Revisiting “Structuring and Supporting UX Work in Academic Libraries”

User eXperience (UX) is a key factor in the success of software systems. Many software companies face challenges in their work with UX. Existing research does not analyze UX practices and challenges in relation to other software quality characteristics or, in particular, in relation to usability. A better understanding of these challenges can help researchers and practitioners better address them in the future. In this empirical study, we have interviewed 17 practitioners with different backgrounds and occupations from eight software development companies. Their responses are coded, and analyzed with thematic analysis. We report eight themes of challenges that practitioners face in their work with UX. While some of these challenges partly overlap with those reported in existing literature about usability or other software quality characteristics, the participants of our study either view many of the challenges as unique to UX, or more severe in the case of UX. Although at a superficial level challenges of UX and other quality characteristics overlap, we differentiate these challenges at a deeper level through the five main characteristics of UX: subjective , holistic , dynamic , context-dependent and worthwhile . In particular, we identified that these characteristics have at least 20 implications (i.e. additional difficulties) for day-to-day work of practitioners. We found that 11 of these implications have been previously reported in literature. However, to the best of our knowledge, the remaining nine implications are unique to our study. These implications can explain why practitioners perceive the challenges to be more severe than for other quality characteristics. Most importantly, they can explain the industry’s lopsided focus on the pragmatic aspect of UX. Our findings can be useful for researchers in identifying new and industry-relevant research areas and for practitioners to learn from empirically investigated challenges in UX work, and base their improvement efforts on such knowledge. Identifying and investigating the overlaps underlines the importance of these challenges, and can also help finding research areas not only for enhancing UX work but also software quality in general. It also makes it easier for practitioners to spot, better understand as well as find mitigation strategies for UX, through learning from past experiences and developments in the area of software quality.

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to broaden the theoretical understanding of the impact that digital transformation processes have on academic libraries and to investigate the characteristics of their digital maturity so that guidelines can be identified for improving the user experience and for accelerating and connecting parts of library operations. Approach/methodology/design: The paper provides an overview of the theoretical background and a review of research dealing with the concept of digital transformation in the context of higher‑education institutions, with particular emphasis on academic libraries. Results: Academic libraries play a key role in ensuring digital access to resources through modern library information systems and also in supporting scholars, teachers and students in teaching and research. Contemporary cloud‑based platforms with built‑in discovery services enable unified resources management, analytics, system integration and the application of artificial intelligence to enhance services to users. Practical implications: The results of the study can be used in the preparation of strategic and operational work plans for libraries. Originality/value: By researching the characteristics through which the digital maturity of academic and research libraries can be measured, the paper contributes to a general understanding of the notion of digital transformation and to its operationalisation in library workflow processes.

UX information in the daily work of an agile team: A distributed cognition analysis

Usability and User Experience: The State of Research

Higher education institutions in the United States and across the globe, are realizing the importance of enabling internal and external collaborative work, e.g., interdisciplinary research and community partnerships. In recent years, researchers have documented the benefits of organizational collaboration for research including greater efficiency, effectiveness, and enhanced research reputation. In addition, accreditors, foundations, business, and government agencies have been espousing the value of collaboration for knowledge creation and research and improved organizational functioning. As a result of both the external pressures and the known benefits, many forms of internal and external research collaborations have begun to emerge in higher education. At the heart of this change, academic libraries, who have long been models for collaborative work, are increasingly participating in the research process by providing a widening range of research services beyond traditional reference services. Innovative library services, in areas such as bibliometric analysis, research data management, and data repositories, are evolving in response to changes in education funding and policies. These funding and policy changes have also coincided with technological developments to create opportunities for academic librarians to find new roles within their institutions and the research community. There is a growing body of literature examining these changing academic library roles, but few volumes have concentrated on how the nature of collaborative work in libraries is helping to reshape institutional research practices. Academic Libraries and Collaborative Research Services fills that void by providing academic librarians and administrators with case studies and guidance on how academic libraries are establishing their place in this new collaborative research arena in the areas of emerging liaison roles, research data services, open access and scholarly publishing, and professional development programming. The book will also be useful to higher education administrators and institutional research officers looking for information on how to partner with libraries to increase the effectiveness of collaborative research.

