Enhancing library services with a journey mapping approach
“Journey maps illustrate customers’ stories.” – Kerry Bodine. About user experience – not just the step by step process but also user’s emotions over time. We often make a lot of assumptions; journey mapping is a way to find out what’s really happening from the user’s perspective.
Journey-mapped all 500 students at an intermediate school, especially interested in:
- taking shoes off at door
- usage of OPAC
- use of AccessIt’s OneSearch system for database search
Created a stylised journey map template to prompt where feedback was wanted. Explained to teachers how it’d work. Trialed with one class, then refined as had to explain to students it wasn’t a test. Hard for students in this age group to give their own opinion without knowing what librarians “want them to write”.
As you come into the foyer, thoughts include:
- too full, smells bad, keen to find a good book, taking off shoes OK, taking off shoes a pain, untidy – note that negative feelings about taking off shoes seems much higher for year 7 than year 8
Exciting part was the actions as the result of the report
- eg scrapped the ‘no shoes in the library’ rule.
- Promoting IP address for catalogue as mural on the wall
- Found students not confident searching catalogue so extended catalogue teaching so now goes into classrooms to teach it.
- Students found it hard to navigate around lots of furniture so freed up some space
- Trialed a self-issue desk but it didn’t work and wasn’t totally reliable so scrapped that but introduced extra student librarians to free up queues of student
Lessons learned:
- Focus on one aspect of student experience / one user goal, not entire experience
- Good to see what the pain points are
- Students reacted really well to immediate changes
Planning:
- collaborate – who will you work with to trial the approach? consider working with people trialling it in other sectors
- decide – which user goal / journey will you focus on, and which user group (or non-user group) will you target
- map – what tools and resources do we need? develop simple templates, or set up video diaries – just think about how you’re going to collate at the other end; and think about resources for recruitment
- analyse – how will you use the data/evidence; how will you present it (and recommendations) to others in the team;
- act – what resources do you need to implement any changes. When you’re seen to act on feedback it reinforces that you’re user-centred, makes them more likely to participate later and gives them greater ownership of the library
- evaluate – the information collected, the process, the impact of changes
(Or could use Matt Finch’s “Who/What/Where/When/How” process.)
Could also journey map the ideal experience and then identify the gaps.