While it’s not always the case, on those occasions when I come across a position description for a user experience librarian or hear an existing user experience librarian describe his or her job, it primarily comes across as a description of a usability professional. By that I mean someone with expertise in designing, evaluating or testing user interfaces for the express purpose of delivering a great user experience with that particular interface or website. User experience may also be aligned with library assessment, the point being that someone needs to assess whether or not the user community is pleased with their library experience. Given the limited degree of librarian interest in design and user experience back when DBL started, the evidence provided by the growth in these positions and units is an encouraging sign. But perhaps we need a conversation about what user experience is and what it is not.

“More than Usability: The Four Elements of User Experience“, authored by Frank Guo, attracted my attention because it effectively articulates some of my own thoughts about the relationship between usability and user experience. The first paragraph nicely sums up the relationship between usability and UX:

Some people mistakenly use the terms user experience and usability almost interchangeably. However, usability is increasingly being used to refer specifically to the ease with which users can complete their intended tasks, and is closely associated with usability testing. Therefore, many perceive usability to be a rather tactical aspect of product design. In contrast, UX professionals use the term user experience much more broadly, to cover everything ranging from ease of use to user engagement to visual appeal. User experience better captures all of the psychological and behavioral aspects of users’ interactions with products.

I have used the term “totality” previously to express what Guo describes as “to cover everything”. The user experience, from my perspective, in about much more than usability. It’s about designing an intentional, well-thought out experience that ensures the community member has a consistently great library experience at every touchpoint. Guo, in this first part of a series on user experience, identifies the four distinct elements of user experience which puts into better perspective the relationship between usability and UX. One of the four elements is usability, and I’ve maintained, as well, that usability is critical to a successful library user experience. According to Guo, usability asks the question “is it easy to use?”

totality and usability - usability is part of totality

Guo shares my view that “while some people use the term “usability” to refer to all elements relating to user experience, it should be more appropriately viewed as just a subset of user experience.” At its most basic level usability is about making things easy to use. While that typically applies to interfaces, there may be non-IT possibilities for usability. It could certainly apply to the experience of retrieving a book from the stacks. It should be easy to navigate the library, but the layout of the shelving or the signage may fall flat and will result in a much higher level of dissatisfaction. There’s clearly a need for usability testing and assessment activity on a library UX team.

The other three elements of Guo’s model are:

1) Value – Does the product provide value to users? Value may very well be the cornerstone of better library experiences. It matters little how creative or inventive a product is if no one derives some value from it. I could debate how essential features are, but I agree that functionality is critical to making something valuable.

2) Adoptability – This one is related to value. It simply asks if anyone is using the product or service. A library database may be a reasonable example in that encouraging “Adoptability” could engage community members in getting them to use the database in more of their searches. If we fail to get user community members to adopt our products, services or technologies, then what’s the point of designing an experience we want them to have – and does it really matter how good the usability is. Then again, if the product isn’t easy to use, no one will adopt it. Which is why all the components involved here need to work together.

3) Desirability – Any good library experience will create some sort of connection with a community member, and the goal is to make an emotional connection: “Desirability related to emotional appeal.” The best products or services are truly great owing to the emotional connection they create between the library and community member. Usability can certainly be a factor in generating that connection. More so than other elements, desirability can depend more on visual presentation.

Guo provides some additional examples of how these elements differ from one another, which is a big help because there are some similarities. He concludes by stating that his four-dimensional model of user experience may have some commonality with one or two earlier efforts that tried to develop explanations for user experience, but that his model emphasizes that not all the components within the model – those four elements – are equal in nature. Depending on the product, service or situation, anyone of the four may emerge as the linchpin to a great library experience. I am not sure what Guo plans for the next part of this series, but I hope he’ll continue to elaborate on the components of the user experience and how they can be leveraged to create a great library user experience. His essay will certainly be of benefit to those who seek to gain a better understand the difference between usability and totality.

Despite making multiple references to touchpoints in past DBL posts and in presentations, it is a real challenge to find any substantive information about touchpoints. What is their significance in the user experience and what do we know about assessing and improving what happens at the touchpoints across our service operations. Yes, you can find an entry for it in Wikipedia, which is short on details, but beyond that there’s little for those who want to better understand touchpoints.