Objective – This study aimed to test the efficacy of a warmth-based library instruction intervention in reducing rates of library anxiety in first-year undergraduate students. "Warmth" is a concept that is commonly discussed within literature on library anxiety, but to date no studies have explicitly tested the application of a warmth-based instruction intervention. First-year students are ideal targets for this intervention because they are the most likely to experience library anxiety. Methods – A quasi-experiment was conducted examining library anxiety rates in first-year undergraduate students at a public research university in the U.S. South. A one-shot warmth-based instruction session focusing on the emotional dimensions of library use was compared to a standard one-shot instruction session. Library anxiety was measured using a modified version of Bostick's Library Anxiety Scale as a pretest and posttest. Results – Results indicated that both warmth-based and standard library instruction were associated with a decrease in participants' library anxiety rates without significant differences between the types of instruction. However, warmth-based instruction was correlated with greater reductions in areas of library anxiety related to interactions with library workers. Though library anxiety rates decreased significantly after experiencing library instruction, participants exhibited low levels of library anxiety before their library instruction session occurred. Conclusion – Though warmth-based instruction did not have a significantly different impact than standard library instruction on general library anxiety, the intervention tested in this study suggests strategies that could be used to increase student comfort with library workers. This study also demonstrates a successful method to include emotional factors such as library anxiety in academic libraries' regular assessment programs. Focusing assessment on students' skills and knowledge alone risks ignoring an important aspect of student engagement and missing opportunities for academic libraries to connect with students. Assessment of emotional components of library instruction initiatives is especially crucial to ensure and demonstrate that libraries are using their resources effectively to maximize student success.

The vision of user experience is making life of users of products as convenient as possible, especially during the interaction with a productor a service. An important aspect of perceived convenience is the user experience of a product. The visual design and especially the interaction design has a major influence on this perception. In order to achieve the vision, user experience experts apply different types of tasks. One type of task is to analyze how users carry out tasks and what user's needs or problems are. Another type of task is to design user experience solutions and other typical task type deals with carrying out usability evaluations in order to find problems in using software application. In the course of user experience activities, many data are being collected. Many of the collected data relates to certain activities of users. For the user experience area there exist just a few tools, which support typical tasks in different ways. None of the tools supports linking results of user experience work to user experience meta-data. Why is it a problem? The current tools do not support an access to user experience project data with generic search and filter criteria like case etc. This makes the access to user experience research data difficult and the comparison of user experience project data between different projects inefficient. In general, results of different user experience projects are difficult to reuse. The core idea of data pattern for allocating user experience Meta-Data to User Experience research data is to associate user experience project data with user experience meta-data. The data pattern considers associating user experience project data with user experience meta-data partially automatically and partially manually by the user. The key idea is that we want to reuse project data like the project sponsor, the application area, the industry, use cases etc. as user experience meta-data and assign them to user experience research data. The benefits of the data pattern are: Reusing results of user experience research projects. Making access to available results more efficient. Direct comparison of available results is supported and more efficient. UX Office is the typical instance for application.

Change brought about by innovations in computing technologies has fundamentally altered the nature of work in academic libraries. In his description of the term informatica electronica, Gilbert (1998) suggests that despite the way technology is changing how library staff do their work, it should not change the emphases on traditional services to patrons, such as accessing and retrieving information. This chapter also focuses on human changes that accompany the migration from print to electronic collections, from traditional to online services, and from the academic research library of a decade ago to the virtual library of today and tomorrow.

