Libraries Designed For Users

User experience (UX) characterizes how a person feels about using a product, system or service. UX design incorporates the practical aspects of utility, ease of use and efficiency to make your web design and functionality decisions with patrons in mind. This results in a better design, a more intuitive interface, and a more enjoyable experience. This book shows you how to get there by providing hands-on steps and best practices for UX design principles, practices, and tools to engage with patrons online and build the best web presence for your library. You ll find out how to conduct a usability test, perform a card sort, make decisions on how to build the architecture of your site, create personas as a cornerstone of your website planning process, create a content strategy, and perform an experience-based evaluation of your site.

The history, trends, and design criteria for the ideal library.

In the face of rapid change and an ever-widening constellation of challenges, it’s crucial for library leaders to pull back to the question of “why?” Plotting a sustainable way forward depends upon recommitting ourselves to our underlying values, such as customer service and community-building, while fostering the improvements that change makes possible. With passion, patience, and fortitude, libraries can stride confidently into the future. In this book, noted speakers and consultants Bignoli and Stara speak directly to library directors, managers, administrators, and technology staff, offering concrete guidance on setting or resetting strategic priorities. Taking an interconnected and specific approach to planning for and strengthening the library environment as a whole, their book discusses why libraries should embrace change as a fundamental part of library life; explores how to harness rapid change to provide more responsive, user-centered library service; addresses the ways in which libraries straddle the physical and the digital, in areas such as service provision and collections, illuminating how they overlap and can be improved using similar philosophies; presents both a comprehensive overview of library technologies as well as related team and change management advice, all grounded in user experience principles; shows how the concepts of sustainability and flexibility apply to physical space planning and design, from furniture selection and arrangement to infrastructure; and provides sound guidance on project management, problem solving, preparing for future challenges, personal reflection and self-care, and other leadership topics.

"A comprehensive and practical handbook exploring the value and applicability of UX Research & Design to libraries. As well as detailed methodology, there are numerous case studies from around the world and insights from practitioner librarians. This volume takes you through all the stages of the UX Process, from research, to data mapping and analysis, to idea generation and finally prototyping and iteration. Written by former librarian and experienced UX trainer and consultant Andy Priestner, it is intended for use by all library staff regardless of previous experience and seeks to place the user at the heart of library service development and delivery."--

Modern library services can be incredibly complex. Much more so than their forebears, modern librarians must grapple daily with questions of how best to implement innovative new services, while also maintaining and updating the old. The efforts undertaken are immense, but how best to evaluate their success? In this groundbreaking new book from Routledge, library practitioners, anthropologists, and design experts combine to advocate a new focus on User Experience (or ‘UX’) research methods. Through a combination of theoretical discussion and applied case studies, they argue that this ethnographic and human-centred design approach enables library professionals to gather rich evidence-based insights into what is really going on in their libraries, allowing them to look beyond what library users say they do to what they actually do. Edited by the team behind the international UX in Libraries conference, User Experience in Libraries will ignite new interest in a rapidly emerging and game-changing area of research. Clearly written and passionately argued, it is essential reading for all library professionals and students of Library and Information Science. It will also be welcomed by anthropologists and design professionals working in related fields.

Library design in the 21st century has one common theme: collaboration is at the heart of innovation. Designing modern libraries is a complex process involving many stakeholders and participants. Libraries of all types work with an almost limitless range of constituent groups for input, buy-in and successful implementation. Securing support for new library buildings and renovations of libraries engages many people: library clients, community members, faculty, funding agencies, donors, governing authorities, librarians, architects, interior designers and planners. Telling the right story and getting to the end game demand carefully crafted approaches, wide-ranging skills, a unified vision and productive teamwork. The IFLA Library Buildings and Equipment Section has selected the best papers presented by award-winning architects and international thought leaders from the academic and public library sector at our recent satellite conferences and seminars: "Collaborative Strategies for Successful Library Design" (Chicago, Illinois), "What comes after the Third Place?" (Columbus, Ohio); "Key Issues for Library Space: International Perspectives" (Maynooth, Ireland); "Storage, the final frontier" (Munich, Germany) and "Telling and selling the space story" (Wrocław, Poland). The stories by the library and design professionals within this publication illustrate how powerful a role partnerships, outreach and cooperation play in a library project’s success.

Useful, useable, desirable: like three legs of a stool, if your library is missing the mark on any one of these it's bound to wobble.