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.
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.