So, on to more interesting things. After looking at what how Apple approaches business and design, I’ll take you through a few ways to implement their approach in libraries (well, that is implement their approach without piles of money and a ravenous league of supporters).

Think Different

How have I not embedded this video yet?

The secret to the Apple approach is to look at ourselves differently. Whereas Google builds on a foundation, Apple makes radical changes in technology and design.

Examine Assumptions and Ask Why

The blessing of libraries is also its curse. Everyone knows about us. Everyone knows we have books. That’s it. To continue connecting with our patrons we need to examine our assumptions about what libraries are, why the are needed, how they connect with a community, and how they can enhance a community.

The easiest way to do this is to ask “Why”. I’ve found that asking three times is enough. Here’s an example:

Assumption: Our job is to provide articles and books for patrons.

Why? Because they need them to write papers.

Why? Because they want to get an A in their class.

Why? So they can get a good, interesting job. Or so they can advance in their education.

After two whys, there is a whole new way of looking at things. Our job is no longer to provide books. Our job is to help students succeed in classes so they can move on with their education or out into the world. All of a sudden our mandate has grown.

This sounds like it devalues our work. But it doesn’t. It’s this thinking that has encouraged libraries to begin classroom instruction. To develop document delivery services and course pages.

Polish and Simplify

This is, strangely, much harder. The ultimate design principle surrounding Apple products is simplicity. Ease of use. After we develop an idea, we need to go in reverse order and begin stripping out other needs and uses. Projects tend to become bloated as they develop and this is the absolute worst thing that can happen. With every additional step in a service, you will lose a percentage of users. And the users that drop out first are always the ones you need to connect with the most. These are the users that gave us a shot and will probably not come back.

Well, that’s the inaugural welcome back post from me. I’ll try to create a more regular schedule now that things are starting to settle down.

Yesterday was my day off. As usual, I spent the morning reading and staring out the window

at my local coffee shop. The place wasn’t overflowing, but it was steady. It’s a smaller place off the beaten pat

h, so it never is too busy anyway. 15 years ago, this place wouldn’t have existed.

As Steve McCallion notes: “Imagine twenty years ago asking a room full of moms if they’d

be interested inpaying $4.50 for a cup of coffee. . . We would never have starbucks.”

Part of the Apple approach is not listening to customers. They never ask anyone ab

out their products. They don’t create focus groups. They

don’t run trials. They just create.

Existing Realities Limit Future Possibilities

That’s McCallion again. As he notes, consumers, patrons, are limited by the services that already have. Focus groups can tell us what patrons like that we already offer (storytime anyone?), but they’ll never tell us what they need. In fact, the more people we ask, the more likely we are to get boring middle of the road answers.

I’ll admit that much of my interests in libraries are related to assessment, seeing what people do. However, I don’t see a problem with testing and getting analytic results. After all assessment can only see what works, it cannot tell us what ought to be. So what do we do?

Creating New Services, Don’t Imitate

There are a variety of books out there, Design Driven Innovation, The Innovator’s Dilemma, Blue Ocean Strategy, that discuss creating new services, so I won’t go into it too much. Rather, I would encourage libraries to think broadly. What we absolutely should absolutely not do is copy successful businesses that are different than us. We should not add coffeeshops because that’s what Border’s has. We should not try to become county Social Services because it already exists (although partnerships might be a good idea). Rather, we need to look at how our well established trust with the community can lead to new services that no one anticipated.

And before anyone has a chance to argue that businesses can serve less people  and can thus specialize more, I’d like to point out that my home (Madison, WI) has 10 Starbucks and only 9 public libraries. We are an equal presence, but they are changing and we are standing still.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/laughingsquid/180837714/sizes/m/

As if that weren’t difficult enough, there’s a fundamental split in how to begin creating new resources or services. In short, an organization can either be driven by user needs and collective wisdom to create services that fill a niche. Or, they can be visionary and create products and services that users do not know they need, but, after they are created, can’t live without. So here they are, I’ll call the first the Google Approach and the second the Apple Approach. Granted this division is very artificial and Google in particular would sneer at the very idea that they are chasing users.

