Designing for Digital 2017

Creativity is the key to addressing ill-formed business threats, for putting shape around poorly defined market opportunities. A creative organization is ready to handle the innovation challenges of greenfield markets, to take on the reimaging challenges of shrinking market share, and to best the misalignment challenges introduced by running fast and loose. But bringing creativity into your company feels like adding to the mess, not fixing it. Creative processes feel wild and unpredictable – and so do the people doing the creative work. We hire creative talent, but we don’t have a lot of well-formed frameworks for managing them or their work. 

Design thinking offered us a starting point, as it gave us tools like empathy to help drive innovation. Lean tells us to run really fast and pivot left and right and left and right. But many of us have started realizing the limitations of design thinking and lean, because after doing a lot of thinking and pivoting, we still have to do a lot of doing. We don’t have the skills to bring the mess into focus.

Creative clarity is about four main things. First, it’s about having a vision and choreographing a creative strategy – envisioning a crisp future even among the blurry business landscape. Next, it’s about growing a team that includes those creative unpredictable outcasts, and giving them the space to produce amazing work. Third, planning the work takes process, but not a process characterized by boring stage gates or stale gantt charts. It’s an iterative process of conflict, resolution, and trust. Finally, it’s about actually delivering creative new products and services that bring everything into focus.

Modern web development emphasizes an iterative and agile process. Accordingly, an ongoing, lightweight UX study is better suited than the infrequent, elaborated, multi-tasks usability testing. The idea of UX Cafe came up as the UX librarian at Penn State University Libraries looked for a way to continuously solicit student feedback. By setting up a weekly free coffee and snack station at the library, the Libraries are able to implement the workflow of iterative web design.

This half day workshop will take you on an in-depth, hands-on journey through basics of object-oriented UX, as introduced in Sophia’s acclaimed A List Apart article. OOUX, much like object-oriented programming, asserts that we should start with defining a system of objects (or content types) before jumping into task flows and interaction design. But don't worry! We will not be programming in this workshop. We'll structure content around real-world objects and design relationships between those objects that make sense. Our developers will love us for it—and our users will, too!

Librarians at the University of Montana designed a survey of undergraduate student comprehension of library terminology. To improve comprehension, methods and strategies were used that treated users like students rather than consumers.

Deirdre Costello, Principal UX Researcher, and Ryan Patriquin, UX Design Lead, will talk about how they work together to wireframe and design surveys to get qualitative design feedback that informs decision-making.

This presentation will detail the user research undertaken by a military academic library during a website redesign project. The presenter will discuss the data collection process and the ways in which a strong user-centered focus impacted decision making

Presentation by Daniel Pshock, University of Houston Libraries.

A common refrain says that 50% of UX is selling UX. This session will explore practical, effective ways of sharing UX and design work with your library at-large to help in getting buy-in and justifying your work, and discuss the importance of sharing work

Learn how to make your digital library services work for everyone. All of the tools and principles of an excellent user experience also support accessibility, just as web design that is responsive to diversity of devices is also responsive to a diversity of human needs. 


Bio
Co-founder, Center for Civic Design

Whitney combines a fascination with people and an obsession to communicate clearly with her goal of bringing user research insights to designing products where people matter." She's written three books on the subject - A Web for Everyone, Storytelling for User Experience, and Global UX: Design and research in a connected world  - to help practitioners keep users in mind throughout the creative process. 

She's also passionate about civic design. At the Center for Civic Design, Whitney’s research shows just how much design matters in elections and she works with election officials across the country to help everyone vote. 

Follow Whitney's practical UX advice anytime on Twitter @whitneyq.

Learn how the MSU Bozeman Library applied the Service Blueprint design method in a traditional way to improve their Specialty Printing services and how they used Journey Mapping in a non-traditional way to improve the onboarding process for new employees.

Academic librarians love Springshare’s LibGuides platform for its flexibility and ease of use. But these same qualities also make LibGuides problematic, creating inconsistency, usability and accessibility problems, and a poor user experience. LibGuides also poses a fundamental design problem: how to encourage critical learning within a digestible web format. To address these challenges, presenters will share results of user testing of a disciplinary research guide, along with recommendations for developing design guidelines and content strategy.