TAPPING THE USER EXPERIENCE TO DESIGN A BETTER LIBRARY FOR ENGINEERING AND TEXTILES STUDENTS AND FACULTY

摘要

In recent years many academic libraries have embraced methodologies for learning more about the totality of users' experiences, including attitudes, motivations, and emotions in order to inform decisions. A growing number of libraries are undertaking projects to study users' behaviors by leveraging ethnographic methods such as those described in the University of Rochester's studies of researchers and students. Librarians are also leveraging research tools and design processes from the user experience (UX) profession, most frequently for web design projects, but also for space and service design. Such research efforts make sense in libraries where focus on the user has always been of high importance, but ever evolving use of technologies and changes in learning-style preferences have called for continual commitment to collecting feedback in an organized and reportable manner. This paper describes how researching the user experience has been an important part of our process of designing a new 128,000 square-foot library scheduled to open in 2013. Through a range of data-gathering methods our library has developed a richer understanding of our users' behaviors, preferences, and needs related to spaces, services, and technologies. Additionally, librarians have used personas, popular in web interface and product design, to package much of our data into a form that can be used for planning spaces and services within the new library. Such efforts to study our users have enabled us to keep students and researchers at the heart of designing new spaces and services. It should be noted that this paper does not discuss the findings of the data collected in detail, but focuses on our processes of gathering user-research data and effective methods for user studies that are applicable in other libraries.