The Google Approach: Collective Wisdom and User Needs

If you’ve ever clicked on the “Even More” tab in Google. You’ll see that they have lots and lots of services. However, at the end of the day, most users settle on two or three (gmail, google docs, and, of course, the search engine). The main strategy I see in Google is that they select an information niche and they seek to fulfill it. With the exception of Google Wave, which given the hype seems to have failed to capture the public, Google is seeking to develop answers to existing needs, not creating a new class of services.

So here is how this mindset works:

Guiding Principles:

• Users have needs that can be addressed with technology: It is our job to figure out how to answer those needs.
• We can create great services by creating a variety of products that help a variety of users rather than a one-size-fits-all approach.
• Entering a field with competition is not bad if you can be superior: For example, there are piles of financial websites, but Google Finance sought to be the best with the power of google algorithms.
• Many creative minds will produce a better company/product than one genius: Google is famous for giving all employees 20% of their work time to pursue any idea no matter how radical (hence the elevator to the moon)

Advantages

• You might be surprised: Some ventures will inevitably fail, but many will stick.
• You can help more people by focusing on many small problems.
• A superior central project can have many useful branches: Once users trust the main product, they will be more willing to try later projects

Disadvantages

• Consensus can drown out creativity: The collective mind my be very good at locating problems, but it may not be visionary.
• One great product or many mediocre products: Spreading efforts too thin may be damaging in the long term.

The Apple Approach: Creativity and Vision trump Analysis

With Apple, there is very little user testing, no focus groups, no surveys. The apple approach is to create a beautiful, simple and amazing product. They create fewer products and many of them are new and unlike anything prior.

Guiding Principles

• Innovator’s Dilemma: This approach was well presented in the book the Innovator’s Dilemma which essentially says that innovative products will necessarily be contrary to user demands. Users have expectations that are built by current availability. They can’t demand something that doesn’t exist, so when new products come along, they might be rejected at first.
• Don’t listen to users: This ties with the first principle. Users cannot envision and predict everything. Many thinkers have argued that User-Centered innovation is bound to fail.

Advantages

• More time to create: When you don’t listen to users, you don’t have to waste time doing testing or surveys or creating focus groups. This effort can be redirected to creative endeavors.
• Accepted products become indispensable: How many can’t leave home without an iPod? Easy enough. In addition, if we constantly chase user demands we are setting ourselves up for eternal competition. That’s hard.

Disadvantages

• You got to believe: Many great innovations die because the organizations behind them become scared and bail out to early. If an idea is good, then it needs time.
• Backlash: Everyone believes they are right. If we ignore users they may get upset. Hiding behind statistics is safe and easy.

So what’s a library to do?

A hybrid approach is best. Libraries do not have the large user base and flow of cash that major companies have. We will never be able to create an iPod. Nonetheless, for too long libraries have been over focused on user needs (often on a very old conservative group of users). As this happens we lose relevancy and that will be our ultimate undoing.

In the coming weeks, I’ll focus more on applying these approaches in libraries. I’ll spend more time on the Apple approach since I’ve certainly spent plenty of time on analyzing users.  However, the ultimate goal is to keep libraries moving forward and that means taking risks.

To end, here’s a great video on how to kill creativity. I suggest keeping a scorecard and giving yourself a point every time you’ve heard one of these phrases:

My Anti-Creativity Checklist from Youngme Moon on Vimeo.

I’ll post the full e-book in a week or so.

That was an artificially brief example with few results (sorry, I’m a small library). However, custom reports have so much potentional, that I created a few generic reports for typical library needs.

Library Outreach

This is report will show how well library outreach efforts are working. In this report, we want to see how long users interact with the site, how much they look at. We want to know how many people we are gaining, where they came from, and what they did.

