User Services and Programming Discussion #1: User-Centered Programs
22 January 2025
• Describe a time when you used a product or a service that was frustrating. What ultimately made the experience frustrating for you?
• What does user-centered design of library programs and services mean to you?
• Why is it important to think of our users when designing library programs and services?
Hm. The 'ol "pick a time when you've had a poor customer experience and how you'd improve it" question, other than seeming too much like something downstream from corporate copy for my taste, is one I can never properly answer. Mostly because I try to be dismissive of my frustration if there's no malice involved—in some cases, I have to wonder if the endless fixation on "eliminating frustration" is downstream from big tech companies whole ethos (yes). Is the frustration I or someone else has with a service actually warranted? Or is it, y'know, an inevitable result of the disparity between a service that is performed by human beings of varying aptitude and circumstances that causes differences in outcome, versus omnipresent digital software that prioritizes the appearance of seamless immediacy by obscuring the human labor as much as possible?
Still, just because I'm more tolerant of friction doesn't mean that our patrons should be subjected to it for reasons that aren't just learning curves or budgetary limits. There is a natural difficulty that's involved in, say, learning how to navigate the specific UI of an OPAC, or a modern printer, difficulty that is nigh-impossible to eliminate due to the sheer number of people interfacing with them. Then there are difficulties that come about when users try to use services that weren't necessarily designed with them in mind, made more apparent when a program or services is supposed to fulfill a specific need for a specific set of people, like a storytime that lacks visual aids. There's a lot of good-practice phrases thrown around when it comes to user-centered services—one nutshell summary I stumbled upon goes "examine real-world user services, proactively consider user needs, pay attention to why people don’t use the library, and anticipate what we will need before we need it” (Eberhart, 2019).
While these sound nice, I think user-centered services shouldn't really strive to resemble the glossy-yet-flattened catch-alls that the "real-world services" of now likely call to mind, as much as it tries to get specific and minimize extraneous difficulties. Not "try to gather as many identities as possible into our storytimes," but "have regular storytimes devoted to as many cultures as possible." Not figure out a way to tape on accessibility measures for disabled folk to an existing program, but to redesign a program for the ground up so that it already accommodates them.
In this case, I have to give a minor shoutout to the approach taken by some teen services—most of the time, if teens are given a say in how their library's programs are run, they're only able to do so through formal responses like surveys or even a fully-fledged teen advisory board. This is what Braun (2020) calls a glut of “teen-centered” services, the typical extent of control teens are given over what public libraries offer for their benefit. Braun instead advocates for more libraries to shift to “teen-driven” services, where “adults are invited to support teens in executing their ideas [and] teens retain power of decision making and agency throughout execution.” While I have heard that this approach has its own set of drawbacks from practicing teen librarians, I'd think there would be no better approach for creating user-centered services than directly involving the target users in the designs of the programs themselves.
References
Braun, L. W. (2020, May 1). Give teens the lead. American Libraries Magazine. https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2020/05/01/give-teens-the-lead-teen-driven-services/
Eberhart, G. M. (2019, June 23). User-centric library services. American Libraries Magazine. https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/blogs/the-scoop/user-centric-library-services/