If Students were cats: Understanding the different breeds at your institution discusses interviewing students to understand how different "breeds" of students use the university library. The document provides guidance on recruiting participants, asking open-ended questions without bias or jargon, allowing participants to share their real experiences, and avoiding leading questions or interrupting participants. It also discusses analyzing the data collected from interviews to understand how students with different goals and majors utilize the library.
Designing for privacy: 3 essential UX habits for product teams
If students were cats understanding the different breeds at your institution
1. If Students were cats:
Understanding the different
breeds at your institution
2. Who are we?
Carrie Moran - User Engagement Librarian at the University of Central Florida
Jakarri Godbolt - Biology Major at the College of Charleston
Kyle Stewart - User Experience Specialist at Gale Cengage Learning
3. What should we
ask about?
Verify what you know
Validate what you think you know
Discover things you didn't know
existed
4. When writing questions...
Do Don’t
Ask about real experiences Use hypothetical scenarios
Write questions using Ask leading questions
unbiased language Overexplain your question
Use terms that your Use library
jargon
participants will understand
10. Data Analysis 1. Fill in the blank! I go to UCF Libraries website to
_______________.
Access databases for research
Find articles.
Find research articles for papers and projects
Renew library materials (because I'm too lazy to bring them
back)
Study
Find books
Library hours
Use the databases
Reserve study rooms
"For research ya big dummy"
Research super capacitors
Find all the stuff I need IEEE papers
Get an A on Micro
Find hours
Expand my horizons
Do HIM research
Find books so I don't have to buy them
To study…the only way I make it to the next level
Do the cooking by the book
Find scholarly articles
Use MEDLINE to find scholarly articles
Get citations for free
To try to do work…and then get distracted with something
else
Introductions
Tell them why they should care about understanding their users and how this will be valuable.
The first step in deciding what to ask is figuring out what you know, what you think you know, and what you don't know.
For example, you may know that students have smartphones. Q: Do you have a smartphone? Pretty basic, right?
You think that they are increasingly using their smartphones to do homework and research, but this needs validation. Q: Do you use your smartphone for schoolwork? If so, what kind of tasks are you doing on your smartphone and for what classes? This question digs more into details about the what and why. This is a great time to ask follow-up questions. For example, Q: You said you never use your phone for your chemistry class. Why is that?
You don't know what apps and services students are using on their smartphones, and this is a great time to ask a discovery question. Q: Can you give me some examples of apps and websites you use on your phone, for school and generally?
Don’t use jargon the participant might not understand
Try to ask about actual experiences, not hypotheticals
Aggressively combat inserting bias into your question. For example, ask “How helpful or unhelpful was your visit to the library today” instead of “How helpful was your visit to the library today”
Keep questions as open ended as possible
*add animation
This method depends on quality interviews, which requires recruiting participants.
One of the easiest ways is to set up a recruiting table at your institution in a high traffic area.
The person running the table can ask students basic screener questions, and hand off participating students to be interviewed.
Why would students ascent to be interviewed? Because you have offered them a small incentive, ranging from free food to Amazon or Starbucks gift cards.
The value of the incentive is relative to the time they spend talking with you. Our general rate at Gale is $25 for an hour interview.
Now that you have participants, you are ready for The Interview!
Wait...that’s not quite what I intended.
Much better…
Once you sit down with your participant, I recommend starting with basic questions about their background. Asking them to tell you a bit about themselves allows you to get some insight into how they view themselves and what is important to them.
Record sessions using a phone app, desktop app or a freestanding voice recorder. This will allow you to share the session with others, refer back to exact quotes with your notes and present the research in a more dynamic way later.
Having established some basics about your participant, move into the questions you prepared for the session.
Make sure to ask follow up questions when it appears that the participant has more to say
Avoid following participants down a rabbit hole. When they start drifting off, try and bring them back to the topic at hand.
Also avoid interrupting students with follow-up questions.
