by Jan Sykes, President, Information Management Services (Illinois Chapter, Knowledge Management and Leadership & Management Divisions)

We’ve seen earlier Future Ready posts recommending that information and knowledge professionals apply principles of design to our work. This idea was reinforced this week in a keynote presentation at the ILA (Illinois Library Association) conference by Duane Bray of the design firm IDEO. He noted that they often found that people in the trenches have some of the best insights into user behaviors, emerging trends and new ways of working. Are we, as information professionals, actively observing and engaging our colleagues in conversations that help us identify emerging practices and opportunities? Or, do we use our extremely busy schedules and full work load as justification to continue our “business as usual” mode? In order to develop new and creative, user-centered ways of making business information readily available to our clients, our antennae must be sensitive to changing signals in our environment.

Mr. Bray described several emerging behaviors they have identified in recent work in the education and healthcare sectors including: human multitasking, mediated conversations (engagement and reliance on input from our social network), melding of online and offline worlds, and leveraging of collective intelligence (ratings and commentary offered by others across a range of products and services, e.g., YELP reviews). Most of us would probably acknowledge seeing these same behaviors. The challenge is to transition our mindset and our service models to incorporate this reality. It is critical for us to do so to remain relevant and competitive. While we may feel we are caught up in whirlwinds of change, I like the concept of small-scale, rapid prototyping to test new services or products within our control and within our respective communities. In collaboration with diverse small groups of clients and colleagues, new tools, technologies, and resources can be quickly tested. Failure on a small scale is an inexpensive learning experience and helps us refocus our planning and energy in a direction that is likely to have a more positive outcome. Successful prototyping lays the groundwork (and business case) for an expanded implementation. More importantly, such work helps us move with added confidence into the future.

Jan Sykes has over 20 years experience in the information industry. Currently, she leads Information Management Services, Inc., an independent consultancy.  Her work is focused on information and knowledge management projects, including needs assessments, content portfolio reviews, contract negotiations and strategic planning activities. Prior to beginning her own consulting firm, Jan was Senior Director of Client Services Consulting for Knight-Ridder Information, Inc.

Jan is active in SLA: she was president of the IL chapter in 2002 and chaired the Association Nominating Committee in 2005. She served on the Board of KM-Chicago and also on the Board of Trustees for the public library in her community.

by Margaret Ostrander, Minnesota Chapter, IT & KM Divisions

Sometimes being future ready means growing our roots in new directions. At the core of our professional ethos is a service ethic focused on the needs of our users.

A recent enterprise search implementation at Thomson Reuters provides a compelling case study for keeping users at the heart of everything we do. Just one indicator of what this project provided to users is an astounding turnabout in data points before and after the search implementation – where previously 90% of our users’ experience with search was strongly negative, this trend was flipped to a 90% strongly positive user experience after the launch of our new search.

Our users’ delight can be attributed directly to rigorous user-focused methods of testing and validating the search experience.

User Observation: Design with the user in mind

User observation focuses the interaction of typical end-users with the user interface features of the search engine.  In our case, relevance of search results is not studied in this portion of testing. Instead, the goal is to increase knowledge about how people actually use search results pages, to identify areas that work for users and those that are barriers. User experience testing also opens doors to hear unanticipated feedback from users about their preferences in using an enterprise search tool.

A major tenant underlying user observation is that analysis of what users actually do, versus what they say, provides a more actionable picture into their needs, preferences and stumbling blocks – and thus a sound basis for the design of an easy-to-use system.

After brief warm-up questions, a moderator guides the user, prompting for reactions, thoughts, insights and feedback. While scripted search scenarios provide valuable comparative data across all users, the most robust and valuable information is mined from searches that users come up with themselves. This portion of user observation offered the team clear insights, and a hands-on, real understanding about both the users and their information needs.

Relevancy Testing: Optimizing search results from the user’s point of view

Clearly, the most important thing to determine when looking at any search engine is how valuable search results are to the user.  Actual search behavior of enterprise users formed the basis of carefully selecting a mix of test queries for relevancy testing. The majority of queries were intentionally drawn from the pool of the most common search queries that our users use, found in the “short head” of search logs, but also balanced with queries from the “long tail” and other examples seen in user observation sessions.

Specific information needs of users were associated with each query so that search results could be judged accurately and consistently. Again, these use cases were defined based on real life examples. Selecting a good group of queries for relevancy testing is as much an art as a science, and the search team found this aspect of relevancy testing to be particularly challenging and interesting.

