Have you ever publicly stated or even thought that part of what we should try to accomplish in our libraries is to exceed the expectations of community members? I know I have. I did a search of all my past posts here at DBL and discovered a number of them in which I either directly said something about designing an experience that exceeds expectations or shared information from some other source about ways to do so. I’m sure I’ve also said something about exceeding expectations during presentations. And why not? So much of what I’ve read about great user experiences is focused on doing something that gives the community member more than he or she expected to get. Whether you want to call that a wow experience is up to you (although I think there’s more to it than just expectation exceeding), but we know that when delivering services or building relationships librarians should seek to exceed the expectations of our community members.

Not everyone feels the way I do about exceeding customer expectations, and I think we should be challenged to offer a better explanation of what that means. In one of the most popular posts last year at the Harvard Business Review blog network, Dan Pallotta’s “I Don’t Understand What Anyone is Saying Anymore” took issue with the phrase “Let’s exceed the customer’s expecations” which he referred to as another meaningless piece of business jargon:

Another term that has lost its meaning is “Let’s exceed the customer’s expectations.” Employees who hear it just leave the pep rally, inhabit some kind of temporary dazed intensity, and then go back to doing things exactly the way they did before the speech. Customers almost universally never experience their expectations being met, much less exceeded. How can you exceed the customer’s expectations if you have no idea what those expectations are? I was at a Hilton a few weeks ago. They had taken this absurdity to its logical end. There was a huge sign in the lobby that said, “Our goal is to exceed the customer’s expectation.” The best way to start would be to take down that bullshit sign that just reminds me, as a customer, how cosmic the gap is between what businesses say and what they do. My expectation is not to have signs around that tell me you want to exceed my expectations.

If you’ve spent anytime interacting with your community members, if you’ve conducted surveys or focus groups, or made any effort to learn more about what they want from the library, then you may indeed know something about their expectations. Even if you haven’t done any of these things, or there are far more community members than you could personally engage, the research about library users, be it the OCLC surveys, the PIL research or user study research discussed in the literature, does provide a fairly consistent message about user expectations when it comes to libraries. In general, they have low expectations. They tend to perceive the library as a place to get books and not much else. Little is said about expectations for great service and personalized attention from library staff.

Even worse, college students, in particular, when faced with a research project perceive the library as an unpleasant place that’s sure to be a bad experience. According to the first report from PIL, when faced with a project that requires library research students report they experience anxiety, sadness, other negative emotions and even physical symptoms such as nausea. That may explain, in part, why they’ll do almost anything to avoid interacting with the library, even if it means settling for inferior resources and no help at all. With expectations so low, how can we fail to exceed them? Knowing the expectations are low doesn’t automatically suggest we can always exceed them. It still requires us to design an experience that will make it possible. Our goal should be to raise these expectations from something community members dread to something they desire. Creating the opportunities to raise, and then exceed, those expectations is part of the user experience challenge.

Another thing we should be mindful of, when it comes to gauging our community members’ expectations, is that in economic downturns expectations generally are lower than normal. According to Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College, one of the positives of the recession is that it lowers expectations. In a recent essay published in the Chronicle of Higher Education Schwartz wrote that “By lowering expectations and keeping expectations modest, the downturn may actually enable people to derive satisfaction from activities and possessions that would previously have been disappointing.” Of college students in particular he writes, “Lowered expectations may also lead college students to feel less entitled than they have in recent years. They may seek what is good about their institution, and be grateful for it, instead of noticing the ways their institution falls short, and resenting it.”

With students having already low expectations for their library experience, it’s hard to imagine they could get even lower – if what Schwartz has to say is true. If it’s likely that students will lower their expectations in these difficult economic times that may bode well for library facilities that are showing their age. Now may be the perfect time, when expectations are generally lower, to make an all out effort in the library to give community members much more than what they expected when they walked through our doors. I believe that librarians should always seek to exceed expectations – whatever that means in your community – in order to achieve the best user experience. It would be easy enough to take the position that because the expectations of library community members are low there’s not much point in bothering to work at exceeding them. Heck, any minimal level of service might be appreciated. To my way of thinking that’s not an acceptable attitude. It’s up to us to gauge what the level of expectations is in our community, to raise it and to keep improving on it. That’s how you create a better library experience.

Recommending that librarians should provide different levels of service to community members is right up there with advocating for the end of reference desks or a future dominated by bookless libraries. It can be volatile subject matter for discussion. The library is a commons that is owned by each community member, and each of those members is equally eligible to receive all the benefits and services and access all the resources to which he or she is entitled. In an age of heightened customer expectations, does the “everyone is equal” approach still work or should librarians be more customer centric.

