On Saturday January 21 2017, a group of about forty librarians gathered at the ALA Midwinter Meeting in Atlanta GA to discuss change management and user experience initiatives at their libraries. Sponsored by ETS User Experience (UX) Design Committee, the conversation covered a number of angles surrounding the process of identifying and initiating changes to workflow, interfaces and systems based on best practices for user experience design or research data gathered in user studies.
At each of several round tables throughout the room, participants discussed a series of four questions together. The group paused between each question to report out into a larger conversation on the discussion prompts – for example, “Share solutions you’ve used to build support and get buy-in for UX-driven changes – what worked, what didn’t?”
Overall, participants’ comments emphasized that they enjoyed being able to share experiences, and hear about others’ projects – one person commented that they “found a lot of common ground.” Another participant commented, “It was very useful to hear reports from other libraries how they have handled various UX changes. It was helpful to get ideas from others, particularly ideas for hearing feedback and the importance of communication.” One other comment stated, “It is good for me to hear what others are doing and for my thinking to be challenged. I believe that I have a new theory of how supervisors can be helpful with change.”
Interested in knowing more?
- Consider attending a pre-conference organized by the committee, to be held on Friday June 23 at ALA Annual in Chicago, titled “We Are All User Experience Librarians: Creating Change from the Trenches”- more information coming soon!
- Plan to attend the ETS Chair’s program at ALA Annual in Chicago – our topic will be “The intentional library: creating a better user experience with service design and design thinking”
- Join the UX Design committee, or another ETS committee (full list of ETS committees). Complete the RUSA Volunteer form. We’ll be starting to issue appointments soon.
We’ve gathered the twitter live-stream outlining some of the discussion, together with some supplementary materials, on Storify – you can find it at https://storify.com/xocg/managing-change-uxets