That’s why I was pleased to discover an actual research article focusing on touchpoints titled “Service Innovation Through Touch-points: Development of an Innovation Toolkit for the First Stages of New Service Development“. It appeared in the International Journal of Design Vol.5, No.2 2011. The focus of the paper is to develop innovation in service design and development by focusing on touchpoints. The author, Simon Clatworthy, developed a toolkit based on a card system as a tangible way for designers to better understand the impact of touchpoints in service experiences, and how to potentially make improvements to those touchpoints. Clatworthy begins with a good definition of the touchpoint:

Touch-points are the points of contact between a service provider and customers. A customer might utilise many different touch-points as part of a use scenario (often called a customer journey). For example, a bank’s touch points include its physical buildings, web-site, physical print-outs, self-service machines,bank-cards, customer assistants, call-centres, telephone assistance etc. Each time a person relates to, or interacts with, a touch-point, they have a service-encounter. This gives an experience and adds something to the person’s relationship with the service and the service provider. The sum of all experiences from touch-point interactions colours their opinion of the service (and the service provider). Touch-points are one of the central aspects of service design. A commonly used definition of service design is “Design for experiences that happen over time and across different touchpoints” (ServiceDesign.org). As this definition shows, touchpoints are often cited as one of the major elements of service design, and the term is often used when describing the differences between products and services. They form the link between the service provider and the customer, and in this way, touch-points are central to the customer experience.

Knowing that touchpoints “are central to the customer experience” suggests that librarians should do more to identify and evaluate the touchpoints that combine to create the library user experience. Do we even know what our library touchpoints are, and if we do, do we know how they work to provide the desired experience – and ultimately how would we assess if they are working to deliver that experience?

Those are questions that drove Clatworthy to conduct this research. His article describes “the method for innovation for touchpoints.” To do this he and his team developed a method involving cards. You may be familiar with web design research that uses a card sorting system to help users identify their preferences for the organization of the site or terminology being tested for the site. In this research, cards were created to represent the touchpoints of an organization. Creating the cards also helped the team to identify and think through the touchpoints that made up the experience. The cards can then be used to identify a “pain point”, a touchpoint where the experience, from the point of view the user, falls flat or is inconsistent with the totality of the experience.

For example, a library pain point could be the directional signage in the book stacks. Up until that time, each experiential touchpoint, from entering the library to searching the catalog to asking for directions at the “ask here” desk, delivered the experience according to design. But when the user got to the stacks location and failed to successfully navigate to the book’s location, the experience failed. We need to identify the pain points and turn them into successful touchpoints. The card exercise could help to more clearly identify which unit or department in the library is responsible for or associated with a unique touchpoint – or when there is overlap.

So what are the key takeways from the reseach:

The first is that service designers focus upon the orchestration of a service in which the choice of individual touch-points and their relation to other touch-points is important. This requires an understanding not only of individual touch-point qualities, but also of their potentials when combined in particular ways. The second relates to the orchestration of touch-points over time. Common to both of these is an understanding of the parts and the whole and the innumerable alternatives that this affords in relation to how a customer might experience.

What is your next step if you want to get in touch with your touchpoints – presumably to understand better where they are and how they can be part of the overall experience design? The first thing may be to start a conversation in your library about touchpoints, and what they mean to the staff who serve at or create these points. Once there is general consensus about the value of studying and improving touchpoints, a more formal process may be called for to map the touchpoints and learn how they interconnect. A customer journey mapping exercise could help staff to identify the library touchpoints – and whether what happens at those touchpoints is adding up to the best experience or if there are various pain points that need attention. Clatworthy’s paper is a good start for better understanding the role of the touchpoint in the library user experience. It would be great to see more research and scholarly communication – or just practical advice – about touchpoints.

Librarians are educators. We may be instructing more formally in the classroom or less formally in our offices, at a service desk or somewhere on campus, but for most practicing librarians the work often revolves around creating learning experiences for others. The nature of the work presents us with opportunities to design learning activities, but teachable moments can present themselves at almost any point in the day. Those unexpected situations may be less designful, but some of the same principles for a good learning experience can apply in either formal or informal settings.

Those who educate and take it seriously will always be wanting to improve their ability to connect with students and effectively deliver transformative knowledge. Doing this well takes time and experience, and a desire to learn how to be a good educator. The resources to help in this endeavor are many and diversified. For librarians, the path to delivering the best possible learning experiences may begin in a classroom learning pedagogy (e.g. “learning is a persistent change in behavior”) or by being thrown into a classroom with a teaching assignment. Along the way one picks up a sense of what works, and some core beliefs about effective approaches (e.g., “deep learning is the result of authentic practice”). Along the way we add to our educator’s skill set – and our teaching philosophy – in many ways.