What does it mean to be customer centric? That is the subject of a new book by Peter Fader, a professor of marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. In this new book titled Customer Centricity, Fader promotes the idea that successful organizations will wisely segment their customers, and create special services for the most valued customers – services that might be unavailable to other customers. Being customer centric means more than just giving community members everything they want. As he explains in an interview:

Too many people think that being customer centric means doing everything that your customers want, and that’s not the case. Being friendly and offering good service are a part of customer centricity, but they are not the whole thing. Customer centricity means that you’re going to be friendly, provide good service and develop new products and services for the special focal customers — the ones who provide a lot of value for you — but not necessarily for the other ones. You need to pick and choose. Some customers deserve the special treatment, and if others want to buy from you, that’s great, but they are not going to be treated the same.

While the goal of customer centricity may be unthinkable to some librarians, when we honestly assess how we treat community members, we already make distinctions between them and offer special treatment to some and not others. In academic libraries we certainly treat faculty members differently than students. We may offer faculty a book delivery service while everyone else has to come to the library. A faculty member’s research question is typically prioritized. Not fair perhaps, but it’s critical to build a good relationship with the faculty. It’s part of what we do to keep them satisfied; our funding might depend on it.

It’s the same thing with the Provost or President. They’ll receive a level of service above other community members. The quality of the work is no less for everyone else, but the provost or president will get much more personalized attention and faster service – and the amount of attention and effort may even exceed what others would get from a librarian. Those types of inequities aside, what about students. Do we make distinctions among the student body, especially among undergrads? We might have some special service, perhaps private study carrels, for honors students. I’m sure this happens in public libraries as well. Consider the advantages of developing some targeted and personalized research services for customers who can provide the most value, such as city councilpersons or the municipal finance office. Perhaps we are more customer centric than we think.

If we choose to formally recognize the importance of customer centricity then we should make it a part of the design of the library user experience. To put this into perspective I want to share one segment of the interview with Fader that resonated more strongly with me. That’s because I want to advocate that we should always seek to emphasize who we are as library professionals and what we can do for our community members by delivering expert services. Content is important, but the community could easily access the content without librarians. Here’s the passage:

Instead of pushing back and complaining, companies have to realize that instead of just putting products out there, they really need to be a solutions provider. That’s kind of a corny phrase these days, but I think there is some validity to it. Companies need to help consumers figure out how their products and services are going to fit into their lives and offer solutions, and not just ingredients.

Solutions versus ingredients. I really like to think of it that way. All the library content, that’s the ingredients. We can offer plenty of unique material that community members will find nowhere else. What we can’t do, given the number of community members and the limited staff, is provide everyone with the same level of service. Consider a more specialized library experience focusing on provided solutions where customer centricity is appropriate. After all, that’s what design is largely about – finding solutions. That’s what librarians do. Community members bring us their information problems. There’s a gap between what they know and they want they need to learn. There’s a point trying to be made and the data’s missing. The challenge is doing the “picking and choosing” that’s required by customer centricity. How do you make those decisions? Are you already being customer centric, either intentionally or unconsciously? If not, are you thinking about it?

This is a profession that promotes the idea of loving a library. If you need some evidence just visit ILoveLibraries.org. If you find it difficult to express love for a building, then you can shift your affections to your favorite librarian – over at I Love My Librarian. Anyone ever heard of an “I Love My Accountant” movement? Maybe if he or she just saved you a bundle in taxes you would wear one of these.

We like the idea that a library or librarian can be loved by community members, and while I joke a bit with the concept we know it’s a great marketing strategy to encourage community members to show their appreciation and the value they place on libraries. It reminds me of that old Pee-Wee Herman running gag on the classic television show. Whenever Pee-Wee said “I love my/this _______” (fill-in-the-blank) another character would come back with “Then why don’t you marry it” which works great on all sorts of objects, such as fruit salad. Anyone out there want to marry their library?

But what does it really mean to love a library or any other inanimate object? There’s actually a study that attempts to answer this question. It’s a report titled “Shoes, Cars and Other Love Stories” and it’s actually a dissertation in the field of industrial design by Beatriz Russo. The research is based on an analysis of just twenty-four people who were asked many questions about products they loved. The author says the dissertation “describes a journey in unravelling and clarifying this complex, powerful and, sometimes, unexplainable experience people have with special products they love, own, and use.” The author sought to determine what are the qualities and characteristics of product love. Here are a few of the key characteristics:

* There’s a meaningful relationship
* The relationship is deeply rewarding
* The relationship is enduring
* It’s not just an experience but rather a container of experiences
* It can change over time – perhaps even towards dislike

Admittedly there is some vagueness to these ideas. What does it mean to have a ‘meaningful’ relationship with a product? Do those who love a specific product lust over a new competitor? What causes a breakup? Do human loved ones actually get jealous of those loved products? Being it’s a dissertation it can’t answer all these questions, but there’s some useful information that may enlighten us about what it takes to get someone to love our product – or in our case the library and services we provide. If you have only limited time for some browsing of the research findings, you may find the section on the phases of product love as interesting as I did (starts on p.121).

