The UX librarian works in the background, with results that are easy to grasp
Imagine if someone moved the University Library entrance closer to your parking spot. You’d notice the difference, right?
But every day, specialists at the Libraries make any number of service improvements that are practical and impactful despite often being nigh imperceptible.
Welcome to the world of the user experience (UX) librarian.
Frank Sweis joined the Libraries in March 2020 after working as a UX analyst for Northwestern University Information Technology and, before that, at DePaul University. As Northwestern’s UX librarian, he’s leading conversations about how students, faculty, and other researchers find the resources they need and how that user experience can be made faster, easier, and more accessible.
“We try to center our patrons in our decisions,” Sweis said. “We want our library search systems to be welcoming to folks, whether you’re a PhD student with heavy research needs or an undergraduate who’s rarely used a library.”
UX comes into play wherever library users and library technologies and services meet, focusing on matters ranging from browser plugins to accessibility accommodations. No human-computer interaction is too small to be subjected to UX analysis.
For example, if you’re using NUsearch (the library catalog) to locate Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, you might click on the topmost result—only to be momentarily annoyed to realize, like many other NUsearch users before you, that the link takes you to a book review of Jane Eyre, not to the book itself.
“It just felt so frustrating to get fooled by an article,” Sweis said. Why should a book review, like a sly doppelgänger of Brontë’s classic, take precedence over the real thing? “That just sticks in your craw, right?”
NUsearch’s “book reviews first” behavior was a quirk of the software’s way of prioritizing search results. After hearing about it, Sweis took action. When usage data revealed that only 10 percent of catalog users adjusted the filter settings to exclude reviews—suggesting that probably few users were even aware of the option—Sweis consulted with the library staff committee that implements the catalog software; then, just like that, a technician turned off book reviews as a search result. (Users can still choose to include them if they prefer.)
But wait—there’s more for the UX librarian to do. Your Jane Eyre search will still bring up films, television adaptations, plays, critical analyses, and even a score for a 2013 opera; does the interface help you distinguish among those results quickly? To ensure that it does, Sweis collaborated with the NUsearch team—specifically, web developer Alice Tippit, who is also an artist—to design icons that make multimedia, scores, and articles easy to identify at first glance.
The UX librarian relies on both qualitative and quantitative research tools to analyze how people engage with an interface or take in information, Sweis said. The more user input available, the better the analysis; the better the analysis, the better the behind-the-scenes UX decisions it informs.
“Being surrounded by students is a benefit we use to our advantage,” Sweis said. By promising modest compensation, Sweis can recruit student participants for in-depth usability studies that entail 30- to 90-minute interviews about using, for example, a software interface. Students may be asked to share their perceptions of how the interface works, what they already know about it, and how they perform specific tasks.
“Do their responses tell us what we expected,” said Sweis, “or are they throwing a curveball at us, showing that our assumptions were wrong?”
Sweis deploys simpler data gathering methods as well. To assess new software that dictates how card catalog information is displayed on screen, he and library colleagues set up a table near the library entrance and offered free snacks to students who performed a 15-minute on-the-spot “card sort” activity. Results revealed that there was no need to purchase the new software, because what students preferred—a cleaner view of a book’s table of contents—could be provided using the existing system.
“I don’t think any of this stuff is too impressive when you look at it individually,” Sweis said, “but all those microinteractions add up. Our concern is getting folks to want to interact with our services and making sure every interaction is approachable and accessible for all users and experience levels. The more we can ease those microinteractions, the better the experience as a whole.”
This post originally appeared in the Spring 2023 issue of Footnotes.