Metrics: These metrics can be mix and matched. The goal here is to have a variety of metrics about how quickly users began to interact with the page

• Unique Visitors: We will see the raw numbers in the dimensions. However, this will give us a graph. We will want to see a spike of new visitors after our outreach efforts
• Page Views and Pages/Visit: Some how much did first time viewers (or returning viewers) look at. Hopefully this will be high for first time viewers and lower as the number of visits increase.
• Time on Page and Average Time on Page: Another measure of how much users are exploring
• Goals: So what are our outreach goals? View blog? Sign up for program? Request a book? Always have a goal.
• Bounce Rate: Always useful

Dimensions: So we want to segment out users that seem obviously new to the site. Then we want to see where they came from to see which of our outreach efforts are working. For example, if we convinced some different agencies to put a link up to our site from their own, this will tell us which visitors followed that link.

• Visitor Type: This will give us two type: New or Returning. The new visitors will, for the most part, come from the outreach.
• Count of Visits: Drilling down from new visitors, this number will always be 1. However, we can drill down from returning visitors and find the users with low numbers, those will likely be from outreach.
• Source: This will give the domain (such as google.com) and can give an idea of how different users arrived at the site. For example, do users from one particular site come back over and over? That visitors to that site must be interested in what we offer but have not yet been contacted by the libraries. This would be a good place for future outreach.
• Referral Path: This is a little more indepth form of Source. This would be something like localnewspaper.com/community/library This will let us know if they came from a permanent link or from a link from a news story about a library event.

Non-Local Users

For academic and special libraries, the easiest way to separate secondary users (community members, out-of-state users, etc) from the primary user group (students, faculty of the university or department) is to distinguish by geographic region. While this does not cover all users, for example scholars doing field research may be separated geographically, it is a nice, quick way to see how secondary users interact with the website.

Metrics: These metrics can be mix and matched. Here are goal is to see how users intereact with a variety of content. We’ll be drilling down by region and than by landing and exits pages. So for each page we want to see how many users see it, how often its were they land (probably because of search engine results) and how often they leave.

• Bounces: For each page, this will give a quick idea of efficience
• Page Views: How often did users look at a page. This will be an important category as we drill down.
• Entrances/Exits: For each page, how often did users land there and then leave from there
• New Visits/Unique Visits: Do users continue to return to this page? Conversely, does this page continue to attract new users. The numbers can be tricky here. If they are going down, this suggests users like the page and return. If they go up, it may indicate that new users are coming consistently.
• Goals: Always important

Dimensions: First we will sort by geographical area. This will give use a way to segment out our primary users, than we can drill down to see what users like, how they arrive and how they leave.

• City: The top city will almost certainly be the city where the library is located.
• Pages: This will give us a list of content users from each city have viewed. To best understand these results, click on Page Views to sort by the number of times a page has been viewed. Default is alphabetical
• Landing Page: For each page, where did the user start? This is helpful to contrast with page views. Pages with high views are likely what the users wanted, but where did they go first? How long did it take to find it?
• Exit Page: For each landing page, where did the user exit. This will tell us how much more surfing they did from that page or if they, hopefully, found what they wanted and exited.

In addition, I was asking how often people used resources. Those results were even more surprising. Since I’ve been collecting usage data on the site, I know how often individuals used these resources, but I was curious about the perceptions. On several resources I’ve recorded that they’ve been used, well, never. Maybe one or two clicks over the year. Nonetheless, several people say they used it weekly or monthly. Hmmm.

Regardless of any individual responses, it generated a lot of useful information. Since I’m the planning type, I reviewed a lot of best practices. For those who like lots of information. There are good guides from Survey Monkey, Purdue and The University of Texas. For those looking for quick information. Here are three best practices that I found most valuable.