Like any love relationship, product love begins with attraction (e.g., “Wow, take a look at that laptop”). Then there is the build-up phase shortly after the product is purchased, which sounds a bit like the honeymoon part of the relationship (e.g., “I could work on this laptop all day – it’s so light and portable). The continuation phase is where most of the relationship takes place, and it’s at that point where the owner is completely comfortable with the product (e.g., “I couldn’t even imagine getting another laptop”). Now in all love relationships there are some rocky times, and here you can hit a deterioration phase in which the owner loses interest (e.g., “This laptop seems a lot slower than it used to be and those new models are really thin and light”). And you know what deterioration leads to of course – the end phase (“I’ve had it with this sucky laptop”). In some ways it sounds just like a real relationship, although we only throw out our products at the end of the road.

Does knowing the basic qualities and phases of product love make it possible for librarians to truly understand not only what community members mean when they tell us they love our library, but to create an experience specifically designed to facilitate such a passionate relationship ? I think you can make a case that it’s possible for members of a public or academic community to develop a meaningful relationship with their library and hopefully with the staff. What’s meaningful about it may be different to a mix of people. For some it may be the books, for others the sacred space and yet for others the interaction and conversation found there. Looking at the list of key characteristics that Russo developed, it is strongly reminiscent of my three core ways in which libraries can differentiate themselves (meaning; relationships; totality). While I’d like to think the connector between the library and the passionate user is a meaningful relationship, that could be an area for more involved research. What would the community members have to say about this?

What we do hear anecdotally (and all too often from non-librarian conference speakers) from individuals is that their fond library memories often stretch back to their earliest encounters with library books or a caring librarian. While the relationships change and the community members move on, their love for the library can endure and cross over from one library to another – unless he or she encounters a library with a truly poor experience. You can well imagine having a much loved product, and then encountering a new incarnation of or variation on that product that truly disappoints. That will probably end the relationship (think “New Coke” or “Qwikster”).

Thanks to this dissertation we can gain a better understanding of the relationship individuals build with products (or services), and how that leads to something along the lines of true love. With that knowledge we librarians might be equipped to provide the type of experience that leads to a true love for libraries. But there are occasions when the relationship changes and community members move on. For some, deterioration and the end may eventually arrive, which is why we need to constantly be finding new members who will become passionate about the library. That’s where marketing, promotion, branding and relationship building come into play. How can we create awareness and best present our library so others will fall in love with it? It may ultimately come down to designing a great library user experience that sets the stage for the blossoming of love.

Note: I wrote this a few days before the untimely and unfortunate passing of Steve Jobs. Jobs did so much to add to our understanding of what it means to deliver a great user experience – and a total, systemic experience. Although he is gone his presence will continue to have a lasting impact on the study of user experience and his accomplishments will no doubt continue to influence our thinking and writing on this subject.

There are many different ways a library staff can express its desire to become more focused on designing a better library. Some of them fall into the realm of improving the user experience. It might be something as basic as usability tests on the library website. It could be creating a staff position dedicated to user experience. It may even take the shape of a larger, staff-wide initiative to design an experience that emphasizes totality. Whatever initiative your library takes up to improve the user experience, it may be wise to step back and position yourself as a user of the library, and not the creator of its services.

Since Steve Jobs announced his retirement as Apple’s CEO numerous articles have both celebrated and critiqued his leadership of the world’s leading technology firm. More than a few could be said to go overboard in their praise of Jobs, and lead us to wonder if it isn’t all a lot of hype. After all, Jobs is but one more CEO of a technology company, albeit one whose vision and innovation has impacted many lives. One of the dozens of articles about Jobs that most captured my attention was featured in Fast Company. Titled “What Steve Jobs Can Still Teach Us” it too puts Jobs up on a pedestal despite a few obligatory remarks about his micromanaging and berating employees over minute product details. What it expresses well however was the way in which Jobs excelled at designing products for passionate users.

What Cliff Kuang eloquently points out is that in order for Jobs to do that he had to be Apple’s greatest user. He tells a story that shares, from Kuang’s view, the moment that more than any other shaped Apple’s future. When Jobs returned to Apple after a 12-year hiatus he found a company ill prepared to compete with Dell, IBM and others. Apple was only doing what all the others did but with higher priced, less competitive products. What happened? Jobs encountered an unknown Jonathan Ive (now Apple’s top designer) working on the iMac. That’s when their long-time relationship began, with an emphasis on great, user-centered design. Kuange writes:

That single moment in the basement with Ives says a great deal about what made Jobs the most influential innovator of our time. It shows an ability to see a company from the outside rather than inside as a line manager…That required an ability to think first and foremost as someone who lives with technology rather than produces it…It’s not clear that anyone else at Apple will possess Job’s same talent for looking at Apple’s products from the outside view of a user.

