Closing In on the End of Summer Semester

It’s been a while since I last updated – things have been moving very quickly.

Here’s how we’ve passed the last few weeks:

Week 6:

I prepared the first drafts of these documents then asked for feedback. I passed on responsibility for several of them to another teammate, which went well until I realized that the team had just entered an endless feedback loop. I think it would have helped these documents get to a more “final” state if we had specified either a final decision-maker for each one or a date that they were going to be finished. Having taken on a leadership role in terms of guiding the user testing and creating the documents, though, I kind of ended up as the one with final say over everything, which is a lot of responsibility – I didn’t feel comfortable handing off responsibility, but I had an email exchange with Kyle that really helped clear up what I should and shouldn’t be responsible for. Things went much more smoothly after that.

Week 7:

  • Finalized testing documents
  • Contacted and confirmed with Kyle’s recruited participants
    • 1 expert tester, Aaron Schwartz
    • 7 users registered for or interested in the course
  • Pilot user testing session with adviser Linda Braun

A lot of this week was spent doing administrative tasks like contacting and confirming with participants, as well as ironing out how we were going to use Google Hangouts to facilitate. One teammate also stepped up and said she was prepared to moderate several tests, which was a relief! We agreed that the best approach to moderation was to make the session feel like a conversation about the site rather than a formal process, and the pilot test went very well conducted this way.

Week 8:

  • 6 user testing sessions with users via Google Hangouts on Air (1 cancelled)
    • Several technology issues – for future sessions, I created a Best Practices document
  • Site walkthrough with expert tester Aaron Schmidt of Walking Paper

After the first few sessions, we had a sense of what some of the red flags were – navigating back and forth between the course site and WordPress dashboard functionality being the primary, and a handful of small functionality or minor visual issues as well. We also got great commentary on the look and feel from both expert testers during the pilot test and the walkthrough. Google Hangouts turned out to be a great tool for facilitating user sessions using screensharing, although a number of participants had technical issues we couldn’t anticipate – outdated plugins without the admin rights to install new ones, malfunctioning microphone – you name it.

Going into Week 9:

  • I put together a User Testing Data spreadsheet, where we’ll enter our notes on the user testing sessions. I asked teammates to commit to entering data by Sunday evening.
  • We’ll use that data to write our Recommendations Report. I asked teammates to commit to having a draft of their pieces of the results and recommendations by Wednesday, so we can all review, and then we’ll submit those pieces by Sunday night. Other pieces, like the related research, we will hand in on Sunday if we’ve had time to complete them, otherwise they’ll be submitted at the end of the semester along with our handoff report.

Weeks 5 & 6: Heuristics and Use Cases

After a very productive synchronous meeting on Tuesday night, our team has a revised schedule that accommodates:

  • Team learning about UX processes and collaboration on testing tasks
  • A deeper focus on use cases as an artifact that can be shared across teams
  • Time for Kyle to finish adjustments to the interface.

 

One teammate and I spent Week 5 working on a Heuristics document that we anticipate will also be shared across teams and that lays the framework for testing tasks, which we’ll be writing up for Week 6.

Meeting with Kyle also clarified a lot of what’s important to him – I think his expectation is that we’ll provide ongoing heuristic evaluation for all aspects of the site, although as a team we’ve agreed to continue with plans for formal(ish) usability testing to make sure the site aligns with user expectations.

He also made the point that the audience we’re focusing on is LIS-oriented, but that’s not what’s important in designing a learning experience for them – some of them may be very new to online learning, and it’s that aspect of these users’ experience that we should be focusing on. I thought this was a really interesting point – the LIS aspect of our users’ backgrounds will be important in developing content, but it’s their experience and expectations as learners that we need to focus on.

SLIS 298: Weeks 3 and 4 – Personas, Heuristics and Use Cases

After submitting our reports on personas, heuristic evaluation and use cases, the instructor evaluated our group’s direction. He’d like us to focus our energy on use cases and heuristic checklists, because personas require a lot of investment and the return might not be that great in such a short timeframe. I think his idea is that we’ll provide this information to other teams and we can all participate in a kind of self-evaluation, and my thinking is that we’ll be able to use those ideas as a framework for testing. Meanwhile, any test prep we can do outside of the actual interface is useful.

