VirtuaLib

CLASS PROJECT • UX DESIGN • MEDIUM-FIDELITY PROTOTYPE

With the intent to help librarians manage their hybrid work, VirtuaLib serves as a platform for librarians to connect to and help their patrons more conveniently. A virtual space where patrons can attend workshops, look up books, and socialize from the convenience of their home.

Responsibilities:

UX Researcher

UX Designer

Meeting Moderator

Project Context:

August 2021 -December 2021

Design-Focused

Tools:

Google Form

Miro

Figma

Team:

Beverly Vaz

Hayoung Woo

Jingying Yao

Methods

Literature Review

Passive Observation

Semi-structure Interviews

Task Analysis

Affinity Mapping

Creating Problem Trees

Concept Sketching

Storyboarding

Usability Testing

Heuristic Evaluations

Creating Personas

Brainwriting

Overview

Project Goal: help librarians in public libraries facilitate their hybrid work.

Background: The traditional librarian is known to be a curator of books. While that is generally still the case, the librarian community has been gradually shifting the role of librarians to be as information professionals, individuals with a plethora of knowledge at their disposal with the main goal of helping people meet their information needs. These needs are ever-changing as technological advancements create new areas of information that need to be accessible to the general public. In order to sustain libraries as functional information resources, libraries also need to change and adapt to a more hybrid work environment where services are provided in-person and virtually to better meet these information needs. The issue then arises concerning how to efficiently perform these within the hybrid work environment.

Key Findings:

Communicating remotely is a problem for librarians both among themselves and with patrons

Librarians have many varied tasks to handle that they don't always have enough time to address patrons’ needs

Both librarians and patrons felt burnt out with using current virtual conferencing platforms

Project Result:

A web platform specifically tailored for a specific library system that enables patrons and librarians to virtually navigate a public library with access to the library's services and the ability to interact with other patrons and librarians more conveniently.

Prototype

Overview

Problem

People throughout history have always made strides to visualize their geographical information, spatial knowledge, and physical orientation. Such information is necessary for one's survival. Maps were created as a tool to help view various parts of the world. However, those without a visual sense struggle to interact with the tacit nature of traditional maps

The problem was initially presented to the team as a broad topic: create an accessible digital map.

Identifying the Problem Space

This part of the project focused on learning as much as we can about how to go about achieving our Project Goal. Through an extensive literature review, the team identified the target population to concern the standard public librarian, those at the forefront of the library who interact directly with patrons (jargon for the visitors to a library).

These librarians possess the following characteristics:

They work at a public library.

They are knowledgeable & insightful

They are committed to service

As well as perform the following general tasks:

From the information gleaned from the literature review, and from the advice of our external partner Becky Sheel of Harmonic Design, we identified the following questions to tackle moving forward in our understanding of the problem:

What kinds of tasks do librarians have to perform digitally versus physically?

What existing technologies do they use most regularly? Has it made their job easier or more difficult?

How has the library been affected by the pandemic?

What are the current frustrating aspects of their job?

Analysis of the Problem

Observations

We visited two libraries in Fulton County — Central Library and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Branch Library — to observe what tasks librarians performed, the patron-librarian interactions, and other issues noticeable in the library. We conducted two types of in-depth observations - participant observation and outsider observation - to confirm our initial assessment of the tasks librarians performed. These observations resulted in the creation of problem trees that informed our approach to the next step of conducting interviews. The image below is an example of one of the said problem trees.

Interviews

We conducted semi-structured interviews over virtual conferencing to get a deeper understanding of the issues. We used the initial interviews to identify the tasks librarians found most troubling and the reasons for those perspectives. We then adapted our questions to focus on those identified tasks in the latter half of our interviews.

Key Findings:

1. Proper communication not only between librarians and their patrons but also amongst themselves and between departments is important to provide the most efficient service.

2. Librarians and patrons alike are getting Zoom-ed out, meaning their current use of Zoom as their main platform for hosting workshops is getting tiresome.

3. With advancements in technology and the encroachment of this pandemic, it is difficult to sustain the library as a fundamental resource to society.

4. What librarians are most concerned with is meeting the needs of their patrons, especially when it comes to digital literacy.

Solution

Ideation Process

The findings in the previous step led to the following design requirements.

Functional Requirements:

Assist librarians in addressing patrons' needs

Simplify librarians' workflow of hybrid tasks

Allow for efficient and transparent communication

Non-functional Requirements:

Usability: Easy onboarding for both librarians and patrons
Promote more social interactions
Familiarity: Improve what libraries currently offer and contribute to sustaining the value of libraries in their respective community
The design should allow self-paced interaction and learning for patrons

From these requirements, the team did a brain-writing session. We focused on the four key areas that bubbled up in our affinity diagram and had each person list at least three ideas per issue for a given round. These ideas could bounce off other members' previous ideas. We conducted four rounds to get at least 12 ideas per issue.

