In Fall 2020, the Library continued our qualitative research into the student research experience. This time, we investigated student engagement with ebooks. Our research questions centered on: how students were currently using ebooks for their academics what pain points they were experiencing the meanings of print books and ebooks in…

In Spring 2020, our college joined the mass migration to online learning due to COVID-19. In the Library, we had a ton of questions about how students were coping during this shift. We decided to conduct exploratory qualitative research to get a better sense of student perspectives, contexts, challenges, and…

I’ve been spending the past weeks helping faculty and students transition to an online learning environment in response to COVID-19. This shift has been challenging for all of us, as we try to navigate our new reality of uncertainty, instability, and anxiety. Headlines and online discussions show that campuses nationwide…

While it might seem that user-centered design practices and UX capacities are ubiquitous, there are plenty of industries where it’s still a new horizon. Here’s some advice I wish I’d gotten when starting out. — I work in an industry (higher education) where there can be a lot of institutional and cultural gaps between users and system designers & administrators. In this context, it can be challenging to highlight connections between poor UX and user outcomes.

There’s a conversation that happens a lot in my institution when we talk about interface design. “Sure, we want this to be simpler for beginners,” people say. “But what about the experts?” Indeed. What about the experts? It feels like an intractable problem, as beginner and expert preferences often seem…

We’re awfully confused about greed in America. Is it good? Is it a sin? How do we stop it? Can we? Reviewing the science provides some interesting answers, along with more questions. First, what is greed? One working definition by Terri G. Seuntjens and others describes greed as, “the tendency to always want…

This past year, Maximilian Maier, a master’s student at a Swedish university conducted a qualitative study seeking to understand end users’ perceptions of manipulative design, or deceptive patterns. Here’s what participants had to say: “[T]hey are forcing me to do something like buy stuff, click or see something, get some…

I’ve been struggling for the past few months with failure. The more I read and the more podcasts I listen to, I find myself longing for something specific and strange. I crave a continual stream of people sharing their stories about how they’ve failed…and how they’re still failing. Not because…

It’s 4:11 pm on a Friday, and I may have just saved us over $1,500 in medical bills. Or maybe not. I’m still waiting for a call from the doctor’s office. And even then, I won’t really know until we get the final bill, weeks afterwards. I’ve made over thirteen…