For example, I attended a lecture by Ken Bain (What the Best College Teachers Do) where I learned that a technique as simple as asking good questions can motivate learners. You need to regularly learn from other educators. To do that I also regularly read The Teaching Professor, which has great personal advice for all kinds of learning situations. It also has summaries of the latest research on learning at the college level (our Library offers a campus site license so all faculty can use this resource). Most of the reading I do on learning is from non-library literature, but there are occasional good articles in the library literature on learning – it is certainly worth paying attention.

Librarians working at institutions with a college of education also have access to a valuable source of learning resources – the many books published on learning and educator skills. I am currently doing all the selection in the field of education at MPOW (only until we fill a position in the next few months), and I skim many of these books to check the quality and value of our acquisitions in this discipline. That leads to too many books worth reading, but I try to pick up as many ideas and techniques as I can in the hope I will improve my teaching – all aimed at delivering a better learning experience.

Allow me to offer an example from a book titled “It’s All About People Skills“. This one caught my eye, and a quick skim revealed it contained potentially good advice in a fairly simple, practitioner-oriented style. There’s nothing particularly earth-shaking here and no deep theory is offered, but it’s a reminder that some simple people skills can often make a difference in the quality of the experience – particularly as a reminder that learning is about the learner – not the teacher – and it’s the teacher’s responsibility to create a better experience.

The point is that you can have the best knowledge of the subject, be well versed in pedagogy, and have great technology competency, but if as an educator you fail on interpersonal skills, your ability to connect with learners is greatly compromised. Here are the key points that I have drawn from this book on people skills that good teachers exhibit:

* Like the students: Never assume all educators like their students. If you don’t genuinely enjoy being around the students and caring about their education, it doesn’t matter how great the rest of your people skills are. If you do like them, it helps to show it.

* Be a good listener: Sounds obvious but an educator may get so wrapped up in their teaching, their lesson plan, their outcomes…that they forget to pay attention to the students.

* Be patient: It becomes increasingly more challenging as one gets older, [and that's just a personal observation - not an ageist remark] has spent more years in the classroom and feels less able to cope with the demands of keeping evermore distracted students engaged. Always remind yourself this is the learner’s first time, and of all the challenges that go along with being new to something. Maintain your inner strength as you strive for patience.

* Have a sense of humor: It’s often best applied an an unplanned occurrence. Trying to force usually fails. Used appropriately it never fails to work in getting students to open up to what you have to offer.

* Use common sense: It helps to be practical. Good teachers know what to do in any given situation. It also means being mindful and making good thoughtful decisions in the classroom.

* Be flexible: Whatever you might have planned for the class, the odds are that something unpredictable will happen. If something good breaks out, try going with it even if it might mean not covering all the content.

* Show you are confident: Remember that no one in the room knows as much as you do about the content. Letting the students know you take the class seriously will build their confidence in your ability to deliver a good learning experience.

* Admit your mistakes: None of us is perfect in the classroom. If you get something wrong or a student points out an error, just be honest – accept the responsibility for your error. Trying to cover it up, making excuses or blaming it on the technology always makes things worse.

* Be approachable: A librarian’s instruction activity is as much about building relationships as it is about teaching new skills. Be the kind of instructor that students will feel comfortable with when they need individualized assistance.

* Use body language effectively: Use more than just your voice to communicate. Make sure your passion comes through in your gestures. In short, get out from behind the lectern.

* Be empathetic: This might be the most important people skill of all for an educator. It’s easy to forget how challenging 21st century research can be. Endeavor to put yourself in the place of your students, and see things from their perspective.

As DBL has discussed in the past, great experiences can be more than big moments, exciting places and highly unique events. It can simply be about a class where the library instructor effectively employs people skills. Under the right conditions those engaged in the experience feel that something different and worthwhile has happened – something they would look forward to experiencing again. Simple people skills, applied well in and beyond the classroom, can lead to a better experience. I hope this post will get you thinking about your basic people skills, and approach them as a checklist that you can use to remind yourself that these all too obvious skills are too often overlooked as we focus on the latest gadgets and theories. As with many other things, design can play a significant role in improving the quality of the user experience. The classroom should be no different.

