Digital Strategies: Practices and Services
Rebecca Jones [Dysart & Jones Associates], Amanda Etches-Johnson [McMaster University User Experience Librarian], Daniel Lee [Navigator Ltd.]
Rebecca: a strategy is a shift -- not an add-on to what you are already doing. Libraries need to change, adopt new policies
Amanda: Explained her work environment as Tech Skunk Works,
where skunk works is "a group within an organization given a high degree of autonomy and unhampered by bureaucracy, tasked with working on advanced or secret projects."
= died and gone to heaven? -- kae
Her team consists of her, McMaster's User Experience Librarian, + two programmers
Some Principles she recommends following
- rapid prototyping
- launch early (and often) -- example 2.0 Toolbox at McMaster -- constantly revising
- usability testing -- her favourite tool is a pad of paper and a pencil , while she watches users
- iterative design -- small changes, nothing major, all the time --> test different things. Her slides 21-24 show amazon.com over the past two years -- from then to now, a big change, but done in a series of small steps, so small you would hardly notice it.
- prioritize based on user needs -- use tools like Google Analytics to gauge these. E.g. she got a complaint about how bad the McMaster site looked on a 1280x766 screen resolution -- but checked and found only 1% of users used this -- so the corrections stopped before they started.
- look ahead -- e.g. libX toolbar
- FAIL -- be prepared to fail, throw spaghetti at the wall, see what (if anything) sticks. Example: Google's Lively
These points ring so true to me, lessons I learned from our 2.0 project. We didn't follow all her principles, e.g. rapid prototyping. But we did use iterative design with the teen engagement project -- and we did fail. :-) I think daring to fail is really really hard for librarians. --kae
Daniel Lee: Explained his work environment: fast-paced, crisis-driven organization, focused on "billable time" -- which the library, and his job, is not. ...His project was to develop a staff wiki -- was driven to it, because mistakes were made, and new people did not implement projects the "Navigator way" -- this created problems for the company.
His tips:
- watch for an opportunity to launch a digital initiative
- have a project plan, and get it signed off by senior management
- have someone in authority supporting the initiative
- tool[s] should be cheap, easily customizable, good match to user & staff skills
- "sharepoint - no frickin way"
- planning is essential
- keep the plan up to date, revise it as often as needed
- you need a hook to get staff to use digital tools
- you'll need to break the e-mail habit -- e.g. only email links to the wiki, don't paste the wiki content into email
- you'll need to confront -- and overcome -- "learned helplessness" e.g. I can't blog, from people who write emails and Word documents all the time
- promote comfort -- talk about and show what is not changing -- build from adult education principles
Such great advice, so realistic -- kae