Iterative rounds of relevancy testing were conducted by corporate librarians on the search team, with a variety of scoring methods for each query. Testing results were used to adjust the search engine’s relevancy settings until search results reached an optimized state. The hard numbers provided by the relevancy testing protocol were also critical in gaining an objective view in how relevant search results corresponded to user needs. The numbers also moved us away from the danger of reacting to biased “gut feelings” towards a clear, accurate methodology that accounted for relevancy as users see it.

Alpha Testing: Involving power users

As the launch of the search engine drew closer, a light weight testing protocol involved a core group of intranet power users. Testers were asked to explore the new search environment.  At this point, we were especially excited to find that in 81% of queries, Alpha users were finding what they needed on the first try, and 97% did not experience any technical problems.  These and other data points verified that the user interface design and search results relevancy was meeting – and often exceeding –  the expectations of Alpha users. At the same time, Alpha user feedback uncovered a few issues that were significant to resolve before moving into a broader Beta release.

Beta Testing: Widen the net of user feedback

Close before the search engine went live, a group of 10,000 users were invited to use search in a Beta environment. Feedback gained through focused survey questions revealed Beta users’ experience was also overwhelmingly positive, mirroring that of our Alpha users. The focus at this point was to test the search engine’s capacity for increased, live traffic and to spot any red flags prior to launch. Beta results were also valued by senior stakeholders, as they could see in a quick snapshot of real users’ experience and feedback before the new search tool was rolled out to all employees.

Additional Testing

Further testing critical to an optimal user experience included testing content processing, content permissioning, browser compatibility, performance (speed), and load testing. The methodologies presented here aim to provide repeatable, proven, and practical tactics to test an enterprise search engine so that its relevance, usability, and accuracy can be optimized for a superior user experience.

Margaret Ostrander, MLIS, is an information professional who enjoys connecting people with knowledge through innovative uses of technology.  She is Manager of Search at Thomson Reuters, a provider of intelligent information for the world’s businesses and professionals. She was recently a co-recipient of the Innovation in Action Award from the Minnesota Chapter of SLA, and was named an SLA Rising Star in 2009.  Margaret recently co-presented on User Observation techniques at the Libraries & Technology conference and a MN SLA Chapter continuing education event.  She has published articles on information seeking behavior in the international journal New Library World (2010) and the “Best Young Professionals” issue of Library Hi Tech (2008). Margaret invites you to connect with her at http://www.linkedin.com/in/margaretostrander.

Juliane Schneider, Academic & IT Divisions

I’ve been a cataloger/data wrangler for much of my admittedly weird career.  I’ve never worked in a basement (always ground floor), but I speak MARC.  I can tell you that, after hearing the despairing pleas of thousands of dietary voices, MeSH has recently changed the heading “Cookery” to “Cooking.”  “Fleas” are now “Siphonaptera” which is quite the evocative term.

After 15 years of being all tech-servicey in a web startup, insurance library, medical center, religious headquarters, and publisher, cataloging is still about to be dead, our jobs are about to go away any second, and we remain undervalued, even by our fellow librarians.

Ah, Tech Services.  We are the emo band of librarians.

We make resources easily discoverable, available, downloadable and deliverable, and when we do our jobs well, we become invisible.  But–BUT–the LMS-es we deal with are becoming obsolete for our users.  No longer must they wade into separate libraries to use disparate databases; here at Harvard, 70+ libraries are in one catalog. Our fancy new Aquabrowser delivers Googlized results, but I can’t find what I want in there, and I’m the one who cataloged the stuff!

Here is our Opportunity!  We could work with the reference staff to create smaller, savvier, discoverable bits of resources tailored to local users. To do this, good cataloging is crucial to create the crosswalks for the records to go wherever the information needs to be presented, in a way that makes sense to individual users.

As Metadata Librarian what I really do is run around and find interesting things to do/cause trouble. My goal: projects that could involve Tech Services in an ‘embedded’ fashion.  Countway Library is sandwiched between  the Center for the History of Medicine, one of the premier historical medical collections in the world, in the basement and the Center for Biomedical Informatics, on the top floor.  The one thing I desperately want to do is to take the resources from these three places – past, present, and future – and make connections.

Another project, Tech Services as content producers.  This is probably my favorite paper ever:  http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000361.  They took an article on tropical disease, added semantic links to the uBioPortal, and used the raw data from the authors to create geospatial and serological mashups (they call it ‘Data Fusion’ – sexxxay!). This is the kind of thing that Tech Services needs to add to their repertoire. It will make the faculty happy (up that ‘cited’ number with more dynamic publications!), it will make administration happy (our repository is better than their repository) and it will make us happy, because it is visible and makes a connection with people outside Tech Services!