1) Have a goal for each question

To design the best question, it helps to have an idea why the question is being asked. For example, I wanted to know how to best use staff time, so I tried to break down specific projects into each question. This way, I can see that 70% of staff want photo archives but only 40% want government document archives.

It is also important to share this goal with the audience. Another recent survey was exploring journal usage. We stated at the beginning that we need to remove journals due to space and budget constraints. I believe this framed the whole purpose so that staff members  really considered the merits of each title. The comments at the end were also much more direct and helpful than in other surveys.

2) Create Concrete Questions

A question that is more specific will generate better results than more open-ended abstract questions. Consider the following question:

How often do you use the library?

This is open to user interpretation. Do we mean how often do you go the building? How often do you look up information in the OPAC? How often do you download articles? Each user can look at this a different way. Contrast this with another question:

How often do you use an electronic database like Web of Science or Google Scholar?

Now the patron has much more clear information and a couple of examples to help the make quantitative estimates. It’s hard to tell if a question is concrete enough. Often there is no way to know until the results show wild swings in responses.

3) Avoid rating type questions when possible?

This is not fully agreed upon in the literature, but I have found it gives much better results. What is a rating question? Those include question such as:

The library should focus on collecting books instead of journals:

Strongly Disagree                                  Strongly Agree

1                                          3                                      5

These questions are also open to interpretation. Higher scales are even more difficult. On a rank of 1 – 10, what is the difference between 2 and 3?

Instead breaking these down to more specific objective values are preferred. Instead of the question above, we could ask:

How often do you go the library for journals?

Daily, Weekly, Monthly, etc.

Now we have results that are more factual.

Opinion questions are hard to completely eliminate, just reduce them when possible.

Piece of Cake

Now all that’s left is compiling the results, translating that into service design and then implementation. How hard can that be?

Photo credits: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bettyspics/2398443150/sizes/o/

Finding Inconsistencies

I was looking the other day at some top content reports. I was interested to find that after the homepage, the most popular page was a publication list from 2009.

Interesting, sure. But I didn’t think too much of it. Later, as I was considering changes to the front page, I turned on the site overlay to see where users clicked and how often.

This is what I saw:

Recent publications is the link that takes people to the 2009 publication list. Yet, no one, not a single person clicked on that link. Clearly, this is a problem. If my second highest piece of content is somehow hidden behind a confusing link, I’m not doing my job on this webpage. I may not be able to direct people to the content I find most exciting and interesting, but I can at least not somehow obfuscate the content that users actually want to see.

Investigating sources of error

Returning to the top content report, I clicked on the link for that piece of content. Then I decided to find out where exactly users where coming from to get to this page. To do this, I clicked on entrance sources.

This gave me the following report:

I can see that the majority of my traffic is coming from google, while a smaller amount is direct. The direct traffic I understand since the publication list is often included in an email newsletter. However, I wanted to direct traffic from the frontpage to this piece of content.

Experimenting with Small changes

In the end, all this took to fix the problem was a little tweaking of the word choice. I set up two alternate versions of the menu item. I made one page to read Publication Lists and one to say Find Recent Publications. At this point, these are just guesses. I have no idea which one will actually direct people toward that content. Of course, there is always a possibility that users visiting the front page do not actually want to find publication lists and the search traffic is going to remain the dominant point of discovery.

However, I don’t need to leave this mystery to just wild guessing or conjecture. I can easily test a few different word choices and see how people respond. So, after creating two different versions of the frontpage with this mild change, I loaded the experiments into Google Web Optimizer. This will give me an idea of how the changes are working by randomly showing different patrons one version or the other and then recording how the respond. In a month or so I’ll report back with the results.

All of this can be better used to measure how the library is engaging patrons. Now engagement is kind of a trendy word these days. And, honestly, like most trendy phrases it is completely lacking in real substance. Well, analytics guru Avinash Kaushik briefly discusses how Google Analytics can be used to track engagement. What should we look for. What can be misleading.