In the age of customer expectations, convenience rules. Short on time, too busy to learn something new, focused more on the surface than the complexity lying below it, the contemporary consumer – and our typical library community members – demonstrate their preference for convenience. Many library services and resources are a poor fit for convenience seekers. That’s probably why we are irritated when we hear someone say or write something along the lines of “Convenience trumps quality everytime”. In a nutshell, that means your typical student will prefer Google or Wikepedia over the higher quality library database every time they can make that choice. The knock against libraries is that they are not convenient to use. We often are uncertain as to what that even means. Is that a comparison between using Google and an Ebscohost or Proquest database? Does it suggest that finding a book with an LC call number is inconvenient? Is there always a line at the circulation desk?

Without a better understanding of what exactly makes the library inconvenient, it is much harder to determine what would improve the convenience. You might argue that if libraries lack convenience that’s just too bad. Conducting good research is slightly different from buying Twinkies and a Pepsi at the Kwiki-Mart. But if convenience is a motivating factor in encouraging individuals to use a service or resource, how do we balance that with the library’s inherent inconvenience – or are there things we can do to improve its convenience factor?

We could probably start with a better understanding of the science of convenience. What does it mean to actually offer a convenient service? You can probably blame this whole focus on convenience on Joe Thompson. I discovered the following item about Thompson in a great article about the convenience factor over at UX Matters:

In 1927, an entrepreneurial worker at the Southland Ice Company in Dallas, Texas began selling milk, bread, and eggs from a storefront on the ice dock to make a little extra money. Having access to an inexhaustible amount of ice for preserving the groceries, Joe Thompson was able to sell when other local grocery stores were closed in the late evenings and on weekends. For the first time, the local community could shop outside of typical business hours, whenever it suited them. Soon after, Joe added gasoline and various other food, drinks, and “convenience” items to his inventory in a new store with the unprecedented trading hours of 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. By 2011, 7-Eleven has grown to 41,000 locations worldwide and is the prototype for convenience.

Ari Weissman’s essay, “Convenience: The Third Essential of a Customer-Centric Business” is the third installment of a seven-part series (not yet complete) on being more customer-centric. It really helps me to get a better grasp of the components of a convenient experience. He makes a good point that convenience changes as an individual’s situation changes. A college professor in her sixties may believe that the 21st-century library is far more convenient than the one she used during graduate school – just think of all the research resources that can be tapped without leaving the office. A freshman in 2012 may find it terribly inconvenient to walk to the third floor of the library to retrieve a book when there’s so much full-text content on the web. Unfortunately, giving every freshman the “when I was your age I had use a print card catalog” lecture is a bad idea. What can we do to improve the convenience factor? I’ll share Weissman’s four components of convenience and put them into the context of a library environment.

Actual Convenience

This gets to the heart of what it means to offer convenience. According to Weissman it is simply the “reduction of physical effort for undesirable tasks” in a way that saves time. I used to go to the physical bank to complete a form to transfer funds from one account to another – but only when the bank was open. Then I could perform that function at an ATM at my convenience anytime. Now I can complete a transfer in less than two minutes while sitting at my computer. It’s hard to imagine it could get anymore convenient – and still be doing it myself. The library is similar. What once could only be done at the physical library can now be accomplished from the desktop – even engaging a librarian for assistance, renewing your books or requesting an interlibrary loan. What’s not convenient? Some of our routines could still be described as requiring too much mental effort. That’s where perception is important

Perception

Simplicity facilitates convenience. Complexity kills it. You know how to intuitively operate that ATM. If you went car shopping, you would cross off your list the one with completely different controls positioned in unexpected places. That’s because your perception of what that experience should be determines your expectations. Convenience is determined by perceptions, and when the actual experience is more difficult than what it was expected to be the result is inconvenience. That’s a perfect way to explain the challenges presented by most library search systems. If you were expecting a Google experience, and then you are presented with the Ebscohost interface it’s going to effect your perception of convenience. That’s why more Google-like discovery search systems will ultimately deliver that perception of convenience – at least until the user gets to the results screen or tries to get to some full-text articles.

