Research Projects

Enterprise persona research

Look for UX skills including Research planning, Field visits and user interviews, Notetaking, Analysis

I recently interned with a company called OCLC. OCLC is a non profit organization providing tools and services to library communities. They work towards making information more accessible to library users and develop services for effective management of libraries. I was assigned to work on an Exterprise persona research to help the desginers make user centric decisions and to help the team remember who they are building the products for. They had a list of 20 or more personas but to start with I chose 5 most important personas among the rest.

Goal

  • Create a central repository for collecting, building, and curating information about our users (personas)
  • To inform OCLC product design,user experience,and development.

Why User Personas?

  • A major push for this project is that,as technology changes,so do work flows and roles. OCLC understands that and continuously add features to enhance the overall experience of their services.
  • To inform the solution design,I researched the pain points,user expectations and user workflows whether the users are librarians or library patrons.
  • I identified most important librarians and created a persona for them. They are, Acquisition librarian, Cataloging librarian, General public/ Information seeker, Publisher, Metadata librarian

Research questions

  • What are the responsibilities of a persona?
  • What are the major painpoints/challenges of a persona?
  • What are the tools used by a persona to accomplish their tasks?

Roles and responsibilities

  • Participant recruitment
  • Conduct field visits and interviews
  • Collect data and report to research mentor
  • Collaboratively analyze data and build personas

My Approach

  • Recruitment Reach out
  • Recruitment implementation
  • Scheduling
  • Interview work
  • Interview data analysis
  • Persona release

Fig.1 Research plan and timelines

Interview

  1. Tell me a bit about yourself.
  2. Tell me about how you got started in the library world.
  3. Can you walk me through your work day?
  4. We understand that libraries use multiple tools in various ways to accomplish a plethora of tasks. Part of my job is to understand how users navigate these tools and leverage different capabilities. What are some of the tools you use and what do you like (or alternatively dislike) about them?
  5. Can you walk me through your interactions with a book or article or thing (from beginning to end)?
  6. If you could change only ONE THING about your work or role in the library space, what would that be and why?

Interview Data Analysis

Fig.2 Data analysis on Miro

Tools used

  • Project planning - Trello
  • Interview Scheduling - Excel
  • Interview data collection - Excel
  • Interview data analysis - WebEx and Miro
  • Design - Hand sketch and Invision
  • Data storage - Confluence and One drive

Outcome

  • Helped team to better understand their users, their challenges and their workflow
  • Team will use these personas to build empathy with their users
  • Help them keep their users in mind while making important design decisions

Fig.3 Acquisition Librarian

Fig.4 Cataloging Librarian

Fig.5 General Public