The key insight in all of this, is that we have to define what engagement means for each campaign and each department. A teen library website will have far different criteria for engagement than a reading blog targeted towards adults. As usual, a successful program will have well defined goals and measures of success. Once those are defined, understanding the data is a snap.

Custom Reports

Since we already identified the key metrics for each visitor, we can make a custom report that will quickly give us the useful information in one form.

So we enter Google Analytics and select Custom Reporting

And we create a new report:

We’ll make a report for our local visitors, so we’ll drag and drop the following metrics: Entrances, Time on Page, Average Time on Page, Page Views

For the dimensions we’ll begin with City then we can ‘drill down’ further. This is where the power lies. We can look at people from Madison, WI (my town) and then click on that metric to see what the Landing Pages appear to be. This will only give us the top pages for people from Madison excluding users we don’t want. We can then drill down further to Exit Pages so for each Madison visitor, we can see the landing page and for each landing page we can see where the leave from (presumably because they found what they wanted or they were frustrated).

I’ll save this report as Local Searches and then when I run it and drill down two levels, I can see that the top landing page for users from Madison is the homepage (no surprise) and from that landing page I can see the top exit pages. Now I can begin to dig into what users are or are not finding.

Visitor Segmentation

We can generate a similar report using our key metrics for visitors. However, a more efficient way is to create a new visitor segmentation.

We’ll begin by selecting Advanced Segmentation

We’ll make a new segment and we’ll select City as the metric. This is a little loose and dirty and can be further enhanced with regular expressions or combination of metrics. However, we just want a quick division between those individuals that are local and those that are not.

After selecting City from Visitors we will segment out all visitors that are not from Madison. We’ll call this segment Not-UW (after University of Wisconsin).

After saving, it takes us back to our Advanced Segmentation window. Now if we click on our new segment we have full access to all reports that only involve individuals from outside of Madison.

And here they are. If we want to toggle back and forth we can select different segments from the Advanced Segments drop down at the top of the report.

In addition, we can have information from both segments (or many other default segments) combined into the same report .

When we apply, this will give us the report with different groups appearing in different colors:

Now that are different user groups are isolated, we can really begin to dig deep into what each user base wants and needs.

The second visitor is a remote visitor. These individuals stumble upon the site through a web search or through links that are not directly related to them or their region. These visitors often are trying to find a specific item not a specific service.

Each of these broad visitor types will have very different behavior on the site. And each should be considered unique when developing a website.

Local Visitor

Expectations: They often have specific needs and expectations of services. Our job is to figure out what they want, where they expect to find it, and how we can best communicate and provide it.

Metrics: The metrics that can help us best learn this information are

1. Top Content: There are often many “home pages” and users may often go directly to the page that is most useful whether through personal bookmarks or links that they have received from someone else. In addition, this tells you where users spend their time. And you can find out how long (although this is deceptive. Did they spend time there because it was useful or confusing?).
2. Click Density: This is a nice guided tour to your site. This will show how users navigate, where they go and what they do. This is a great way to see what navigation paths work and are intuitive and which aren’t.
3. Time on Site/Page: This is similar to #1. Users that are local are using the site actively (hopefully). They are more likely to spend more time on different resources. Time on site/page helps determine which ones are useful (because they spend a lot of time using them) or confusing (because they spend a lot of time using them). The difference is hard to tease out and is best determined with surveys or other forms of qualitative study.

Remote Visitors

Expectations: A lot of remote visitors come to the site to find a single piece of information. They may want a electronic document, a phone number, information about a unique collection or other items. They do not necessarily expect to spend a lot of time using the site and working from it (although for rich digital collections, this may not be true).