Therein may lie the important lesson that Jobs can still teach us librarians. We certainly use our own products – we have to – but we do so as the information experts not the typical user. While our expertise allows us to make things simpler for those who seek us out for mediated research assistance, it also prevents us from seeing our library’s facility, resources and services from the outside – as the user experiences it. How might we do a better job of becoming the library’s greatest user? For a start, we might try spending more time with users asking them to tell us how they see and use the library. That’s not a particularly new idea, and we already know what we’re likely to hear (too complicated; less useful than Google; intimidating; etc. ). Perhaps this story about Jobs can encourage us to become more passionate about using our own resources – and really caring about how they are making (or could make) a difference for people – and then demanding from them what any great user would.

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.

Does something like this ever happen in your library? A single-parent student has no choice but to bring a toddler son or daughter to the library. It’s a weekend, and the student has an assignment due on Monday. College libraries can be a little boring for the young, so the child does a bit of acting out or the parent lets the child use a computer. Another student complains about the noise or inability to get on a computer. It’s an isolated incident. The vast majority of the community members who bring their children to the library cause no problems for others. Despite this single transgression, because of a complaint, the library administration overreacts. Something must be done. A response is required. So the answer is to punish everyone who needs to bring a child to the library even though the vast majority conform to the existing policies. The existing access policy is quickly revised to restrict toddlers from coming into the building, or they are perhaps limited to a single area of the building. Whatever the response, it was likely too much too quickly – without really thinking through the impact of the change on the majority of the user community.

This is just one scenario. It could be anything that involves a single incident in which a community member violates a policy. Perhaps a laptop was broken. It could involve a special collection item that was damaged. Whatever the case, does the “this means we have to change the policy” response make any sense? It’s good to respond to a complaint, but is there really a need to change the policy over a single incident? In these situations the outcome is to punish every person who follows the existing policy and causes no trouble at all. You may have seen a previous presentation by Derek Sivers. He’s done a few memorable turns at TED. I enjoyed his short video presentation about this problem, “Don’t Punish Everyone For One Person’s Mistake”.

Sivers makes the point that people are going to break the rules, screw up or otherwise act out in some way that will create a problem. It’s going to happen. You can’t prevent every problem. You can only do your best to create an environment that facilitates the best possible library experience for community members. When that doesn’t happen because of the actions of a single individual or perhaps a rowdy group, Sivers says that we need to resist the urge to change the policy to prevent everyone from possibly making the same transgression. I think it’s a good idea to keep things in perspective and ask yourself and others if this single incident really is causing a problem that needs a strong response. Why not do the damage control, then lay back and wait to see if it happens again?

There’s always an opportunity to change a policy. If we change it too rapidly, for the wrong reasons and without contemplating the cascading consequences of our action, we may ultimately alienate far more of our user community members than would have happened as a result of the original problem.

In an earlier post at Designing Better Libraries I introduced the idea of “Putting up Your Antennae”. I described those innovators who come up with breakthrough ideas as “the folks who have their antennae up, ready to pick up the signals that communicate something important is happening. They are listening and observing.” That’s the key phrase – listen and observe. But there are other ways in which we may listen to and observe our community members.

Many of those practices, as well as the science and art behind them are shared in a new book titledListening to the Customer is a new book by two of the library profession’s leading experts on assessment and evaluation, Peter Hernon and Joe Mathews. The book is a really fine compendium of methods for learning about the user community members. If you and your colleagues want to start exploring the library’s customer base, and develop techniques for connecting with them you will want to take a closer look at this book.I had the honor to share a practice piece for the book. It is in some ways an elaboration of the original post above.

I asked the authors (and the publisher) if they’d be all right with me sharing with you the section that I contributed to the book. They were fine with that, as long as I waited until after ALA. I received a copy of the book so I’m going through it now. Those of us interested in designing better user experiences will appreciate this book. To dedicate an entire book to listening reflects the importance of observing and taking in information – not being quick to provide your point of view. Many librarians bristle at the use of the C word to describe our user community members, so I respect the authors for holding nothing back there, and deciding to refer to them as customers. I recommend that you check the book out – and then think about out you can do a better job of listening – and acting on it – at your library.

Here is the piece that I contributed to the book:

Keeping the Antennae Up: How Listening Improves Service

Much of my undergraduate studies is long forgotten. Fortunately, what I do recall tends to be among the most valuable content to which I was exposed. One of those bits of memorable wisdom was learned in an unlikely course, an introduction to poetry. While I lacked genuine talent for poetry writing, the value of the course was that it taught the importance of drilling down beyond the surface of the words. One cannot underestimate the importance of learning to read in a way to really understand the author’s message. My instructor said something that I remember to this day. “The poet is the antennae of society.” He actually told us to visualize the poet with stalks protruding from their head, capturing all manner of information from the world around. Then the poet would write in a way that would inspire others to explore life through poetry. Poets needed to be astute observers of the world around them.

