More than Usable: Library Services for Humans

As Experience designers, we're interested in more than just products, services, and websites. But our toolkit looks remarkably like the toolkit product designers use: design for tasks, hope emotions will follow. But experience is big, and emotions aren't just the outputs from using something. We're going to need more than science to explain experience--we'll need philosophy, literature, poetry, and more.

In this talk, I explore how phenomenology (the branch of philosophy that deals with experience), metaphor, and frozen space urine can help us design better experiences for our library users by putting people and experiences first.

(This talk was the closing keynote at UX Lib: User Experience in Libraries Conference, Cambridge, UK, March 17-19, 2015.)

Transcript

1. MORE THAN USABLE LIBRARY SERVICES FOR HUMANS MATTHEW REIDSMA GRAND VALLEY STATE UNIVERSITY
2. Photo: NASA
3. Photo, Audio NASA
4. Photo, Audio NASA A MYRIAD OF STARS
7. Names of the Sea, p.233 The stories told by numbers and research are quite different from the stories we tell ourselves and each other. This is not to say that either is wrong. “ Sarah Moss
8. TASKS EXPERIENCE
9. We tend to talk about transportation as if the ultimate goal were mere movement, measured in speed, time and capacity. “ Emily Badger http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/04/29/cutting-edge-transportation-maps-will-change-how-we-understand-and-plan-cities/
10. The ultimate goal of transportation, though, isn't really to move us. It's to connect us -- to jobs, to schools, to the supermarket. “ Emily Badger http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/04/29/cutting-edge-transportation-maps-will-change-how-we-understand-and-plan-cities/
11. Your members don’t come to the library to find books, or magazines, journals, films or musical recordings. “ Hugh Rundle http://hughrundle.net/2012/04/04/libraries-as-software-dematerialising-platforms-and-returning-to-first-principles/
12. They come to hide from reality or understand its true nature. They come to find solace or excitement, companionship or solitude. “ Hugh Rundle http://hughrundle.net/2012/04/04/libraries-as-software-dematerialising-platforms-and-returning-to-first-principles/
13. [Libraries] let people transform themselves through access to information and one another. “ Andromeda Yelton andromedayelton.com/blog/2015/02/16/c4l15-keynote-transcript/ Photo: Molly Tomlinson photoclave.com/
14. TASKS EXPERIENCE
15. Photo: Minneapolis Star Tribine, http://www.startribune.com/local/west/265401331.html
16. http://www.uscis.gov/mye-verify/self-check
17. Usability
18. Usability
19. We just don’t know if [our designs] work or not until we evaluate the subjective experience of the people using them. “ Victor Lombardi Why We Fail, p. 10
22. TECHNOLOGY AS TOOL
23. TECHNOLOGY AS ECOLOGY
24. A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile, but the traffic jam. “ Frederik Pohl
27. BEING-IN-THE- WORLD
28. Instead of asking, “How can we know about the world?” Heidegger asked, “How does the world reveal itself to us through our encounters with it?” “ Paul Dourish Where the action is: the foundations of embodied interaction. MIT Press: 2004.
29. Meaning provides a facet of usability that forces designers to think past function into the domains of culture, language, and everyday practice. “ Thomas Wendt Design for Dasein: Understanding the Desgin of Experiences, p.36
30. When our tools are broken, we feel broken. And when somebody fixes one, we feel a tiny bit more whole. “ Lev Grossman qtd. in Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, p. 473-74.
31. PRESENT-AT-HAND READY-TO-HAND
32. qtd. in Dourish, Paul. Where the action is: the foundations of embodied interaction. MIT Press: 2004. As we act through technology that has become ready-to-hand, the technology itself disappears from our immediate concerns. We are caught up in the performance of the work. “ Martin Heidegger
33. BREAKDOWN
34. There is a constant movement between present-at-hand and ready- to-hand in everyday life, and designing with that movement in mind is the job of experience designers. “ Thomas Wendt Design for Dasein: Understanding the Desgin of Experiences, p.155
35. User-friendliness is not merely an issue of the number of errors made per unit of time. It is rooted in the confidence of being able to handle disruptions. “ Klaus Krippendorff The Semantic Turn: A new foundation for design.
36. BEYOND TODAY
37. RETHINK USABILITY 1 2 3
38. RETHINK USABILITY 1 2 3 TEST TO LEARN, NOT PERFECT
39. RETHINK USABILITY 1 2 3 TEST TO LEARN, NOT PERFECT DESIGN FOR BREAKDOWNS
40. “The Space Between You and Me,” The Manual, Issue #1, 2012. Good technology makes us feel like we are inching closer to who we truly want to be. “ Frank Chimero
41. PEOPLE YOUR LIBRARY IS
42. Junod, Tom. “Can You Say...Hero?” Esquire. November, 1998. We make so many connections here on earth. Look at us—I’ve just met you, but I’m investing in who you are, and who you will be, and I can’t help it. “ Fred Rogers
43. THANKYOU
44. THANKYOU