Presented at 2014 Digital Library Forum http://www.diglib.org/forums/2014forum/program/66z/ As at other institutions, the range of web applications we develop and support at Stanford University Libraries is growing, as is the audience for those applications. In addition to our library website and online library catalog, in recent years we’ve added applications for multimedia archives, self-deposit for scholarly resources, discovery of complex geographic data, and self-service digital exhibits. Expanding our range of online offerings certainly enables us to better expose and share the rich collections in our digital repository, but it also brings new challenges. How can designers ensure an institution’s growing array of digital library applications provide users of those applications with consistent, enjoyable, and successful experiences? While best practices from the larger user experience community are an important foundation, we’ve found that digital library content, and the faculty, students, and librarians who are the main audience for that content, have unique characteristics that must be considered in the design process. Using examples from recent development efforts, we’ll illustrate our unique approach to incorporating domain-specific considerations into the user discovery, information architecture, and interaction and visual design phases of our process. Designers of institutional-based digital library applications have to consider not only the expected end-users of the applications we design, but also a varied set of interested stakeholders. Collection donors, librarians responsible for digital collections, and those concerned with branding and identity at the institution all have an interest in the products we develop. We’ll describe how we consider varied stakeholder needs and share our strategies for seeking stakeholder feedback throughout the design and development process. Finally, we’ll conclude this session by briefly describing how the design process and the designer are integrated into our agile development process. We’ll also address how Stanford has deployed its user-centered design process to kick-start a variety of community-based open source projects.

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A User-Centered Approach to
Designing Digital Library Applications
Gary Geisler & Jennifer Vine
Stanford University

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Outline
• Who we are, what we do
• Unique challenges of UX design for
digital libraries
• Stanford University Libraries
approach to UX design
• Moving towards a more
community-oriented design process

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Who We Are and What We Do
Stanford University Libraries (SUL)
Digital Library Systems & Services (DLSS)
~2 UX designers for
~20 developers

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Who We Are and What We Do
SUL DLSS is significantly involved
in open source community
• Hydra and Blacklight
• Spotlight
• Mirador
• IIIF
• DPN
• Future:
• ArcLight
• Other collaborations

5. STANFORD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES
Outline
• Unique challenges of UX design
for digital libraries
• Stanford University Libraries
approach to UX design
• Moving towards a more
community-oriented design process

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Challenges of UX Design for Digital Libraries
Many useful UX design resources available today
We use many established UX design processes and techniques

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Challenges of UX Design for Digital Libraries
1. Wide range of products, developing concurrently
2. Diverse set of stakeholders
3. Broad range of users and use cases
4. Mix of content and use restrictions

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Wide Range of Products
Core properties: Library
website, library catalog,
digital repository
Dedicated collection
sites: Tel Aviv, FRDA,
Revs, etc.
Third-party products:
Article search, SFX

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Diverse Set of Stakeholders
Parent institution
Partner institutions that share source materials or development resources
Funding agencies
Donors of source materials who want them presented in a specific way
Metadata librarians who craft metadata to display in a specific
environment
Faculty whose reputations are affected by the digitization and
presentation of their research
Instructional librarians whose role is to mediate between the patrons and
the product

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Broad Range of Users and Use Cases
Students
(undergrad, grad)
Faculty, researchers
Our librarian colleagues
Lifelong learners

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Broad Range of Users and Use Cases
International audience
Locations of
SearchWorks sessions IE 6.0 users of the
library website

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Mix of Content and Use Restrictions
Many content and resource types
• Text, images, audio, video,
theses and dissertations, data sets,
complex objects, archival collections, etc.
Mix of restricted and publicly-available content
• Completely public
• Public metadata, restricted content
• Completely dark

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The Competition
“Wow, this is great. It is better than Google!”
— Feedback from a student
Google increasingly does influence user expectations
• They think all knowledge is in SearchWorks
• They use long, natural language search strings
• They have complete faith in relevance ranking

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Outline
• Unique challenges of UX design for
digital libraries
• Stanford University Libraries
approach to UX design
• Moving towards a more
community-oriented design process

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SUL’s (evolving) Design Process

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Discovery: Environmental Scan
What content and associated metadata are we working with?
What has been done before in this area?
Types of sites and products surveyed for Spotlight

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Discovery: Project Objectives

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Discovery: Project Objectives

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Discovery: User Needs
What do likely users of our web properties want to do with them?
Analytics, log analysis, existing feedback data
Stakeholder and user interviews
End products:
• Interview transcriptions and notes
• Detailed examples of realistic tasks
• Features that potential users like
or don’t like

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Discovery: Requirements Prioritization

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Information Architecture: Conceptual Models

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Information Architecture: User Personas

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Information Architecture: Requirements by Persona

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Information Architecture: Wireframes

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Interaction & Visual Design
Most of our interaction and visual design occurs during
development

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Interaction & Visual Design
Balancing consistency and SUL branding with a design and
personality appropriate to the web property
Revs Bassi-Veratti FRDA

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Integrating Design with Application Development
SUL uses an agile development methodology
Github (or JIRA) for issues (work tickets), sprint
milestones, release notes
Weekly sprints, with publicly posted demo videos

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The Designer is Part of the Development Team
Participates in daily standup
Helps formulate initial work tickets
Handles "Design needed” tickets
Manages formative feedback
during development

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Outline
• Unique challenges of UX design for
digital libraries
• Stanford University Libraries
approach to UX design
• Moving towards a more
community-oriented design
process

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Towards a More Collaborative Design Process
1. Our web properties are open-source and increasingly, of
potential value to other institutions
2. Open-source products mature more quickly and provide more
value when there are more contributors
3. Institutions are more likely to contribute to a product if they
believe it will serve their objectives
So how can we improve our design process to ensure that the
project objectives and needs of users at other institutions are
considered?

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Potential Benefits of Collaborative Design
Stakeholders and their application users more completely
represented in design documents
Ideas and alternative viewpoints from UX designers at other
institutions enrich design documents
Time and effort to produce solid design documents is distributed
across institutions
Time to complete the design stage of a project can be reduced
Partner institutions will understand early on how the app will fit into
their institution, and not be surprised or disappointed by the end
result

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Challenges of Collaborative Design
How to avoid design by committee?
How to reconcile different design sensibilities?
How to deal with participants’ differing feature priorities?
How to ensure that the overhead of collaboration isn't a drag on
project velocity

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First Steps
Our baby steps towards more community-oriented, collaborative
design:
• Seek early-stage input from interested institutions
• Include users from other institutions in our research and persona
development
• Seek feedback on design documents
• Seek input during development

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Other Ideas?