Volume 22 Issue 3 Introduction
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7710/1093-7374.1862Keywords:
Oregon, Oregon libraries, academic library, libraries, librarians, northwest, information science, information literacy, social media, writing, library trends, books, donors, library funding, Oregon library association, quarterly, Oregon library association quarterly, American library association, ala, ola, reading, library success, success, evolving roles, UX, user experience, user services, OSU, Lane county community college, Linn Benton county community college, Reed, Reed college, Oregon state, University, library service design, Joe, Marquez, web services, bees, picture book topics, cataloging by, Wilsonville, public, fiction staff picks, new discipline, changes in libraries, career, careers, library careers, library career, new department, student workers, fall, 2016, access services, professional journal, scholarly, academic, circulation, Portland, Multnomah County Library, personal librarian, innovative, inventive, Washington county cooperative library services, user, users, solution, lita, lux, service designAbstract
In recent years, UX research has become more commonplace in libraries across the country. This is a good thing. The downside is that UX has become synonymous with the user interface. However, the user experience is more than just a human-computer interaction. The user’s experience encompasses the whole experience a user has with the library, whether that be while searching the library catalog for a book, retrieving the book from the stacks, or checking the book out. The user experience is not a single interaction, but rather a series of micro interactions. As a user moves across “interfaces,” she is constantly faced with challenges that she must navigate to complete her task successfully. To me, our job as librarians is to make those smaller interactions as fluid and unhindered as possible—in a word, seamless.
This issue of OLA Quarterly is about the state of user experience efforts in Oregon. This collection of excellent articles not only emphasizes the importance of including the users in the design process, but they also stress the importance of actually including users at all! After reading these submissions, I hope that you will see that Oregon libraries value the opinions of their users and are user focused.
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