Define, develop and deliver

A post by Customer Services Coordinator Kate Williamson and User Experience Officer Kirsty Barnfather

At Durham, we’re lucky to be part of the Academic Libraries North (ALN) community and often join their sessions and workshops, especially within the User Experience (UX) Community of Practice (CoP) that we are members of. The ALN UX CoP allows groups of people from different institutions to get together (usually virtually) and discuss different User Experience methodologies, projects, and chat about what each library is currently doing or planning for the future. There are a variety of sessions, from workshops to ‘UX in one hour’ presentations, allowing members to expand their knowledge and encourage others to try out new techniques.

In March we attended the Define, Develop and Deliver workshop ran by the UX CoP. The session explored the double diamond approach and allowed us to use practical UX techniques for data analysis, ideation and prototyping.

Armed with a stash of pens and paper, we looked at a variety of methods (some familiar and others completely new to us). Our highlights included the anti-problem and Google reviews as they were fun and different ways to approach an issue.

The anti-problem asks you to think of a problem you would like to solve and then reverse it. We looked at issues such as not being able to find a book on the shelves, not borrowing books as carrying them home is difficult, etc. Reversing these meant coming up with bad ideas that would cause the most disruption to the user. Covering the floor with spiders to make it impossible for people to get to the shelves was a personal highlight. Once you have your terrible idea, you reverse it to come up with the most helpful solution that would create a positive user experience. This can be as crazy as the spiders, but the idea is that you will be able to take away elements of the solution to resolve the initial problem. For example, putting staff at the end of each row of shelving turned into the idea of a ‘personal shopper’ service for book collection, and issues navigating the online catalogue created a very individual and accessible online experience with a virtual assistant. Whilst all hypothetical, a lot of ideas were discussed and it was interesting to hear the creative solutions to so many different issues faced in libraries.

Page tables and Google reviews were another fun way of looking at improving user experience. For the page tables, we used some of the solutions from the anti-problem task and created a quick pitch for the product or service. We designed a ‘Book Butler’ personal shopper service and a helpful navigation tool called ‘Look for your book!’, which is essentially a Google maps style app to direct users to their chosen books on the shelves.

The Google reviews then become useful as you evaluate your product or service with a 5-star review and a 1-star review. This lets you look at your prototype from a user perspective and anticipate what issues might come up that you should address before implementation. Your imagination can run wild at this stage but considering so many different angles with a group of people really allows you to troubleshoot an idea to (hopefully!) create a great solution to an existing problem.

We really enjoyed the workshop and came away with loads of new ideas for our ideation and prototyping stages of UX work. We’re looking forward to the next!

If you’d like to have a look at some of the other methodologies of UX work, the ALN UX toolkit is available here.