From brainstorming, the team chose 10 ideas to create sketches for:

TechUP Time: A self-learning module that patrons can use at the library to learn various computer skills.
On-Demand Librarian: A mobile application that is designed to help librarians keep up with tasks and distribute them accordingly to other librarians
Loom: Zoom, but for librarians. The tool is designed to support librarians' virtual conferences and workshops, and has a "Ask the librarian" feature as well, to enable chatting with a librarian.
Interactive Mood Gauge: This serves as an add-on to a conferencing system and allows librarians to see the real-time fluctuation of their participants' emotions and focus levels.
VirtuaLib: A platform that allows users, using avatars, to navigate a virtual library where they can make use of the library's various services and resources.
Pocket Shelf: A product that aims to simplify the readers' advisory task for librarians by curating suggestions by librarians for patrons based on their search terms.
Reservation for Libraries: A mobile app that allows patrons to reserve library resources quickly and efficiently, thereby reducing the in-library wait time and improving the overall experience.
ROBO-Lib: A small robot that takes care of recurring physical tasks for librarians, like shelving, thus freeing up their time.
Happy Trails: Happy Trails is programming targeted towards children in which animated characters voiced by librarians take part in some adventure in the local neighborhood. This builds kids' familiarity with their neighborhood and local librarians.
Porta-Lib: Porta-Lib serves as individual, portable spaces that patrons can use to not only provide them with privacy but also comply with COVID-19 policies. Such a setup would allow for in-person programming to take place efficiently in the pandemic.

From these 10 design ideas, the team settled on the top 2 designs that best addressed both the functional and non-functional requirements:

TechUP Time: allows participants to gain digital literacy skills through a graduated program that enables librarians to track a patron's progress over time and give them feedback without having to be around the patron all the time. This helps patrons learn while freeing up time for librarians to pursue their other tasks.

VirtuaLib: a digital tool that mimics the physical layout of a public library. In VirtuaLib patrons and librarians can navigate the space and interact with each other just like they would in a physical library while also making use of some fun avatars on the platform.

Scene from the TechUP Time storyboard

The initial VirtuaLib sketch

Research

Prototyping

When it came time to design the interface, the team chose to go ahead with the Virtualib design concept, as it seemed more challenging in terms of design and met the pressing problem of encouraging social interactions in the virtual mode. To design the prototype, the team chose Figma as our tool of choice, since it allowed us to create a prototype that was high-fidelity in look and low-fidelity in function. We used Coolors to come up with a color scheme and a mind map to envision the functionality.

Since our design solution accommodated both patrons and librarians, we had to design for two different experiences within our prototype — for patrons and for librarians. One such difference in experience is that a patron can visit any library, but a librarian is associated with just one library.

For Librarians:

For a librarian to log in, they need to enter their credentials and the library they are associated with. Upon logging in, they can choose to enter the virtual library, see a friends list from where they can message friends, create their avatar or see and schedule events in their calendar. Moreover, librarians get notifications for important events they have scheduled on their calendar.

For Patrons:

When a patron tries to log in, they can choose to be a guest (the equivalent of walking into a physical library) or login to a library they are affiliated with as a patron. On logging in, the patron can navigate the virtual library, see their friends list from where they can chat with friends and create their avatar, like librarians. However, they can also see the programs they have registered for and library resources they have currently checked out. Patrons also get notified about the due dates for their checkouts.

Iterative Design

Evaluation of Prototype

To evaluate the prototype, we conducted a discount evaluation with a peer team in our course. We were grouped with a 4-member team for the evaluation activity and we chose to have 2 members of the team evaluate the librarian version of the product and the remaining two evaluate the patron version of it. Moreover, we had each participant do both a user-based and expert evaluation to get the most bang for our buck.

Evaluation Method

For the evaluation sessions, we chose two design requirements to focus on:

VirtuaLib should allow for efficient and transparent communication between librarians and patrons
VirtuaLib should have easy onboarding for both librarians and patrons

The procedure we followed was that of the heuristic evaluation model. The first time our evaluators walked through our product, we had them think aloud and complete benchmark tasks as users. We then conducted a short semi-structured interview following each task to understand their experience. We then had them go through the prototype on their own to conduct a formal heuristic evaluation where they filled out a worksheet containing some heuristic principles and a modified System Usability Scale (SUS) questionnaire. The tasks for each user group are as follows:

Patron:

List the help options available to you
Attend a program
Make a friend and reserve a room for friends

Librarian:

Schedule a date for a new event
Send a message to a friend
Create and run a new program

Expert Evaluation

For our expert evaluation we chose the following heuristics:

Visibility of system status
User Control and Freedom
Consistency and standards
Recognition rather than recall

We asked our participants to rate the heuristics on a scale from 0 to 4, where 0 indicated the area of interest had no usability issues and 4 indicated major usability issues.

User-based evaluation

For the user-based evaluation sessions, we used the modified System Usability Scale questionnaire. We asked our participants to rate their experience on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 being they strongly disagreed with the statement and 5 being they strongly agreed with the statement,

Findings

From our expert evaluations, none of the heuristics received a 0 or 4, indicating there were no major usability issues, but minor ones that could have caused some frustration, that should be addressed.

From our user-based evaluations, our product received an overall usability score of 65 out of 100 points. The standard average for the SUS is 68 points with a standard deviation of 12.5, indicating our product falls in the first standard deviation. This indicates our product needs further research and improvements. However, since for the purposes of our evaluation we modified the SUS questionnaire, the scoring may not be completely accurate.

One thing we noticed during our course of evaluating the product was that the process of navigating the library did not match the user's mental model completely. This was a major cause behind the frustration felt. However, our participants did find the tutorial we had in place very effective and felt we could build on it.

Overall, the response was positive and our participants seemed receptive to the idea of a virtual library. Our design conceptually met the two design requirements we wanted to focus on in the evaluation phase, but improvements in the usability of our product could enhance our user's experience of it.

Evaluation

Reflection

VirtuaLib gives designers more freedom to be creative. VirtuaLib is not constrained to conventional tasks but is a flexible platform by which many more tasks can be incorporated into the system beyond just our current focus on workshops and programming. VirtuaLib can be modified to meet future needs as contexts change.

VirtuaLib has unique and limitless potential.

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