Flow

One factor that makes convenience stores convenient are the multiple things you can fold into one visit. Perhaps you stopped in for gas, then you grab a cup of coffee, maybe the newspaper. While completing a primary task (the gas) the consumer is able to take care of a secondary task (grabbing some coffee). Flow is design based on the community members’ behaviors, habits and rituals. Joe Thompson knew that people wanted a simple way to buy milk, bread and eggs late at night. Librarians get this. Consider co-located services in academic libraries. Students can get research help while they wait to see a writing specialist. The library is a place to pick up a video while returning a book. I enjoy showing students a quick two-step technique that immediately adds secondary databases to their primary choice – think of the time that saves over searching them individually. That’s not to say we couldn’t create an even better flow. It reinforces what we already know about the importance of studying our user community members to better understand how we could blend their primary tasks with more secondary tasks.

Control

This is exactly what it suggests – giving the community member greater control over the outcome of their experience. This often applies to self-service where the member takes control over a process. What’s ironic is that it offers the perception of convenience because one is in control of the situation – for example checking out one’s book instead of waiting in line at a desk – but it actually adds to the individual’s workload. Think of it as a trade-off between putting your fate into some one else’s hands and taking responsibility for it yourself. The library community members demonstrated this 25 years ago when they clearly showed their preference for end-user online searching over librarian-mediate searching. Instead of having an expert do the search, the members preferred to take it into their own hands – and if asked they’d say their search skills were far better than the librarian’s. We have to keep looking for ways to empower our users and give them more control.

I never really liked the phrase “convenience trumps quality every time” for the same reason I get annoyed by other platitudes. They may sound good, but they’re just too simplistic and they fail to capture the nuances of the library environment. Weissman shows us there is much more to convenience than just making it easy to get something you want. He writes:

Achieving convenience lies not just in reducing the barriers to the service, but in raising its inherent value. Ultimately, our goal is to create something that is not just sufficient, but excellent; not just easy, but desirable; not just successful, but delightful.

With the proper understanding of the science of convenience we can design experiences based on an understanding of community members’ needs and behaviors. It should be possible to make quality more convenient. Using libraries and conducting research should be more than a choice between low quality and high quality.

One thing we’ve got plenty of in our libraries is shelves. We use them to store our books and any other materials you might fit on them. When we refer to getting something off the shelf, it is really all about discovery. Every time one of our community members opens a book it’s an opportunity to learn something new and to generate unique ideas.

There’s another type of shelf we all have in our libraries. It’s the imaginary shelf where we store our ideas and our innovation plans. Many of us have no trouble coming up with ideas, sometimes too many of them. Too often these ideas just end up sitting on the shelf. For one reason or another, whether it’s a lack of resources, reaching for too much too soon, allowing critics to create roadblocks or simply failing to obtain the needed resources, many of our ideas whither and fade away. That’s why we put them on that shelf, hoping that we’ll eventually have the time to take them off, give them a dusting and put them to good use. That’s the hard part. Too often our ideas never make it off the shelf.

That’s where strategies for “getting things off the shelf” may be of help. It refers to a set of strategies created by Ellison “Dick” Urban, formerly of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and now the Director of Washington Operations at Draper Laboratory. In the course of his work, he frequently was responsible for shepherding technology projects from the idea to implementation stages. Urban says that he “always had great interest in the entire chain of events from new concept formulation to customer adoption but have sometimes been frustrated by the inability of great ideas and creative prototype artifacts to reach the desired end state”. In an interview at Ubiqity, Urban shares the 10 point checklist he developed to get things off the shelf. I’ll share them here and attempt to put them into a library context.

#1 – Own a discriminating technology: Ideas for new library projects should clearly articulate how they differ from existing approaches. Developers should be able to identify what makes the idea unique. With multiple ideas from which to choose, those that are truly unique will deliver the greatest value and are therefor worthwhile of having resources allocated to their development. This step helps to insure that the idea get the necessary resources to see it through to implementation.

#2 – Walk a mile in a warrior’s boots: Ideas may sound great in the library conference room, but it’s important to get a sense of how they would work in the field. So get out of the office and get out into the community. Urban says that decision makers need to the people who could provide critical feedback on the idea, and share suggestions for what might improve the idea or confirm that it’s not ready for further development.

#3 – Have a plan but don’t stick to it: Ideas have a better chance of success if they start with an operational plan for implementation. Urban’s advice is to “make “value added to the user” a key parameter for periodic evaluation of progress. Constantly evaluate your plan against your goals and objectives and be prepared to change everything”. Be flexible about needing to change during the process, and keep asking if the plan still makes sense.