We have a Google+ hangout scheduled for 6:30 pm tomorrow evening (Tuesday, 7/2), so I’m hoping to get the following ironed out then:

  • What the instructor means by “heuristics” and what kind of deliverable he’s expecting there
  • How we should be working with, or at least communicating our role, to the other teams
  • What the timeframe is for a class-directed heuristic evaluation, followed by user testing
    • My concern is that it will take a long time to collect and make changes based on class feedback, and we may not have time for both as envisioned
  • A revised schedule

I did tell the instructor in last week’s progress report that I was concerned about the testing timeframe, and he responded that he needs two weeks to finish the first round of the interface. I think we’ll need a week after that to make sure the testing questions align with what’s going on on the interface, so those should be the big considerations in revising the schedule.

SLIS 298: Week 2 – User Experience Basics

So as it turns out, the agenda for this week has changed – the professor does want to follow the UX-heavy schedule I set last week, but we’re taking a time out this week to put together writeups on personas, heuristic evaluations and use cases. These reports include:

  • A simple, one sentence definition of your concept;
  • An elevator pitch (an extended definition with a brief description about the concept);
  • Some research on the concept (contributed to the group’s Zotero library) and a summary of the pros and cons and what researchers say
  • An outline of how putting this concept into practice this semester might be helpful and how to make it work.

I’m assigned personas, which is a little bit of a review for me, but it’s useful to catch up on current thought in the field (although it hasn’t changed much since I studied them last fall). It is a good experience in writing it up to be consumed by someone who doesn’t have the background I do, though – so far this semester looks like it may be a lot more about co-teaching than actually doing the UX work I put on the schedule, which is different than I expected but not bad.

Update: after Google Hangout with Linda, 6/20

I’m going to update the schedule to reflect what we talked about, including divvying up work instead of working collaboratively which would allow us to push forward with the schedule we’ve set.

Week 4, next week:

  • We’ll each provide a deliverable based on our research from this week, week 3
  • I’ll suggest a Google hangout to review/provide feedback, and by the end of the week we should be ready to perform the heuristic eval and write testing tasks
  • I’ll share Personas document, team schedule and any other deliverables with Linda

Week 5:

  • We’ll each perform heuristic evaluation
  • One person will write up testing tasks, one will recruit and one will put together a plan for how tests are conducted
  • At the end of the week (Sunday), we’ll be ready to conduct a pilot test with Linda

Week 6:

  • Conduct testing

Ideas for a product/article:

  • different models of interaction in an online learning environment
    • leader
    • follower
    • quiet worker
    • different learning styles
    • how the instructor’s interaction makes a difference
  • education “startup” feel
    • sense of hurry, urgency
    • following a development model
    • usability in education
    • carving out a “space” in academia

SJSU SLIS 298: MOOC Research and Development

I will be using this blog to post updates, progress reports and general thoughts from my experience in SJSU SLIS 298: MOOC Research and Development, which I’m taking as an independent study through Simmons. This will help me communicate with my advisor, Linda Braun, as well as provide Simmons with an artifact at the end of the semester.

Progress Report

We are finishing up Week 2 of the course, and so far it’s been a whirlwind. I have:

  • been assigned to a team (Web Design & User Experience)
  • collected research articles relevant to my team’s folder
  • started the reading
  • started creating documents that will serve as artifacts throughout the course
  • volunteered to write this week’s progress report for our team, due tomorrow
  • created a team schedule for the 10-week semester

Research Articles

Here are the two articles I’ve contributed to our team’s reading list:

  • Kop, R. (2011). The challenges to connectivist learning on open online networks: Learning experiences during a massive open online course. The International Review Of Research In Open And Distance Learning, 12(3), 19-38. Retrieved from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/882/1689
  • Fini, A. (2009). The Technological Dimension of a Massive Open Online Course: The Case of the CCK08 Course Tools. The International Review Of Research In Open And Distance Learning, 10(5). Retrieved from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/643/1402
  • I’ve also pointed my teammates to some user experience and usability resources we can use as a framework to make decisions, primarily from NNG and usability.gov.

