David Lee King

social media | emerging trends | libraries

Community and the Digital Experience

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I’m knee-deep in wading through a bunch of articles and books on various aspects of experience design for the book I’m writing on digital experience planning, and I just had an epiphany today: I’m insane!

(No, wait – that’s not it…)

Ok – so I’ve been thinking about experience lately, both for my book and for the library website my library is currently redesigning. And we’ve been talking a lot about “experience.”

So what was my epiphany (hee – I just used the word “epiphany” twice in one blog post)? The type of experience a library website delivers. Because there’s more than one type of experience that can be delivered via the web.

Here’s what I mean. Go take a peek at the website for the newest Harry Potter movie (just promise to come back here!). That site clearly presents a type of experience – it’s all about fun, entertainment, projecting a theme through sound and cloudy, dark images, etc – it’s all about the experience of entertainment.

That’s a great digital experience – but that’s not what I want on my library’s website. No, that’s the wrong type of experience. So I continued thinking about digital experience and presentation for a library website (or any content-rich site, for that matter) – what type of experience should we be creating?

And then it dawned on me (yes, this is when the heavens opened and I had my epiphany (ha – did it again): the movie site is mimicking the actual movie… so a library site should mimic the actual library. And what type of experience happens in a library?

One of community. And conversation. And participation.

Those things happen here at the library EVERY SINGLE DAY. There’s an amazing amount of interaction between the library staff and our patrons – ideas being shared, information being found, meetings being held, and questions being asked and answered.

And that – that – is the experience I think libraries need to work on creating in a digital environment, be that in Second Life, in MySpace or FaceBook, or on the library’s website. Look at CNN and USAToday’s recent redesigns – they focus on community. Why? Because those newspapers exist to inform their user communities. And why not interact with those communities? That only makes sense.

It makes ok sense for a newspaper. But for a library? Community is our lifeblood. Our goals, as I see them, in the emerging digital age are to:

  • create a sense of community in our digital spaces
  • create and nurture conversations in our digital spaces
  • allow participation in our digital spaces

Do these things, and your digital doors will swing just as wide as your physical doors do now.

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Bad United Airlines Customer Experience

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This post starts out describing a bad customer service experience I had, then turns my whining into five things you should think about in your library.

First, for the story:
I spoke at New York Public Library a few weeks ago. After my presentation, I decided to show up early at the airport, so I could work on some writing projects (as in a book – stay tuned for more on that one).

At the United Airlines ticket counter, I went to the self-service EASY CHECK-IN counter. One would think that by advertising the counter as EASY CHECK-IN, that it would, in fact, be EASY CHECK-IN. That was not the case.

I received my plane tickets just fine – that part actually WAS easy. But I was there 4 1/2 hours early, and the EASY CHECK-IN machine apparently didn’t like that – it wasn’t set up to check bags that far ahead. Unfortunately for me, the person behind the counter wasn’t much better than the EASY CHECK-IN machine!

I explained my problem (I wanted to check my bags early). Pretty clear, right? Instead of addressing my problem, the Counter Guy simply pointed me to the REALLY LONG LINE for normal ticketing, and said “go stand in that line, and see if they can get you on an earlier flight.” WHAT??? That’s not what I needed! So I re-explained that I already HAD my tickets (I showed him) and said again “I just need to check in my bag… ” In a “most patient” tone (you know, that “you must really be a dumb customer but I’m still supposed to be nice to you so I’ll talk louder and slower” tone), the Counter Guy restated that I needed to get in the REALLY LONG LINE to see if they could put me on an earlier flight, and that was all he could do for me!

ok…

So I headed over to the REALLY LONG LINE. 45 minutes later, when I finally reached the Counter Lady at the end of the REALLY LONG LINE, I explained my problem again (I just want to check my bag). In a very helpful voice, the Counter Lady said “you know, you didn’t need to stand in this line for that.”  (admittedly, I knew she’d say that, but by this time I realized I wanted to blog about the stupid process I had to go through, so I held out).

I told her that the Counter Guy at the EASY CHECK-IN counter said I had to stand in this line to get my bag checked in early. So what did the Counter Lady do? She simply rolled her eyes in the general direction of the Counter Guy, and then helped me with my real problem (someone finally took my bag – yay!).

