together small, interdisciplinary groups to figure out what the true needs are and then apply the art of engineering to serve them. Only by combining design and technology will we create innovative products and services that can suceed.”

Hasso Plattner, cofounder of SAP, from an article titled “Launching the Next Generation”

“And the Big Idea for 2008? Stop competing against your competitors. Your traditional rivals aren’t your biggest worry. Disruptive innovation is hitting corporations from outside their business. Verizon (VZ) was forced to open its cell-phone service because Apple (AAPL) and Google (GOOG) smacked it hard. Verizon’s new business model will probably generate 10 times the demand for service. You just never know. That’s life, in beta.”

Bruce Nussbaum in an article “Innovation Predictions 2008”

“I see creativity as central to design strategy. For me, design is centrally about creating options or possibilities that do not currently exist, not choosing between or among options that currently do. So at its heart, it is about the creation of something new. This highlights the difference between business administration and business design. Business administration entails the intelligent selection from among existing known options and the taking of action on the selection in question. Business design entails the creative production of a new option that is superior to the existing options.”

- Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto (From a presentation at the ID Strategy Conference 2007)