In our library work we must never underestimate the power of listening. To excel at it we must always have our antennae up, picking up the signals our user community members emit all around us. Doing so allows us to gain sensitivity to the needs and desires of our users. Put simply, listening leads to a better library experience. While the act of listening sounds simple, doing it effectively in a way that leads to positive change is anything but simple. The major challenge is that in our day-to-day work we become so involved in our routines that we become oblivious to much of the non-routine activity happening all around us in our libraries. Those things which are problematic to our users and that prevent them from having the best possible library experience are what’s likely to fly right under the radar of the library worker. In order to become good listeners library staff must make a conscious effort to become more attuned to the sounds and sights around them. When the antennae are up, it can make all the difference.

Two old standbys

We all tend to fall into ruts when it comes to finding out what the user community members think about library services. Two of our favorite old standbys are user surveys and focus groups. The former is an indirect form of listening while the latter is all about listening. At my library we use both techniques. We have found the two are connected. Academic librarians are accustomed to conducting all types from surveys, from quick-and-dirty website polls to the more elaborate LibQual. All of them leave us with some good insights but more questions. Why did they say the website confuses them? How come so few respondents know we already are open past midnight? What we’re hearing often tells us there’s a communication gap.

To enhance our ability to conduct surveys, both simple and complex, we recently became a subscriber to Counting Opinion’s LibSAT software. One of the challenges of satisfaction surveys is developing the questionnaire and collecting the data. LibSAT reduces the amount of time required to create a survey, and provides more options for inviting community members to participate. It will also enable a new type of survey, the post-service survey. Think about a recent hotel stay or a retail purchase. A few days later a request to complete a survey arrives in your inbox. This type of survey, sent to a targeted user right after a reference transaction or an interlibrary loan would provide some direct feedback about an actual service interaction. In conjunction with annual “how are we doing” satisfaction surveys, this will amplify our ability to listen to what community members want to tell us about our services and resources. Surveys are good starting points. They help us refine our interests so that instead of trying to listen to all the buzz and noise, which ultimately overwhelms us, we are instead able to point ourselves in the proper direction.

Equipped with this sense of where we need to direct our energy, it’s a logical step to learn more through focus groups. In the past, like many libraries, we’ve used focus groups to help us better understand the less than satisfactory ratings showing up on our satisfaction surveys. More recently we enlisted a team from our institution’s Leadership Academy, an internal professional development institute, to conduct focus groups with students and faculty, both library users and non-users, to provide insights for the early stages of a building planning process. While we want to listen to our users, in this instance we opted to designate the actual listening to a non-library focus group team. Concerned that having librarians present in the focus group might bias responses, we thought it best to do the listening second hand. With tapes, transcripts and reports, it’s almost the same as being there. Focus groups are not without their problems. As Gerry McGovern, web usability expert, stated in a column about focus groups, “The biggest problem: what users say in a focus group rarely matches what they do in a real-life setting. Users’ opinions about a site or product are very rarely consistent with how they behave when they actually interact with it.” (http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2010/nt-2010-11-01-Focus-groups.htm) So while listening is important to approach what is said in focus groups with a touch of skepticism.

That’s one reason for the growing popularity of anthropological techniques. Well known as an instrument used by corporations to better understand how consumers use their products, field studies add observation to listening. Consider the following example from the corporate world. A company that made body wash products asked their customers what they like and didn’t like about the product. No men ever mentioned in the focus group what was learned in observing them use the products. Many men shampooed their hair with the body wash, a good example of consumers using a product in ways it was never intended. What happened next: all-in-one body
wash/shampoo products targeted to men, which are quite successful. Had the company stopped with focus groups, they might have lost out on a great opportunity. That’s an important lesson for librarians. We need to pay attention to what we hear, but also what we see. Take the focus group report mentioned above. Many participants indicated they wanted the library to be open 24/7. If we listened only to focus groups perhaps every library would be open 24/7. But we know from actual observation that as it nears the midnight hour the library grows deserted. It’s a classic example of people asking for things in focus groups that they would rarely, if ever, truly use. That’s why more limited, self-access 24/7 spaces have grown in popularity in academic libraries. It’s a cost-effective, lower-risk solution to the challenge of listening to the few whose needs hardly represent the average college student. If my institution gives the go ahead to build a new library facility, we’ll listen carefully to the community members, but chances are we’ll want to base some decisions on our observations of their behavior.