And now for the library part. What’s the moral of this story? I have a couple:

1. Labels are useless if they don’t match functionality. In this case, the EASY CHECK-OUT line wasn’t easy. What are your labels? What do you call your library’s self-check-out machines? How about labels on your website – do they match functionality? Ex – Advanced Search… is it really more advanced, or does it just have more options? How about “Named Areas” of your library? Do you have a reading room, or “The Nathan B. Rezznick Room for Discovery?”

2. Train your employees (or, don’t be Counter Guy)! In United’s case, two employees standing within 15 feet of each other handled one pretty standard problem two different ways. Do your reference desk staff and your circulation staff do this? How about your IT staff vs public service staff? You should all be on the same page.

3. Do something about the problem. At United, when they realize there’s a problem, they roll their eyes at each other. Hopefully, later on someone chatted with the Counter Guy about customer service, procedures, etc. At your library, when a public computer doesn’t work right… do you roll your eyes at the PC Technician, or do you work with him/her to fix the problem?

4. Make sure staff and customers use the same thing. I’ll hazard a guess that the upper management at United have never actually had to stand in their own ticket line for 45 minutes (or even used the EASY CHECK-IN counter). When customers need a book, and ask your reference staff for help, do they use the the same front-end public catalog the customer uses, or do they use the staff, back-end version? Certainly the staff version provides more options and possibly more information. But how will staff really understand the customer search experience if they don’t use what the customer uses?

5. Be the best library in the world. Seriously. Make being the best library in the world your goal, and then figure out how you can achieve that goal within your time, budget, and community. With that mindset you can’t NOT improve something, and who knows? You just might achieve it!


Adaptive Path and Second Life

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This is cool. Adaptive Path, a company that focuses on building digital experiences, is apparently going to help Linden Labs improve the digital experience that is Second Life.

I find that to be an extremely interesting project. Usually, improving a digital experience means improving someone’s website, or a function of the website – not improve something that, in many ways, is mimicking real life in a digital way.

They also say this: “So, after we spoke with them for a while, we discovered that, while there may be a few issues with the world and it’s amazing growth rate, there is one issue in particular that’s affecting the usability for the residents. While I can’t divulge the exact issue, I can say that it’s a very complex and interesting problem –  something that we’ve not tackled in this manner before.” I sure hope that means actually talking within Second Life, rather than just being able to type/chat to each other!

And I hope they write it up, speak about it, etc – I think we’d all learn much from their “experience.”

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Customer Service When No One is Looking

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Just a random thought on customer service. I’m currently reading a book by Jim Palmer (an old friend from my days in Nashville) titled Divine Nobodies: Shedding Religion to Find God. It’s an interesting book (though I realize not everyone’s cup of tea).

Palmer mentions loving libraries, and then goes on to say this (it’s not really the point of his chapter, but it struck me nonetheless): “Sometimes you see strange things in libraries… there’s the time I saw the librarian at the counter turn away from a departing (and apparently difficult) customer and flip her the bird out of everyone’s view except mine at the water fountain. It made for a strange moment when our eyes met, and it burst my bubble that all librarians are mild-mannered Mother Teresa types whose greatest joy in life is simply helping people find books” (pg. 48).

Besides the goofy giggles I get from the seeing the phrase “flip her the bird” in a Christian non-fiction book (I have a quirky sense of humor), this scenario really did give me pause. Why? Well… think about your library staff for a sec. Are their customer service cups half-empty or half-full? Are they prone to to be reactive or proactive? Do they go the extra mile to help customers find something, or do they say “it’s up on the next floor” and point vaguely to the elevator? Do they “flip her the bird” when no one’s looking (or at least, when they THINK no one’s looking)?

Well?

I know some libraries that have mandatory customer service training for all new employees – I think that’s great. Possibly those libraries that do great customer service need to “share the joy” with other libraries?

Don’t Set Your MySpace Page Profile to Private!

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library myspace pageI just saw Plainfield Public Library’s MySpace page (via Michael Stephens). Well, not really – take a look at the screenshot – their MySpace profile is set to private.

So what? Well… it’s a usability and experience thing. There will be MySpacers that want to peruse the page, see what programs the library has to offer, etc – and not want to sign up to be a friend of the library. By setting their profile to private, the library is basically blocking all their great MySpace content from ALL POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS. It’s sort of like saying “yes, you can enter our library building! Of course! But – do you have a library card? ‘Cause you can ONLY enter our fine library if you have a library card.”

The newspaper article about the page (aside – extremely cool they received press about their MySpace page!) quotes a librarian saying they’ve added more than 80 friends to the site since August. My guess? They’d get more friends if the profile WASN’T set to private.

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