A last project I’m working on is to place QR codes on the ends of stacks that, when scanned, will list the books shelved there.  For once, the user can access a true shelflist of our resources, and instantly know what is on the shelf, and what is remote.  I call that sexxxay, but maybe it is really just geek cataloging.

Juliane Schneider is the Metadata Librarian for Countway Library, Harvard Medical School.  In addition she works with the Center for Biomedical Informatics, the Center for the History of Medicine and Administration on projects from creating a Curriculum Management System to creating an autism ontology.  Currently, she is Chair-Elect of the Academic Division and Secretary of the IT Division.  In the past couple of years, she has a program planner, so she’s looking forward to SLA 2011, where she won’t have to worry about A/V and room setups!  You can connect with her via juliane_schneider@hms.harvard.edu, or on Twitter @JulianeS.

Steven Bell, Associate University Librarian, Temple University

I was pleasantly surprised to become aware of the Future Ready 365 blog, and I’ll look forward to acquiring some good ideas from colleagues who are confronting the challenge of building a sustainable, resilient library. I’ve been writing and speaking about future-proofing for approximately the past two years, and have shared a number of ideas for ways in which librarians in all sectors of the profession can create libraries that are ready for whatever the future might hold. I first became interesting in pursuing this topic when I was asked to contribute to Library Journal’s issue on “Future Proofing Your Library”. I wrote:

Adopting new skills and new techniques to our work will help, but I also advocate that library workers need to take a whole new approach to how they identify problems and develop the right solutions. Design thinking is all about being a “problem finder” and then thoughtfully developing, in playfully creative ways and in teams of border-crossing professionals, appropriate solutions. A significant challenge for library workers is keeping up with user expectations. If we fail to provide our users with an experience that meets their expectations, then we lose, and in a hypercompetitive and hyperconsumptive society, that can be the greatest challenge to our long-term viability.

We must use design thinking to create great library experiences for our users, because when people can get their information anywhere, all that can differentiate our libraries is the unique experience we can deliver—but it must be based on personal relationships, it must deliver meaning to the user, and it must be well designed.

Any number of strategies may contribute to the librarian’s effort to create a future ready library. I offer a dozen such strategies in my article “Fit Libraries Are Future-Proof.” Some of the strategies are inspired by library practitioners; others come from for- and non-profit industries. The overarching philosophy that unites them is the design thinking approach, seeing oneself as a professional who brings intentional design to creating a future ready library. The point is that becoming future ready or future proof requires more than the occasional random actions and occurrences that move us forward incrementally. It demands intentional design. I hope others will take the time to follow the links in this post to learn more about design thinking and how it can contribute to a creating a fit library that is ready for anything the future throws our way.

Steven Bell is the Associate University Librarian at Temple University. He blogs at Kept-Up Academic Librarian, ACRLog, and Designing Better Libraries, and is coauthor of Academic Librarianship by Design. Learn more about his ideas on design thinking and user experience at stevenbell.info/design and http://dbl.lishost.org. You can follow Steven Bell at http://twitter.com/blendedlib.

by Greg Lambert, Texas Chapter, Legal Division

As I was riding the bus into work this morning, I started putting some puzzle pieces together in my mind, and things that I’ve been reading, watching and preparing came together and made me wonder if the library world’s push to find its place in the age of social communications may mean that it needs to re-embrace its stereotype as a place where you go to quietly study and work without being interrupted. Let me list out the three puzzle pieces I’m thinking about, and then I’ll fill you in on what I mean…

1. Ark Group’s February 2011 conference on Best Practices & Management Strategies for Law Firm Library & Information Service Centers – At this meeting, I will be co-presenting with WilmerHale’s Library Director, Matthew J. Todd, on the issue of reconsidering the physical space of a law firm library from a “Social Engineering” perspective. In other words, using the physical library as conduit for actually talking and sharing ideas with your peers in real face-to-face interactions.
2. Jason Fried’s TEDx Talk on Why work doesn’t happen at work – The e-Discovery manager in my office sent this video to me a couple weeks ago and found it interesting the amount of time, money and effort that law firms spend on work space, only to find out that real work may be going on elsewhere.
3. The University of Arizona’s law library got some interesting press in the student paper saying that the law library refuses undergraduates. It seems that one of the best kept secrets at the University of Arizona is that if you want a place where you can study and actually get something done without interruption, the law library is the place to go.