On my reading list:

  • W3C’s Accessiblity Evaluation. (2013). Easy Checks – A First Review of Web Accessibility. Retrieved fromhttp://www.w3.org/WAI/eval/Overview.html
  • There are 175 other articles in the class Zotero folder – I need to go through and pick some out that will help provide background for writing up personas and use cases.

Team Schedule

Below os an overview of what that schedule looks like. I wrote it following the process I’m familiar with based on user experience design and usability testing and tried to fit everything in in a way that was reasonable during a short time. When the professor reviewed the schedule, he approved it but mentioned that things like personas and use cases might be vocabulary not everyone in my group is familiar with, so I’m a little concerned that I’ve put together a schedule that’s too heavy on the user experience design and not heavy enough on what other team members focus on, so this schedule may change over the course of the semester. In addition, if my teammates aren’t familiar with user experience practices, we may not be able to accomplish everything I’ve set out to do!

Week 2

Review and post plan and schedule on team space

Research MOOC audience and user experience

Week 3

Research MOOC audience and user experience, begin writing up use cases and personas

Week 4

Finish writing up use cases and personas, begin writing user testing tasks

Review use cases and personas

Share use cases and personas

Week 5

Finish writing user testing tasks

Review user testing tasks

Week 6

Evaluate MOOC based on usability/user experience heuristics, recruit 5 participants for user testing

Write up recommendations based on evaluation

Review recommendations

Share recommendations

Week 7

Make changes to MOOC based on recommendations

Review changes, update user testing tasks as necessary

Week 8

User testing

Write up user testing results and recommendations

Share results and recommendations

Week 9

Make changes to MOOC based on user testing

Review changes

Week 10

Write Handoff Report

Review Handoff Report

Submit Handoff Report

 

Next Steps

Here are the things I’ll be focusing on in the next week:

  • Reading to support personas and use cases
  • Developing a method of communicating with the team – may be continuing to post in a group blog, may be meeting synchronously, may be emailing
  • Figuring out who will be responsible for what in the coming weeks

And the week after:

  • Writing personas and use cases with my team members and reviewing them together
  • Starting to think about user testing tasks

Posts from LIBR281

Just a quick clarifying update: the posts from January-May 2013 are from a WISE course I’m just finishing up, Transformative Learning and Technology Literacies, with Professor Michael Stephens. It’s been a great experience, and I’ll be working with him on an independent study over the summer to build a MOOC out of another course he teaches, the Hyperlinked Library.

 

Jolicloud, for those who have a BUNCH of cloud services in their PLN

Thought this might be a useful tool for anyone else who’s using multiple cloud services in their personal and professional lives:

http://unclutterer.com/2013/05/02/organize-all-your-cloud-services-with-jolidrive/?utm_source=feedly&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+unclutterer+(Unclutterer)

 

I’m going to give it a try – let me know if you are too, and how you like it!

PLN: A Network for Professional and Personal Development

Goals

  • My online personal learning network will help educate me about current news in libraries, electronic resources, education, information retrieval, web design and user experience. This includes peer observations, news articles and scholarly articles.
  • My online personal learning network will help educate me about emerging technologies and their potential impact on libraries and education. This includes peer observations, news articles and specific examples of implementation.
  • My online personal learning network will help educate me about the state of the current job market in libraries, what kinds of jobs I might be qualified for and best practices for applying to specific positions.
  • My online personal learning network will help me answer specific technical questions to meet immediate needs.

Defined Scope

I currently work for a vendor in a user research and design role, which has been a great learning experience for me in terms of getting to know the technology that drives a lot of library services. My current goal is to continue learning and advancing in my current job, which requires staying up-to-date on a number of different topics – primarily trends and emerging technologies that affect libraries, but also education, information retrieval, web design and user experience. My long-term goal is to work in a library that wants to fully control or even build the technologies they use themselves, which requires watching the evolving job market in the library space to understand where I might fit. In addition to these larger-picture goals, I occasionally have small day-to-day technical questions I have an immediate need to answer, including how to formulate SQL queries, accomplish something specific in CSS or define unfamiliar vocabulary.

