Designing for Digital 2020

Understanding the users’ experience with a system may be crucial to a project’s success, but how do you convey this to stakeholders and development partners? In this session, we will discuss how we are building a culture of user-centered decision making by integrating user experience methodologies into the design and development of information retrieval systems at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. We will also discuss how we adapted our approach to meet institutional and budgetary challenges.

User experience professionals and groups that focus on usability tend to have their own methods and practices for performing a usability test. The Usability Working Group at Cornell University Library has worked to translate our list of methods into a format that can be shared and utilized by ourselves and others. We want to explain a few of the methods that we use frequently and the specific additions to this toolkit that make it unique.

From a small team leading the design, development, and maintenance of multiple digital systems and web properties at an archival repository, this talk shares the results of our work to advocate for and build a UX design and usability testing program. It will detail a strategy to operationalize UX work through the organization-wide involvement of staff in usability testing activities, the creation of supporting templates, and the associated advancement of web accessibility awareness and skills.