#4 – Make a commitment: It’s a good idea, once a plan is in place, to share it some community members, perhaps a faculty or student library advisory group. Once ideas are shared with members of the library community, it creates a greater commitment to bring the idea to fruition. Consider making them part of the development team, as it will add momentum to the process, but be careful about raising expectations too high.

#5 – Lead your contractors: This is Urban’s military language for simply being a good team leader. Inspire them. Make sure they know they’re developing the idea for the community members, not the idea champion. Urban says “It’s ok to fail. Build concept and design iterations into the process. Review frequently. Learn from mistakes. Change course as often as necessary.” Good advice.

#6 – Build a constituency: This is a simple one and easy to do in most libraries – make it about the team. Your idea will have a better chance for success if you involve others and avoid trying to be the hero. If it’s your idea, be the idea champion. Help make it happen by empowering others to turn your vision into something concrete.

#7 – Work the acquisition system: Every organization has a system for acquiring the resources needed to accomplish a project. Knowing as much as you can about how the system works and who are the key people to support the project increases the odds the idea will make it to the finish line.

#8 – Look for windows of opportunity: Right now your idea may be premature for moving to the next stage. It may be best to wait until a situation arises where this idea can emerge as a viable solution or when the resource and support system may be better capable of helping the idea achieve implementation. A key to success in higher education is persistence. Keep believing in your idea and others will join the effort when window of opportunity opens. I have always found that a key to success in higher education is persistence. Keep believing in your idea and others will join the effort when window of opportunity opens.

#9 - Be conscious of “dollars and sense”: Stay focused on the affordability of your project, and the value that it’s going to bring to your community. Make sure you have a consistent message that communicates the value that the project will deliver.

#10 – Don’t forget the little things: Be nice to all the people upon whom the success of your project depends. Treat them with respect, and be honest in your dealings with them. Make sure you thank them.

If you read the original article you’ll see that most of the ten points on this checklist refer heavily to military situations. That’s where Urban did most of his work, but at the end of the article he acknowledges these ten can be applied to any field – including higher education. Keep in mind that the checklist only helps to see ideas through to the end. It may improve the odds of success but there’s no guarantee the idea won’t fail. You still have to take the risks. Creating a better library experience with the ideas you and your colleagues generate all begins with getting them off the shelf.

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.

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.

In a fairly well-known library journal I came across a column advising librarians on keeping up. There I found suggestions for how to stay on top of what’s happening in the library profession. At least that was the author’s intent. What left me disappointed was the narrowness of the scope of the suggested resources. It was mostly a collection of the same old “popular” librarian blogs. Several of those listed would hardly even help if your real intent was staying abreast of the latest developments in the profession. My other issue with this column’s advice is that it neglects to point librarians in the right direction for keeping up with content that will inspire them with creative new ideas for innovation. That’s why my advice is for librarians to always look beyond librarianship for greater inspiration. That’s where you’ll find the ideas that could be applied to library practice waiting to be discovered.

You’ll find similar advice in Bill Taylor’s blog post Don’t Let What You Know Limit What You Imagine. He reminds us that it’s important that we not let our experience – and all that we know about our industry and what we read about it – limit our capacity to come up with new ways of looking at things. He says we need to have “vuja de” :

The most effective leaders demonstrate a capacity for vuja dé. We’ve all experienced déjà vu Looking at an unfamiliar situation and feeling like you’ve seen it before. Vuja dé is the flip side of that — looking at a familiar situation (a field you’ve worked in for decades, products you’ve worked on for years) as if you’ve never seen it before, and, with that fresh line of sight, developing a distinctive point of view on the future. If you believe, as I do, that what you see shapes how you change, then the question for change-minded leaders becomes: How do you look at your organization and your field as if you are seeing them for the first time?

He uses Commerce Bank as his primary example. You can read more of the specifics in his column, but what captured my attention is that Commerce refused to benchmark itself against other banks. Think about how often we do this in our libraries. We look to see what the other libraries are doing. We develop “comparison” lists so we know which libraries we need to follow. True, it’s a good idea to occasionally ask colleagues in similar libraries how they handle a specific problem (e.g., I recently asked for advice on a particular policy issue), but just following what other libraries do, according to Taylor, is unlikely to lead to any significant innovation in your library.