PLN diagram

Resource Network

Career

These are resources I use to keep up-to-date on careers in the LIS field. There are several other resources I would check in on regularly if I were actively looking for a job, but these are the ones I keep up with to maintain a sense of perspective on the job market.

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/pub/deirdre-costello/12/440/593/

Keeping up with my classmates’ and colleagues’ experience and job titles helps me benchmark where I am in terms of my own career and the career-oriented decisions I make. The link is to my profile – let’s connect!

Hiring Librarians: http://hiringlibrarians.com/

Reading survey responses from people who are responsible for hiring librarians help me understand what employers may be looking for and how to be a good employee now, as well as best practices during the application process.

I Need a Library Job (INALJ): http://inalj.com/

A site intended to help new librarians find a job in the field, the information here helps me understand what the job market looks like and what my career choices might be.

Open Cover Letters: http://opencoverletters.com/

People who get jobs in the LIS field can post the cover letters that helped them get those jobs here. I find it helpful to read the way people write about their own experiences, and how those experiences end up fitting the positions they’re hired for.

Librarian Hire Fashion: http://librarianhirefashion.tumblr.com/

I get really nervous about what to wear to an interview and dressing appropriately and professionally beyond that – it may sound silly, but this site has given me a lot of ideas and a lot of confidence.

Conferences

Between working and going to school full-time, I haven’t had much of a chance to go to any non-local LIS conferences. However, my current employer has a professional development budget, so I hope to be attending a wider range of conferences soon to meet colleagues and make connections.

 

User Experience

These are resources I use both to research the UX field’s previous findings on specific topics and stay current on topics like the usability of new technologies and the evolution of the user researcher’s role in the development and design process.

Nielsen Norman Group: http://www.nngroup.com/

The “fathers of modern usability,” Jakob Nielsen and Donald Norman, regularly publish their thoughts and findings, including updates to usability heuristics that have become “canon” in the field of user experience but need to be updated to include current technology.

User Experience blogs

These blogs all provide thoughts and reflections on specific aspects of user experience. They’re especially helpful in providing perspective on how user research can fit into the big picture at a larger organization, as well as reporting on the user experience of new trends in web design.

Walking Paper: http://www.walkingpaper.org/

This blog is dedicated to the user experience of libraries specifically. It’s a fascinating look at all the small things libraries can do to improve the experience of their users.

UXPA Boston: http://upaboston.org/

I am a member of UXPA Boston, which includes membership on a listserv announcing user experience-related events in the Boston area and access to an online job board. Attending these events, which are primarily talks by local UX professionals, helps me expand my knowledge about the field as well as make connections.

 

Emerging Technologies in Libraries

These are resources I follow in order to stay informed about new technologies – from methods of data visualization to iPhone apps – in order to understand how these technologies could be leveraged in the LIS field.

Read Write Web: http://readwrite.com/

While not specifically about libraries, following this site makes it easy to keep up with trends in emerging technologies. I also like the thought exercise of trying to understand how these technologies may impact libraries.

Pew Internet: http://www.pewinternet.org/

The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project is a great resource for information on how people are using technology, and they often report data specific to technology in libraries and library usage.

Linda Braun’s twitter feed: https://twitter.com/lbraun2000

Linda Braun is a professor at Simmons College and tweets frequently about new technologies – or new uses of existing technologies – and how libraries are implementing them.

Twitter in general: https://twitter.com/deirdre_lyon

I follow a number of classmates, colleagues, interesting people I’ve met at conferences and thinkers in the LIS field who are interested in technology in libraries and I often hear about new technologies via my Twitter feed. The link is to my profile – let’s connect!

Harvard’s library design resources

Harvard has two resources that are essentially sandboxes for design ideas to improve users’ experience of both the physical and online library.

 

The LIS Field

These are resources that help me stay up-to-date with current news and major ideas in the LIS field.

