Designing for Digital 2020

With the goal of redesigning our existing services to improve the student research experience, we interviewed 23 graduate students about the barriers, facilitators and “roller coaster” of emotions they experienced while working on a literature review assignment, and then used the thematic analysis of those interviews to create a student experience map to inform our service design choices and show students when and how they can utilize library support for their research projects.

Our Applications Development & Support department in the Ohio State University Libraries has practiced Agile methodology for some time. In the last two years, they have begun to gradually incorporate user experience research and design as an influence on their sprint planning. This session will talk about the challenge of improving user experience as a negotiation between the project owner, the stakeholders, the users, the UX researcher, the front-end designer and the back-end developers.

This workshop is available to in-person attendees in Austin only. It will not be viewable via the Online Conference. 

In this workshop, we will introduce open coding and clustering as a way to analyze qualitative research data, and participants will have the chance to practice using interview transcripts and open-ended survey responses. Participants will also have the opportunity to discuss issues and challenges in analyzing qualitative data.

Following this session, participants will be able to

1. Code qualitative research data (e.g. interviews) as part of a team.
2. Understand how individual perspectives affect interview coding.
3. Create affinity maps to explore research data and present easy-to-communicate summaries of complex research.
4. Cluster research data algorithmically.
5. Understand the relative advantages and disadvantages of algorithmic vs. manual clustering.

Participatory design invites users to tell us about their needs and assumptions by giving them the tools to create their own solutions. In this presentation, I’ll share how we invited users to build paper prototypes as part of a user research strategy for an academic library project. The results revealed user goals and priorities that had not been fully explored in interviews. This user research approach is low-cost, low-tech, high-impact, and highly creative.