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.