I’ve been prepping for this Ark Group conference by discussing the idea that the library could re-invent its space and become the new water cooler location for small gatherings of peers to discuss work they are conducting, or just getting to know each other better in a neutral setting. The idea is that lawyers tend to be too reliant upon communications via e-mail, text, chat or phone and have lost touch with those down the hall simply because they don’t reach out to them through those electronic communication tools. Kind of like the trend that many of us don’t know the names of our neighbors where we live… many lawyers have only had brief conversations with their fellow lawyers that office down the hall.

However, when I watched the Fried presentation on the fact that one of the reasons we don’t get work done at work is the fact that we have too many distractions that are related to these exact social interactions:

When’s the last time you had three or four hours to yourself to get work done? It probably wasn’t at the office. A phone call, a co-worker tapping on your shoulder or knocking on your door, a required meeting — all the things prevent you from having long uninterrupted stretches of time to get things done. Good work requires thinking, and thinking requires time.

Fried’s concept is that social interaction has its place and time, but so does uninterrupted work.

The final piece of the puzzle I was putting together this morning was remembering the story of how the undergraduates at the University of Arizona loved going to the law library because they could actually get some peace and quite there and actually get some work done. While the main libraries on campus were bustling with activity, social meetings, coffee shops and other activities, the law library seems to be what we think of when we think of a traditional library… a place you are expected to be quiet.

So, am I wrong in my idea that the physical space of a law library (in this instance, a law firm library) should be transformed away from its traditional approach as a place where you are expected to work quietly and not disturb others, and made into a water cooler setting where people talk and discuss the issues they are working on? Or, should we be promoting the law library as a quiet place to get work done? Perhaps there’s a happy medium somewhere that we could do.

Fried half-heartedly jokes that “Instead of casual Fridays, how about no-talk Thursdays?” Maybe the library can be the exact place for a “No-Talk-Thursday” to happen. To balance the “No-Talk-Thursdays,” perhaps we could then have a “Water-Cooler-Fridays” where the library is set up to handle open discussions on any issue a lawyer wants to throw out to his or her peers.

I’d been pretty wrapped up in the idea that the drop in “foot traffic” in the library was due to the fact that people tended to just think of it as a quiet place to go. Now I’m thinking that maybe people just think of it as a place that has books, and the drop-off in traffic is because they have forgotten that it is a quiet place to get work done. The University of Arizona undergraduates talk about their law library as one of the best kept secrets on campus, and value it for its peace and quiet. Perhaps we’ve also become the best kept secret in our place of work. If that is the case, then I’m thinking that I need to let that secret out and find ways of embracing the fact that we are still an outstanding place to go to get work done and at the same time start working on expanding the library as a place where ideas are shared.

Greg Lambert is the Library & Records Manager and King & Spalding LLP. He is the recent Past-President of the Texas Chapter of SLA.

Debra Kolah, Texas Chapter

Envisioning the future from the user perspective helps us to create the most amazing experiences possible. If we have thought ahead and steered our way through the ever raging course of technology and change, then we are not shocked by the future, but rather feel the electricity of possibility.

The term “user experience,” while familiar in the context of computer usability, is fairly new in the library environment. The first user experience or “UX” librarian job descriptions started appearing only within the last few years.

But UX in libraries is gaining strength. The user experience deserves our attention. My own title changed in December 2009, I was one of three science librarians when I was promoted to the new position of UX librarian. Solo UX work is not uncommon, but it is hard. Now libraries have had a taste of it and the roles are beginning to expand. Over time, UX will become embedded in librarianship, and all librarians will focus on the user experience if we want to continue to exist and thrive.

The future demands that we create a holistic, user-centered, innovative approach to service design for virtual and physical spaces as well as digital and physical collections. Focus groups, surveys, usability studies, embedded librarianship and ethnographic studies are some of the tools used to gather data and anecdotal information about the user experience. We need to focus on the elephant which is the library website as well as the hundreds of little details that go into making libraries places where people want to go. Everyday we have an opportunity to make the library a user-centered place that teaches, inspires, and creates the future.

We must transition staff to new roles. These include: user needs assessment, usability testing, gathering and interpreting statistics, virtual sites design and production (web and mobile), embedding content outside of our own systems (in YouTube, Slideshare, course management systems, etc.), and marketing and communication.

The times we are living in call for creative ways of doing things that we might not have done in the past. We must look at new user needs and discover new ways to become the libraries of the future. That future has the user at the core of everything we do.

Debra Kolah is User Experience (UX) Librarian at Rice University in Houston, Texas. She is a member of multiple divisions and currently serves as Public Relations Chair of the Physics-Astronomy-Mathematics Division.