Commerce’s leaders ignored what other banks did, especially when the talk turned to “best practices”. Instead it looked at totally different industries. So instead of studying Citibank and BankAmerica, they followed what was happening at Target, Starbucks and Best Buy. Taylor concludes by reminding us:

You can’t let what you know limit what you can imagine. As you try to do something special, exciting, important in your work, as you work hard to devise creative solutions to stubborn problems, don’t just look to other organizations in your field (or to your past successes) for ideas and practices. Look to great organizations in all sorts of unrelated fields to see what works for them — and how you can apply their ideas to your problems.

By all means, follow the library literature that helps you to become a better librarian, and that keeps you alert to what’s happening in the world of librarianship. That’s a path to continuing professional development that will help you to keep growing and improving your professional practice. But don’t stop there. When it comes to keeping up, go beyond those traditional library magazines and blogs. Don’t place those limits on your powers of creativity and innovation. If you need some suggestions for resources beyond the library literature, you’ll find some at my Keeping Up Website. In the new year, choose to be more intentional about ignoring what you know in order to discover new ways to design a better library experience for your community members.

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?

One of the knocks against design thinking is that it’s too much about thinking and too little about taking practical action – getting things done. I wrote about this reaction, which calls into question the value of design thinking, and suggested that we needed to focus more on the design approach as a practical method for putting our design thinking tools and techniques to work. In seeking out more ideas on how to accomplish this I acquired a copy of “Designing for Growth: A Design Toolkit for Managers.”. I believe the book has lived up to expectations. Of the numerous books and articles I’ve read about design thinking, this one is the best at providing a concrete approach to applying design thinking in your practice. Yet in many ways the book sticks to the blueprint for design thinking, albeit broken down into more steps with a variety of techniques organized into “ten tools”.

Let me give you an example. In the classic IDEO method, the first phase of the design thinking process is to be an empathic designer – to put yourself into the place of the end user of your service or product. As was famously said about designers in the Deep Dive video by David Kelley, “We not experts at anything. The only things we’re experts at is the design process.” The video then goes on to illustrate how designers go out into the field to study the existing experience and learn from the experts – those who either create or use the product or service. The second tool in the Toolkit is Journey Mapping. This is an exercise the design team conducts to create a graphic flowchart of the customer’s experience as he or she interacts with the products and services provided by the library. The whole point of Mapping is to deeply understand things from the point of view of the end user. What’s the first tool? That’s another thing I really liked; it’s visualization. The authors, right off the bat, emphasize the importance of visual communication throughout the design process. There’s a chapter dedicated to each of the ten tools, and the one on visualization even has some sketching tips.

Many of the steps, processes and tools discussed in the book really connect back to the basic fundamentals of design thinking. The difference is in the way the ideas, practices and techniques are organized around four phases of the design process: (1) What Is? (2) What If? (3) What Wows? (4) What Works. It’s interesting that steps one and two are all about discovering what the gap is between the problem and potential solution. Again, that’s classic design thinking. What Wows is all about prototyping, and What Works is about implementation and evaluation. It’s all there. That said, I see this book as being somewhat different from others on design thinking. Others, like The Art of Innovation or The Design of Business, are more like straight read throughs. This book really is more like a toolkit. You just use your hammer or screwdriver when you need it to get a job done; you don’t take out every tool in the box. Likewise, if I just want to invite our community members to work with us in developing a new service, I can just make use of the chapter on customer co-creation. It offers me the steps I need to follow to get this done successfully. While some may come away with the impression that the book is a bit on the busy side and that there are many possible distractions within the book, I tend to prefer the many sidebars used throughout the book. They may be a bit of a distraction on the first reading, but then you discover there’s lots of practical advice and ideas found within those sidebars.

If you want to get a taste of the book Designing for Growth, you may want to read an article based on the book, “Learning to use design thinking tools for successful innovation” that was authored by Jeanne Liedtka in the journal Strategy & Leadership (Vol. 39 No. 5, pgs. 13-19). It is behind a paywall, and your library may or may not provide access (NOTE: it can be “rented” for $3.99 via DeepDyve if that option works for you). When librarians ask me to provide more practical ideas for how they can implement design thinking in their libraries, I’m going to point them to Designing for Growth. I think the authors are on the right track when it comes to moving potential design thinkers from thinking to doing.