No prizes for guessing that my contribution to the discussion (my “trend”, although I hesitate to call it that) was user experience. I definitely think “user experience” was one of the buzzwords (phrases?) in libraryland in 2009, so I considered it worth talking about. Here are my notes from the session.

The background

One of the biggest problems with UX is that no one can really agree on what it means. The information architecture and related design world has been talking about UX for number of years, but in the library world, it’s still pretty fresh to our ears.  Literally, user experience design is about designing everything from environments and buildings, to services and products, to technology: hardware, software, and of course, websites and other digital environments.

It’s that last one I’m mostly interested in for the purposes of this discussion. I think it’s the slice of UX that is really trending in terms of technology and the web environment. And user experience in a digital environment is about visual design coupled with interaction design, and how the combination of both visual and interaction design make our users feel.

Right now, the trend we’re seeing in the UX world is a focus on emotional design (how the visual design + interactions make our users feel). It’s not just about what our users can do on our sites or whether or not they can get what they want when they go to a website, but what the holistic experience of that process is like. In the library world, on the other hand, we’re not quite there yet. We’re still figuring out the interface design and interaction part of things.

This is not a bad thing. I actually think it’s a good thing. Because, realistically, if our users can’t find what they are looking for on our websites and in our catalogues and on our various web applications, i think we can take a pretty accurate guess at how that makes them feel!

The trend-y bits

The emerging importance of mobile platforms is a great jumping off point for talking about interaction design and libraries. Mobile interfaces are necessarily stripped of design elements because those elements are too resource intensive. When you’re dealing with mobile browsing on small-format screens, you don’t have the real estate, bandwidth, or time to deal with anything but the essentials.

Personally, when it comes to mobile browsing, if I visit a site on my phone that does not have a mobile version, I will spend maybe 5 seconds looking for what I want. If I don’t see it on the home page, I won’t go any further. And if I don’t find it at all, I leave (usually cursing).

There’s evidence in the usability literature that users are starting to seek out mobile versions of websites even when they are not using mobile devices. This is definitely behaviour I see in myself — I have a pretty awesome screen on my laptop, with plenty of real estate, where I can (and do)  happily appreciate a well designed website. But, more and more I find myself seeking out mobile versions of sites even on my laptop because those sites provide just the essential functionality with none of the clutter. Goodreads mobile and Amazon mobile are two examples.

What does this mean? Well, I think it means that the mobile experience and changing user expectations will force us to reverse engineer the user experience of our websites and other online applications. It’s already happening in the broader design world, and I think the more experience libraries have with designing interactions and interfaces for our mobile users, the more we’re going to take our cues from those stripped down interfaces and get back to basics with our regular websites and search apps.

2 bonus UX-related trends for libraries

• The conversation about UX analytics is happening. Measuring the user experience isn’t easy, but it’s a conversation we need to have so that we can come up with some metrics together.
• Automated usability testing services continue to grow and provide functionality we should be taking advantage of. Services like Crazy Egg, Usabilla, and userfly are paid services that do some good work tracking clicks, providing heatmaps, and such. NYPL Labs’ Infomaki, while not quite as automated as those other services, can probably fit into this category too (we’ve got it working at my library and I’ll be setting up some tests… any day now).

Update: Check out Lauren’s and Jason’s write-ups of the trends they talked about at the session, too.

So it was with some delight that I read the email about Buley’s virtual seminar on the same subject that’s happening next week. It’s a bit spendy for a one-hour virtual thing, but I suspect that it will be worth it for a number of library design/IA/UX types since, I’m assuming, a lot of us work in our own, cozy 1-person teams. I’ll be there.

So it was with some delight that I stumbled upon Favthumbs. Do the internets really need another del.icio.us visualization tool? Maybe not, but it turns out that this one works for me. Since most of the stuff I’m doing these days is design-based, and being a generally visual person, images tend to imprint themselves on my brain better than words. If I bookmarked your website last week because you’ve done some interesting stuff with search boxes, I can guarantee you that I won’t remember the name of your site or anything I read on your page (rendering a search of my bookmarks fruitless), but I’ll probably remember the colours and layout. So a carousel (à la iTunes) or grid display of my del.icio.us bookmarks, complete with thumbnails, is genius. It’s pretty much exactly what the visually-biased like me need.