User Experience and Participatory Design in Libraries

[Edited October 25 to provide some context for the post]
Last week I had the pleasure of presenting at the Library and Information Association of New Zealand Aotearoa national conference in Hamilton. The presentation described the principles behind a design-led organisation, different ways in which you could apply design approaches to shape your organisation and its services, and how libraries in particular are taking up these tools and strategies. At the end of the presentation an audience member asked for examples or case studies of libraries using different design methods and approaches (assuming the word design encompasses what others might call a user experience or customer experience perspective).

In response I’ve assembled the below (non-exhaustive) list of case studies and examples, gathered over the last few years whilst working with libraries. Examples cover libraries looking to improve current user experience of search interfaces through to co-designing the future of their library with their community.  Please send me other links/examples to add. At this stage the examples are presented in no particular orde

Darian Library
Online Articles:
Libraries: A Canvas for Creating Meaningful User Experience, Amanda L. Goodman, UX Magazine May 2013

Swinburne Libray
McKay, D., & Conyers, B. (2010). Where the streets have no name: how library users get lost in the stacks. Originally published in Proceedings of the 11th Annual ACM SIGCHI NZ Conference on Computer-Human Interaction (CHINZ 2010), Auckland, New Zealand, 08–09 July 2010 (pp. 77–80). New York: ACM.Available from: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1832838.1832852image

University of Technology, Sydney
Sukovic, Suzana; Litting, David and England, Ashley. Playing with the Future: Library Engagement and Change. Australian Academic & Research Libraries, Vol. 42, No. 2, 2011: 70-87.

Online Articles:
Design as Catalyst UTS
Design Thinking and UTS Library Presentation
UTS Library Service Model, Mal Booth & Team
Reinventing information literacy instruction through experimentation and play

Woollahra New South Wales
Libraries Ideas Website Website inviting the community to participate in the redesign of Double Bay Library

Aarhus Library Redesign Project
Peter Dalsgaard, Challenges of Participation in Large-Scale Public Projects, PDC ’10 Proceedings of the 11th Biennial Participatory Design Conference, Pages 21-30, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1900441.1900445

Online Articles:
Challenges of Participation in Large-Scale Public Projects

The Library’s Voice, A Guide to User Driven Innovation

Carnegie Library  ReDesign Project
McQuaid, H., Goel, A., McManus, M. (2012). When You Can’t Talk to Customers: Using Storyboards and Narratives to Elicit Empathy for Users. DPPI ’03, June 23-26, 2003: 120-125.
http://darmano.typepad.com/for_blog/rettiggoel.uxWeek.8.25.05.pdf
http://www.maya.com/portfolio/carnegie-library 

University of Rochester 
Studying Students: The Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester, Nancy Fried Foster

University of Guelph Library
Using Personas  

General Resources

Using co-design to innovate in libraries Joanna Ptolomey and Lauren Currie

Design Thinking for Libraries Zaana Howard http://www.slideshare.net/zaana/design-thinking-for-library-experiences

Designing our Library Future Zaana Howard http://zaanahoward.com/2011/06/10/designing-our-library-future-be-involved-or-be-forgotten/

Libraries of the Future Project http://www.futurelibraries.info/content/page/about-project-1

Participatory Design in Academic Libraries, Methods, Findings, and Implementations, Council on library and information resources, October 2012 http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub155/pub155.pdf

WeaveUX : Journal focused on User Experience in Libraries