User Experience (UX)

User Experience (UX)

The January 2010 Library Journal had an article by Aaron Schmidt titled “The User Experience.” His focus was on user experience design. He included three aspects of design: interaction design, information architecture, and visual design. Visual design” deals with the surface characteristics of an object or document.” This is the color of the carpet or the shape and layout of the circulation desk. Interaction design is the “process of creating how something behaves and how people must behave to engage it.” Think workflow, how people navigate through your library when you think about interaction design. Information architecture (IA) is about “organizing and structuring data.” In libraries this is often used in designing web page layouts and how they are labeled.

Whether we know it or not, we are the designers of our library services and use all three of these aspects in the work we do every day. How well are we doing? Not sure just what this all means? A series of articles on User Experience are planned for Library Journal. The first two are online at the links below. Want to read more about design? A list of books accompanies the first article.

January Library Journal Article

March Library Journal Article