Other formal listening devices

In addition to the survey and focus group, librarians can organize more formalized sounding boards in the effort to seek out advice, ideas and feedback related to decisions and planning. The most common approach is to organize committees that allow for representation from community members. At my institution we have several different types of advisory group. In addition to the ones organized at the administrative level, many of our individual subject specialists tap into their own networks in the disciplines so that they too serve as remote listening outposts. Our two primary advisory groups are the Faculty Senate Library Committee and the Student Library Advisory Board. Each group meets two or three times per semester. The meetings are mostly for bi-directional information sharing, but also to create positive connections between the library and its constituents. While there are some common topics at each meeting, such as a report on the library facility, the two groups focus on the issues of concern to the groups they represent.

The faculty are most concerned about collections and services that support teaching and research. The students want to know what we’re doing to make the library better for their fellow students. For both groups we offer a glimpse at pieces of the budget; they all want to know if the administration is treating us decently. The danger of these groups is that the tendency exists for them to become more about us and less about them. Rather than tell them what we’re doing, we need to know how they use what we have and what they’d like to see. That means getting them to do the talking while we listen, and we are usually able to come up with good questions to get them going. As much as the groups are a sounding board for our ideas, we need to learn from them. They are the voice of the community. They allow us to extend our antennae into that community.

Informal Techniques

With the formal methods described above, there are limitations on the effectiveness of listening. Today, technology allows us to extend our ability to listen into cyberspace. To listen to its community members in that space, librarians leverage technology to establish new outposts for tapping the virtual conversation. Take a simple example, the library website. Libraries always offered suggestion boxes conveniently located by the entrance or circulation desk. Some still do, but many more now have a virtual equivalent, the suggestions blog, on their website. We call ours “What’s Your Suggestion” and it allows any community member to let us know what’s on their mind, be it a complaint or an idea for improvement. Either way, we take it seriously and pay attention to what we’re hearing through the messages received. Sometimes we can take action with a positive response, such as when we were asked to provide more single student study carrels in our quiet zones. Other times we cannot, such as when we are asked to provide more electrical outlets, but even then we are able to post an explanation of why we may not be able to satisfy the request. The suggestion blog then becomes an ongoing record of all the requests and explanations – along with comments from students. Above all, it shows the community that we are listening to them.

Social media such as Facebook and Twitter also offer ways to communicate with community members. While they provide a good channel for announcing updates and events, they are perhaps even better as listening posts. By monitoring the tweets and status updates, the library staff and administration can stay alert to any complaints, problems or other issues of which they might not otherwise hear. We have all heard stories about corporations using social media to monitor consumer reactions to their products and services – and responding quickly when problems arise. We can do the same thing. It’s fairly easy to set up alerts on search engines and with other web tools that allow the social media to be monitored 24/7. In 2008, we introduced some new furniture. When we had it available on display for review and community comment, there was none – so we went ahead and bought some of it. To our surprise a student made a video complaining about the new furniture, and then posted it on YouTube. Rather than get upset, we took it as an opportunity to make some minor corrections that would improve the furniture and respond to the complaints. Now, everyone likes the furniture even better.

That is why listening to the community is so important. We are professional librarians. We are experts at acquiring, storing, organizing and retrieving information. We are not experts on design, customer relations management or many of the other elements that add up to a great library experience for the community member. It is often the case that they know what is best. If we fail to listen and pick up these signals we also fail at delivering the great library experience that builds loyal community members, keeps them coming back and most important of all, encourages them to tell their friends to use the library. Following social media to detect what’s being said about the library is proving to be a powerful way to listen, and quickly respond to demonstrate that the library does care.

Carpet Time

New technology tools and social media can improve our ability to listen, but there is still much to be said for good-old fashioned low-tech listening. Good listening approaches that involve no technology could fit into the category that Nicholas Webb, author of The Innovation Playbook, refers to as “carpet time”. It’s a simple concept that emphasizes the importance of spending quality time with the people who use your services and products. Webb says that to “understand what customers really care about – or what could be going wrong in the course of delivering meaningful value – you have to spend carpet time…to see them, feel them and experience them.” If you are a library administrator you can’t experience members of the community from your corner office; you need to walk the floor or get out for face time with your constituents. Here’s an example.

In our LibQual surveys we consistently get low ratings from faculty on information content. To learn more I started visiting department chairs, along with the subject specialist for that discipline. We are occasionally joined by that department’s liaison to the library and possibly a graduate student. When I engage them in conversation about our collection, I rarely hear anything but praise for the quality of the collection in that discipline. If anything, I might hear some requests for specific journals or electronic resources. It may be that when being surveyed anonymously faculty are much more critical, or it may be that when we take the time to ask questions and listen we get a completely different perspective. I am not sure what accounts for this inconsistency, but in the end, regardless of the strength of the collection in that discipline, by demonstrating our willingness to engage in dialogue and listen we are improving our ability to serve our faculty. It is much better to hear about problems directly from the faculty then to get surprised when the LibQual report turns up. I will be interested to see if our carpet time has an impact on faculty responses when we do our next LibQual in 2012.