Library Stuff: http://www.librarystuff.net/

This is essentially a feed that links to articles about events that may directly affect libraries. It’s especially useful for keeping up with the open access debate and the communication between libraries and publishers.

In the Library with the Lead Pipe: http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/

This started as a blog, but has turned into more of an online journal that publis

hes relatively long-form, thought-provoking articles on topics directly relevant to libraries and library professionals.
NYPL Blogs: http://www.nypl.org/blog

I think of the NYPL as a flagship library that bridges the gap between public and academic librarianship. I like to follow what this library is doing because it’s a chance to see the way some of the major ideas in the LIS field are implemented.

 

Librarians

These are major thinkers in the LIS field whose blogs I follow to stay current with the major ideas in the LIS field as well as to see examples of all the different ways to be a passionate, engaged librarian.

Tame the Web: http://tametheweb.com/

I’m assuming readers will be familiar with this one, but I count on this resource to help me stay up-to-date with technology trends in libraries and education. Also a great resource for implementation examples.

Librarian by Day: http://librarianbyday.net/

I cound on Bobbi Newman’s writing to help me understand all the possible roles for a 21st century librarian and keep me up-to-date on all the major topics that librarian should be well-spoken on.

The Wikiman: http://www.thewikiman.org/

Ned Potter, an academic librarian, writes frequently about the profession and professional development, and I find his perspective valuable in terms of making my own career decisions.

Librarian.net: http://www.librarian.net/

Jessamyn West is a user-centered library activist who has chosen a non-traditional career path in the LIS field. I also keep up with her at http://www.jessamyn.com/.

 

Quick Questions and Reference

These are resources I use when I have a question about a specific technology that I need answered right away.

CNET: http://www.cnet.com/

I use CNET to evaluate tools I can use for specific tasks.

W3Schools: http://www.w3schools.com/

I use W3Schools as a reference when I’m working with a language I’m fuzzy or rusty on.

StackOverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/

I use StackOverflow to see how people have solved the specific problem I’m also trying to solve.

 

PLN in Action

I was recently putting together a literature review on teenagers’ information-seeking behaviors to provide to someone new to the LIS field who was going to be working on a product for that audience. I performed searches in the scholarly article databases the company I work for provides, but the most compelling evidence came from Pew Internet (How Teens Do Research in the Digital World, http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Student-Research.aspx) and the Nielsen Norman Group (Teenage Usability, http://www.nngroup.com/articles/usability-of-websites-for-teenagers/). Both provided research results in an easy-to-read, engaging fashion that made it clear they intended for others to take those results out into the world and create based on them.

I’m also frequently asked to pull data about how specific features are used, which involves interacting with the massive amount of data kept in the company’s logs. This requires writing complex SQL queries in Transact-SQL, which I’m not totally familiar with yet – I’ve gotten a lot of help from StackOverflow in terms of figuring out how to write queries that will do what I want.

As mentioned above, I also get really nervous about what to wear for job interviews, so I consulted Hiring Librarians’ survey results (http://hiringlibrarians.com/category/what-should-candidates-wear/) and Librarian Hire Fashion before my last interview and ended up wearing a dress and cardigan combination that the interviewer (my now-boss!) complimented me on.

 

Network Maintenance Plan

I currently maintain my PLN using several tools, which I check into weekly if not every day:

  • Feedly: Most of the blogs and websites mentioned above have RSS feeds, so I use Feedly to check in on them every day. I actually like it better than Google Reader – I love the interface and how customizable my experience is.
  • Twitter: I check Twitter on my phone on a regular basis and often email either tweets or links to myself to follow up on when I’m at a desktop and have more time.
  • Email: The Nielsen Norman Group and UXPA are both listservs, so I get updates from these resources via email. I also use email to keep in touch with classmates and previous colleagues.
  • LinkedIn: I log in to LinkedIn about once every week or two to see what’s changed, especially in terms of the experiences my classmates are listing and how peoples’ job titles have changed.

Generally I find that my PLN grows more often than it gets trimmed, and I’m sure it will grow exponentially as I read about classmates’ resource networks. In terms of trimming, I tend to unsubscribe from a blog’s RSS feed or unfollow someone on Twitter when I find that either the nature of the content has changed or my need for it has changed.

