Understanding The Library Experience: A Field Study Into Bow Idea Store In Tower Hamlets

The Idea Store has never carried out user-research and apart from collecting basic information like how many residents took out books in a year, they had little idea about how residents used the space, their pain-points, and experience.

The problem:

• Confusing online library portal.

• Functions that you would expect to work on their website do not.

• Basic functions such as renewing a book and ordering in a book are also confusing.

• In-situ portals to return and take out books is unresponsive.

• Communications around overdue books for example, are corporate and often go ignored.

Goals:

• To understand user’s pain points.

• To understand users expectations and behaviour in the Idea Store.

• To develop key research based recommendations to improve the user experience at the Idea Store, thus increasing the public's use of the service and providing a service that justifies council tax.

What I did:

Ethnographic interviews:

I chose to use this method to start my project to give me a general idea of how users interact with the Idea Store and to provide a jumping off point for further research.

I specifically looked at:

• Stages of discovery

• What are the workarounds?

• Body language

Directed interviews:

I chose to use this method to discover the How, what, who and when of how users interact with the Idea Store. This method also allowed me to explore my goals, for example a user’s pain points.

For example I asked:

• Tell me about the last time you visited the Idea Store?

• What else competes for your attention (sequence of events)?

• What frustrates you about the Idea Store?

Usability Tests (Guerrilla):

I chose to use this method as by watching individual users carry out specific tasks, I would be able to better understand how intuitive the design of these services are (which links back to the genesis of this project). I chose guerrilla methods due to lack of resources.

With the user I observed them do some of following:

Self-service machine:

• Finding the machines

• Checking-out a book

• Renewing a book

• Checking your account

• Reserve a book.

Idea store website: www.ideastore.co.uk/idea-store-bow

• Finding the website - would they use desktop, tablet or mobile device at home?

• If they had to, how would they access the website in-situ?

• Logging in to your account

• Look up a book

• Renew a book

• Look up an event in the borough

• Download an ebook

• Look up a course

• Book a course

• Contact the library online.

Finding materials in-situ:

• A fiction book by Ian McEwan

• A book for children

• An audio-book

• A non-fiction book on history

• Books in other languages

• Find help.

Card sorting:

I planned to use this method in order to understand how users would like the information on the Idea Store portal to be presented and how they would expect the information architecture of be.

For example, I asked users:

• Write ten elements/actions you want on your ideal website

• Group these elements together

• If you were putting these into a filing cabinet what would the name of that file be?

• Eg. taking out a book, contact us etc.

• Primary navigation versus drop-downs

• Home - what is the most important information?

A snap shot of the results:

Surprisingly a large section of the users I spoke to didn't ever use the Idea Store online portal and didn't know that it existed. Of those that did and based on the limited responses in usability tests, the feedback was that the online portal was busy, confusing and the language used was not clear. Another pain-point was the self-service machine - which many said was unresponsive or always broke. Of the participants that said that they took out books, a major pain-point was the process of knowing when books needed to be returned. Several people mentioned the noise levels were also an issue, as (as my personas indicate) the Idea Store is being used for a variety of uses.

Mixed uses of areas mean that noise can be an issue

Personas:

Love a post-it note

Challenges:

Most users approached were happy to take part in the directed interviews but were less keen to take part in the usability tests (therefore I got only two participants to take part versus 20 for directed interviews), mainly because they were seen as more difficult and/or time-consuming. Moreover, I could not get anyone to take part in the card-sorting technique, with again users saying that they didn't have time and/or it sounded confusing. In the future, I will have to incentivise participation.

During the study there were also issues with language barriers. I overcame this by using very simply language and explaining questions thoroughly if a participant was confused.

Recommendations:

• No mixed use areas - separate study spaces, socialising space, books etc

• Use WhatsApp or text to let users know when there book is due to be returned

• Advertise the online services

• Simplify the language and the layout of the online library portal

• Remove or dramatically improve the self-service check-outs.

The self-service machine was a key pain-point

Reflections:

• As I was not able to persuade users to take part in my card-sorting method, in the future incentivising taking apart will be crucial.

• An important element to this study was not to letting my assumptions cloud my methods, for example, I had assumed that most users who took out a book would use the online portal, a point that my research disproved. In the future, I will create a list of any assumptions I have, so that in my write-up and study, I'm more aware of them.