Taking notes as the interviewer can be difficult, as interviewing and accurately capturing quotes often feel mutually exclusive. Personally, I hate when I have to pause the conversation to finish writing down something the participant said. Having a scribe in the room is very helpful if you can manage it.
If you don’t have a scribe, try capturing the themes that strike you as most impactful or relevant to your research goals. The recording comes in handy here, making it so you don’t have to get word-for-word accurate quotes.
We are going to do a mock interview with Jakarri as the participant, and you all are going to use this empathy map to capture what you hear from our interview.
*pass out empathy map*
The sections of this map all correspond to verbs that participants commonly use during interviews. As I interview Jakarri, try to capture the themes and ideas that emerge. *Interviews about library usage and study habits*
Going to change gears for a moment and talk about data.
It may be difficult for you to get participants for interviews, but you likely have a few great sources of data available to use in building user profiles.
Google Analytics / general site traffic
LibGuides/LibAnswers
Website searches
Public facing staff
You can also gather responses from your existing social media channels with no pressure to recruit participants
Once you have the data, how do you turn it into something informative and useful?
Rough analysis - read through data set and find common themes, then categorize each response
Make it pretty for your stakeholders
Take a minute to look over these website searches.
Create categories and assign them to your data
Develop two tasks that are common to your users based on your analysis. Jot down any themes about your users that emerge based on the data.
Debriefing with your entire research team a great tool for keeping everyone on the same page.
For each interview, share the most important themes with the team. Consider the context of the student’s life, background, technology, etc.
Have any observers write out the top 3 most important things they heard during the session
Using the information from the mock interview with Jakkari, we are going to sketch out a thumbnail persona. This is a relatively uncomplicated technique that can quickly turn your interviews into a persona that will help guide your decision making.
A persona depicted as a specific person but isn’t a real person. A persona is a composite created from the observations and insights derived from your research. Having a cast of personas for a project allows your team to focus on a small group of memorable personas instead of focusing on thousands of actual users.
Let’s start with about, which includes demographics, technology usage and details about the persona’s life.
Now let's add in some context - capture details about how the personas lifestyle and processes interact with your service, or other similar services.
What does all this information imply as it relates to how our persona uses the library?
https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1tv2hnSzz5QVTb5ekoZXzGXatA5PKY03QML4VjRFxw1c/edit?usp=sharing
Story mapping has sprung out of Agile software development methodology over the past decade, but has significant value outside of software.
It will help keep the user front and center as you develop programs and services. It will also help your team to better understand the end to end experience of your users.
The highest level, a story, is generally worded in the first person.
Imagine you wanted to map out a student searching for a journal article through an academic library.
As a student,
I want to find a peer reviewed journal article on cats,
so that I can use it for my veterinary research paper.
Create your own story based on the interview with Jakarri OR your data analysis from the UCF searches
From there, a story map breaks down as follows:
An activity is something like “Finds a database” and consists of one or more tasks,like “goes to the library website” and “clicks on the research link”
Under a task can go any number of sub-tasks, details, technical issues or cool ideas your team has for changing that step.
*Move to Google Draw, and time permitting, assemble a short story map of student retrieving a journal article via a discovery service.
https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1b3lWS9lvMyk874Lk14d0v-vKSaAccZKwmWeL6HgXsYs/edit?usp=sharing
Politics
Your UX team & other library stakeholders have personas as varied as your students
User story mapping is an effective way to build empathy on your team & keep a user focus throughout the design process
If you want to go more in depth because you very fruitful interviews or your topic is very complex, consider an affinity map.
I know you can’t read it from this far back, but each grouping represents some theme that came out during research.
In this case, I was doing research on Cengage’s CRM system, Magellan.
The red cards represent the highest level of theme, like samples.
Under are grouped all insights about samples, like “Creating new sample workflow”.
Under that card are slips of paper with the actual note or quote from the user interview that pertains to creating a new sample.