As I prepare to graduate next fall, I anticipate that I will actively expand my PLN to fulfill the information needs currently fulfilled by my classes and regular interaction with my classmates; I will try to find those classmates on Twitter and LinkedIn, follow their blogs, and use those connections to find other valuable resources. I also anticipate that as my current position evolves, I will discover and be directed to a number of user research, user experience and web design resources that I will add to my PLN in order to stay current on issues in those fields.

A totally different kind of online learning

I live in Melrose, which is a small city about seven miles north of Boston. I’m fine, my whole family’s fine, and so far I don’t think anyone I know was touched by any of this week’s tragedies – except for the fact that we live in greater Boston and were so scared for, now proud of, our city.

But what I want to write about today is my experience of the way some of the tools we’ve talked about in this class – Twitter especially, but also blogs – have been and are being used to disseminate information during events like the Boston marathon bombing and subsequent manhunt.

My husband and I don’t have cable TV – we have a Roku box for our streaming services, but we can’t watch live television, so we were pretty much glued to the radio this last week. On Monday, when everything started, and then on Friday, when neither of us could go to work, we sat in our living room with the radio on, a live newsfeed on mute on the computer, refreshing Twitter on both of our phones every 30 seconds and reading any new-seeming piece of news out loud along with where it came from. This last piece was especially important: was it a news source, was it someone on-scene being retweeted, or was it just someone totally unrelated to the event declaring something. Twitter was often minutes, if not hours, in front of other news sources in terms of circulating new pieces of information, but it was also much, MUCH more likely to get all excited about some new piece of information that was just speculation or, in some cases, completely made up, sometimes by a news source. While it felt to us like a lifeline, a window into what was ACTUALLY happening, we quickly had to come up with our own system for trying to assess the credibility of sources and the information they were reporting. That said, we also saw well wishes from all over the world – New York, Syria – that were really meaningful, as well as remembrances of people who had been hurt or lost their lives that helped us remember the big picture of what the city was going through.

When the evening rounds of gunfire started in Watertown, we went over to my aunt and uncle’s house to watch their TV – we could tell it was coming to a conclusion, and we wanted to see it on TV and experience it with family. The visual seemed really important, as did being with people we cared about. So we sat in front of the TV talking about all we’d seen and read that day  and making a story for each other- how the FBI had interviewed the older brother in 2011, how his boxing coach said the younger brother looked up to his older brother so much. But my husband and I grew impatient with the recycled images on TV and with the loopy commentary from tired newscasters (at one point, a newscaster said it wouldn’t be long until the “knucklehead” at large would be in custody), and turned to Twitter – my family eagerly listened as we reported what was happening on-scene far before the newscasters got wind of it. By that point, we were both following the feeds we knew to be credible and could be pretty confident in their accuracy. Nothing could beat watching Watertown celebrate on-camera, though, or the fireworks we could hear after we turned the TV off.

Now that the climax has passed and everyone has the opportunity to piece together their own version of events, blog entries by people who knew the bombers, or at least about them –  classmates, a girl who went to their mom’s living room spa for years, an anonymous FBI aide frustrated that Russia had warned them in 2011 and no one had kept track – are pouring out of the woodwork. For me, they paint a picture of a scared 19-year-old heavily influenced by his older brother, but there’s a lot out there I haven’t read that probably says something different – people could get any number of things from these accounts, more of which are showing up in my newsfeed by the hour.

Overall, I think the use of social media to receive and disseminate up-to-the-second news information will ultimately replace TV and radio during events like this in the future, but this will only happen successfully as news consumers learn to cull the credible from the speculative and exclamatory. I also think some Republican senators should think more carefully when they tweet during a crisis, but that’s neither here nor there. In terms of how communities process tragedy, that’s necessarily a little murkier, but for me the blog posts about how Dzhokar was polite to his friends’ families, spent a whole night helping a girl retrace her steps to find the new cellphone she’d lost and moved his mom’s customer’s car so she wouldn’t get a parking ticket have an important humanizing effect.