Carpet time works just as well in the library as it does beyond the walls of the building. We were thinking about creating some flexible study spaces using freestanding wall dividers. Our building has too few formal study rooms. I had one space in mind in our computer commons where there were no electrical outlets, and usually ended up as the place where students lounged and ate meals – which was sometimes a problem as there was more noise and mess than we would like. I thought we could turn it into more productive space. However, there was some concern that students would prefer the space as is. So what did I do? Conduct a survey? Run focus groups? Neither. I simply spent some time on the carpet, literally, talking to students and asking them what they thought of the idea. I also observed to what extent students were already forming study groups in the computer commons. I asked those groups what they thought of the flexible study space idea. Nearly every student I spoke with thought having a flexible space was the best of both worlds, study space when needed and lounge space when it wasn’t. That encouraged my administration to make a modest investment in adding electrical outlets, a wall-mounted flat-panel monitor and two collapsible wall dividers. Now the space can easily and quickly become an enclosed, private study area when needed that has all the features of our traditional study rooms. Surveys and focus groups may have worked equally well, but carpet time was faster, simpler and more direct. By listening and observing, we were able to make a good decision that will improve the library experience for our students.

Keep the antennae up

The best thing about listening to the user community is that it is something any library worker can do. No special training is needed. There are no listening workshops. The more staff members we can enlist to think of themselves as individual listening posts the better positioned the library is to both discover what’s broken and quickly fix and detect ideas for new services. When an undergraduate walks up to the reference desk and asks the librarian on duty why it’s not possible to send a text message from the library catalog, the antennae should start buzzing and the ideas should start flowing. If we do a good job of picking up the signals, there is no end to the ways in which we can enhance the library experience for our community members. What we need to do, as a staff, is engage in a conversation about the importance of listening and observing what happens all around us every day, rather than just going through the motions and being oblivious to the experiences that community members are having as they work, study, relax, socialize, game or whatever it is that motivated them to come to the library. It all starts with getting those antennae up.

In the past I’ve contemplated on the outcomes of a total user experience for libraries – and have identified what that experience of totality would be like: memorable; unique; create loyalty, etc

But when I talk with others about the library UX the conversation often turns to questions about what are the qualities of a good user experience – or any great experience for that matter. That is, what more specific things should we be trying to offer? What exactly should we deliver to the community member so his or her reaction would be “I’m having a great experience at this library?” An answer to this question requires us to have a better understanding of the characteristics or qualities of a desired user experience.

To provide that answer I refer back to “Discovering WOW –A Study of Great Retail Shopping Experiences in North American” which I discussed in this post. In that post I mentioned the following qualities:
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.

In a recent research project, reported on at the ACRL 2011 Conference, titled “Delivering a WOW User Experience: Do Academic Libraries Measure Up?” Brian Mathews and I asked students about their library user experience and had them compare it to a recent retail experience. Would the student compare their library experience favorably to their retail experiences? You can read the paper for the answers. But we identified nine variables that we think are relevant to defining the qualities of a library user experience:

* Product Availability (book)
* Ease of Finding Product
* Greeting/Acknowledgement
* Were the Right Questions Asked
* Were the Staff Interested in You
* Evidence of Executional Excellence
* Sensitive to Your Time
* Patient and Caring
* Problem Resolution

If librarians can master these qualities and integrate them into the delivery of service wherever a community member connects with a library touchpoint that could be the best way to consistently achieve a great library experience. I recently learned about another way of defining the elements of a great user experience. I found them in this piece on “The Total Experience: Customers Deserve Better”. According to this essay there are three fundamental qualities to the total experience:

* Functional: How well did the experiences meet their needs?
* Accessible: How easy was it for them to do what they wanted to do?
* Emotional: How did they feel about the experiences?

This is according to Bruce Tempkin, the author of the article and individual behind the Tempkin Experience Ratings. The goal of the ratings is to identify those companies delivering a good or great user experience – and very few actually succeed. Tempkin writes:

There are a lot of reasons why some companies outperform others. But one of the underappreciated areas is customer experience (CX). Sure, companies often say they are customer-centric, but only a handful put the time and energy into becoming customer-centric. That’s why it was not a huge surprise to find that only 16% of companies received “good” or “excellent” ratings in the 2011 Temkin Experience Ratings.

What could companies and organizations do to improve? Most do pretty well on the functional area; the experience meets the consumer’s basic needs. You needed a hotel room for the night – and you got one; that’s meeting a functional need. Improvement is needed in the other two dimensions. We’ve got to make it easier for community members to do what they want to do, and we’ve got to do better at creating an emotional connection. Put that into the context of your library. The content, whether it’s a book or journal articles or film, is being delivered. Was it easy for the community to access these materials? Do we know enough about how they felt about getting the content, and was there any interaction with the library staff? Did we have a chance to create an emotional connection, and leave that person feeling great about the library and staff?

