2014 Breakout II (Wednesday)

Notes by @erinrwhite again. Y'all cannot escape me

NCSU's UX department is cross-functional and has members from across departments. Looking at creating cross-channel experiences from digital to real life. Working on consistency across experiences. Expanded on UMich's UX department to create a UX research team.

Research: the NCSU does a research project every month. NCSU is also training new library fellows to infuse User Experience work into their projects. Growing the culture of UX within the organization.

Process

How do you work in harmony with a dev team when sometimes the UX team can be the roadblock to development? Need to get a workflow that works so that everyone can move quickly.

UXing web pages vs. entire web applications: they're totally different experiences so need different approaches to user experience evaluation.

Research

Guerrilla research: go out into the public spaces of your library to test prototypes or design ideas. Make it quick. User research doesn't have to be a huge deal.

If you can't give money as remuneration, give 'em candy bars. But make the candy bars full-size, not the minis.

Librarians are users too...right?

How do we push back against librarians' assertions that pages/interfaces should look a certain way?

Research with users can *sometimes* help.

Need to communicate your evidence to your library. UT hired someone last year just to do IT communication (!).

Numbers don't always work. Need a visual tool if possible (i.e. a heatmap). If you can compile a video or audio of user interviews or usability testing, that can be very powerful.

Resources

Recommendation: 37Signals' book Getting Real on helping choose things that are/aren't important and moving on.

Publish your damn work!

As a community, we need to get better about sharing our work with each other so we don't have to keep reinventing the wheel.

Mag II

Pine Oak

Capitol

in Ballroom

Willow Oak

in ballroom

in ballroom