Metrics The goal here is to find out a) what the user wanted b) if they could find it

1. Bounce Rate: This is a measure of those who went to the page and then left right away without viewing other pages. Remote visitors will push up the bounce rate very, very quickly. Why? Because they are likely browsing the web to find an answer. A quick glance at the page may tell them it is not what they want and off the go. However, if they go directly to a site that has the information they want and then leave immediately, it is still a bounce so you need to check bounce rate along side . .
2. Keywords: This is great because you can see exactly what the patron was expecting. Combine this with bounce rate and you have a good indication of whether or not they received what they wanted. By looking at the keywords, you can build an understanding of what users want from your site and how that can be incorporated.

Reports

This was a quick look at a few key metrics for different visitors. Next week, I’ll show how to make custom reports to help isolate the data about each of these visitors.

Photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/88448902@N00/478136767/

Collections

This one is the easiest to recognize. We digitize some material, slap on some metadata and put it online. We know it’s being used because we see the hits, but how it is being used is more of a mystery.

So in addition, to my librarian-ness, I also play the banjo. As such, I spend plenty of time geeking out with my fellow fringe musicians at http://www.banjohangout.org/. The style of banjo I play is called clawhammer. And clawhammer banjoists mostly play a style of music called Old Time which has seen a recent revival from the film O Brother Where Art Thou. So being a tradition steeped in old music, there is a small obsession with field recordings and old masters.

Enter the Digital Library of Appalachia. This is an incredible digital collection that contains photos, music, essays and other tidbits from Appalachia. This collection is so important to members of this community, that when it was offline for only one day it caused a slight panic.

However, that’s not even my favorite anecdote about the digital library. I’ve been working on a song recently called Put Your Hand on The Plow. I found out about the song from a Japanese banjo player who heard the recording of a fiddle player from, that’s right the Digital Library of Appalachia. As far as I can tell, there are no other recorded versions of this song anywhere. So here’s a breakdown:

1. A song is recorded deep in Appalachia
2. Years later it is put online in a digital library
3. A Japanese man hears it. Loves it. Makes a banjo version
4. A guy in Wisconsin listens to it (along with almost 600 other people) and learns it himself.

That’s not a bad life for a song that might have disappeared forever.

Reference

We tend to not think of reference on a large scale. Often we think of reference as a service for our most immediate patron base whether that’s the town, the campus, or the department. Still it’s growing as an international institution. There is not a week that goes by where I do not answer at least one water related request at the Department of Limnology from someone in South America or Africa or Europe. Still, my favorite interaction is with a man from Germany.

I received a question via chat from a man in Germany. He was researching the roots of his family and found a reference via Google Books to their Turkish village in an obscure census that somehow ended up in our library. I was able to find the census book and send him the little bits of information I could find. If I recall, it was something along the lines of this: Population 123 women and 136 men. Taxes XXX. Location in state Y. However, even this little information thrilled the man.

We tend to think of services as local and and resources as global. After all, resources only involve passive interaction with patrons; we put it online, they look at it. Services require active assistance; we interact directly with patrons. But that’s going to change as information about our collections goes online even if the actual collections do not.

Publications

Librarians are, hopefully, fierce defenders of open access. And we try to convince faculty to sign on, but it’s hard. Most are busy enough and don’t have any extra time to spend submitting papers to yet another repository. Still, we need to communicate the importance not just to the readers of the articles, but also the ways Open Access can benefit the authors.

I’m constantly showing this image to members of the CFL:

This image was published in Science February 2009. Here’s the full citation: Science 20 February 2009:Vol. 323. no. 5917, p. 1025 DOI: 10.1126/science.1154562

What it shows is the increase in citations for Open Access articles in the poorest countries. Note how in South America, the Middle East, the former Soviet countries all use OA articles much more. And not just use them, they cite them. So by making publications Open Access, scholars themselves benefit. Their articles will be read by more individuals, will be used in more decisions, will be cited more in further research. Their publications will have impact. And in a place where monetary gains are few, it’s nice to have some positive feedback.

Share

So tell me, what are some of your stories of libraries with a global impact. Share below.

: photo credits:

banjo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/usonian/18067964/sizes/m/

village: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lapidim/43503396/sizes/m/