Tempkin offers four tips for delivering the total experience that get closer to achieving the qualities of the good/excellent experience. They are:
1. Purposeful Leadership – If the executive team doesn’t behave like it’s important, then why should the rest of the organization?
2. Employee Engagement – If employees are not aligned with the goals of the company then there’s no way they will be able to deliver great experiences for customers. So any CX effort that does not engage employees will likely fail.
3. Compelling Brand Values – Brands are more than marketing slogans and advertising campaigns; they represent the organization’s raison d’être. So companies need to understand their brand promises.
4. Customer Connectedness – Every time a customer interacts with the organization, it leaves an imprint on them, pushing them either towards higher loyalty or further on the path to abandonment. That’s why we need to develop systematic approaches like “voice of the customer” programs for collecting and responding to customer feedback.

Consider taking a closer look at the Tempkin Experience Ratings. Between the information from the Retail Shopping Experience study and these ratings, a stronger sense of what it means to deliver a library user experience emerges. It should enable us to begin a conversation in our libraries on how we go about designing the right user experience. This new information helps to put the pieces into place.

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.

Back in August 2010 I had the pleasure of participating in the Reference Renaissance Conference. I participated in the closing plenary as part of a panel presentation and discussion about the reference service user experience. The gist of my presentation was that delivering reference service in a library could be more than just a series of transactions, many mundane and some quite challenging – but transactions just the same. If you have read my posts here at DBL in the past, you would have a pretty good idea of what I’d had to say about this topic in my presentation. But just in case you’d like to have more detail, you can read the article I wrote “Fish Market 101: Why Not a Reference User Experience” based on my presentation. It was published in a November 15, 2010 issue of Library Journal.

I hadn’t thought much about that piece until recently when I received a question from Lisa Reuvers. Lisa is a Library Technician at the Buckham Memorial Library in Faribault, MN. Here is what Lisa asked me:

I am from a library in Minnesota, and have just read your article on the “Reference User Experience”. You speak of having a memorable reference experience and I am curious what your ideas might be? How can we make such a formal process more inviting and fun? It is intriguing to me to make the experience memorable, other than just giving them some information and then call, “Next!”.

I think Lisa poses an excellent question, and it’s the exact type of thinking I like to see. I know that some of what I have to say about user experience doesn’t always translate to the front line of the library, and library workers should challenge me to come up with better ideas and examples. I suspected that Lisa was asking me for specific actions she and her colleagues could take to transition a reference encounter from a transaction to an experience. Should I tell her to be more entertaining? Maybe juggle a few books while taking a question? So what did I have to offer as an answer. Here it is:

One of the points I make in that piece is that it would be a real challenge to turn a reference or circulation transaction into something more inviting and fun – as you say. I point out it would be a bad idea to throw books to patrons the way the Pike Place Fish Market throws fish.

That said, what we often think of as a mundane transaction could be – if not more memorable – a better contributor to the holistic UX library experience. By that I mean that you want to be thinking about your library experience as a TOTAL experience – of which the reference UX is one part of a larger design for a great library experience. In that piece I describe some of those components – being different, service that inspires loyalty, etc.

In other writings I have discussed how library transactions can focus on being memorable by exceeding user expectations. Have you tried things such as starting transactions by asking the person how their day is going, by introducing yourself, by asking them what their name is and letting them know how much you appreciate them using the library. Do staff remember frequent users and greet them by name? Have you followed up with patrons on occasion to ask them about their experience using the library? Did you let them know that their opinion mattered? All of these things can send a message to the community that the library cares about them and values their use of the library – and that we see each community member than more than just a number on a library card and a transaction. These are the types of actions that help build relationships and loyal library users who tell their friends about the great community library.

As I have stated in other writings and presentations on UX, many individuals do not like coming to the library or have a great fear of research which intimidates them. So they already come to us with low expectations of having a good experience. So anything we can do to make them more at ease, more relaxed, and more aware they have people who are there to help, already exceeds their expectations and contributes to a great and unexpected experience.

But if we just see ourselves as personnel who answer questions, check out books, maintain the stacks – and not as important components in delivering a well designed experience – then it won’t happen. This begins with a staff conversation to figure out what the experience is now – and what it could be and needs to be.

Lisa wrote back to tell me that she found my answer helpful in providing more insight into what I meant by a reference user experience. In fact, she asked me for permission to share it with all of her library colleagues. I was glad to hear that, and I hope that both the article and the follow up sent to Lisa will be at the center of a discussion at the Buckham Memorial Library to begin a conversation about what their desired library experience is and how they will go about designing and implementing it.