To learn about the experiences of librarians working through COVID-19, we conducted semi-structured interviews with academic librarians from across Canada on issues such as workload, collegiality, and overall satisfaction with their working conditions during the pandemic. Themes emerged around job security, workload changes (both in terms of hours worked and the type of work being done), working from home, relationships with colleagues and administrators (including the perceived speed of the institution’s pandemic response and the state of communication from or with administration), and hopes for the future. This article focuses on the semantic elements of librarian work during COVID-19 uncovered during thematic analysis, including an in-depth discussion of how academic librarians’ workload changed; a second planned article will focus on latent themes on the caring nature of library work. This study connects isolated individual situations with the overall picture of what librarians’ work looked and felt like during the COVID-19 pandemic. For library administrators, we identify the ways in which institutional support helped or hindered librarians in doing their work.

The fast-paced changing information environment calls for continual development of libraries and information institutions to cope with the changes of the digital environment. To ensure this, there is a need to understand the current employment trends to identify the competencies and skills required of professionals. The advent of information and communication technology (ICT) has created a real paradigm shift in Library operations so information professionals are working at the leading edge of the internet and the web technology; leading to more web-based services. Moreover, the digital environment is reshaping the whole context within which information is being generated, processed, and delivered through online networks. This has strategic significance for library professionals in facing the challenges of this ever-changing information environment in which ICT is the major source for survival and development. This is having a direct impact on library development; a development which is reflected in the literature as required by the emerging market place. The inevitable consequences for professionals are to be equipped with the necessary skills, traits and competencies applicable to the cyber environment to meet the demands of the ever changing job market. The paper identifies the characteristics required of library and information (LIS) workers to serve the expanding and changing information market of the 21st century, as reflected in job announcements posted on the listserv of the IFLA from January to October 2014 to create a synergy between the profession and the current employment trends. A sample set of 259 job advertisements posted by academic, public and special libraries are selected and are grouped in four categories these are: 1. Technology-based positions with 48.71% of the advertisements. 2. Public/information services skills listed by 22.87% of the openings. 3. Technical services skills scored 18.64% of the available jobs. 4. Personal attributes are mentioned in 9.74% positions. Most positions are available in Academic libraries.

Cloudlet is an emerging technology in mobile cloud computing. However users may be far away from cloudlets due to the mobility of mobile users, which leads to a poor network connectivity, thus, user experience will be poor. While a user moves across multiple cloudlets areas, issues of service scheduling between cloudlets to better support user experience become important. In this paper, we consider a latency-sensitive and stateful service scheduling problem in cloudlets. We propose a novel cloudlet service model and formulate the problem with the goal of finding the optimal service running sequence which minimizes the average service response time during the whole running process of the service for a user. To solve this problem, we propose an algorithm called Mobility Prediction-based Markov Decision Process (MPMDP). The proposed algorithm takes user’s mobility prediction into account, and makes an decision based on Markov Decision Process to decide on which cloudlet the service should run for a user each time. Finally, we evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed MPMDP algorithm by simulations with real-world users’ traces. The simulation result shows our algorithm achieves a lower average response time compared with previous schemes.

Shift workers in libraries just like their counterparts in service organizations are impacted upon negatively with respect to health and efficiency. This calls for investigation on the extent of impact on librarians’ efficiency and health. The study empirically investigated the extent of shift work impact on library staff efficiency and health in academic libraries in Delta State, Nigeria. The study was a descriptive survey and the population includes 182 staff in the academic libraries. Questionnaire was used for data gathering. The questionnaire was validated and reliability established with Crombach-Alpa reliability Co-efficient, 0.86. Data retrieved were analyzed using frequency count and simple percentage. The study found that, to a great extent, shift work disrupts shift workers’ family life and has negative effects on efficiency and health. Also, the study found that service level is higher during morning shift, but the shift workers prefer afternoon shift. A shift worker whose pulse corresponds to diurnal activity by a light/dark cycle should go through phase modification when adjusting to a new light/dark cycle, especially the night/ afternoon shift workers). Adequate lighting could be used to reduce/mitigate circadian rhythms’ disruption in shift workers.

This study evaluated the effectiveness of strategies employed in organising electronic information resources in academic libraries in Limpopo Province, South Africa. The objectives were to determine the impact of metadata and cataloguing practices on user experience and accessibility, examine the alignment between organisational strategies and user preferences, and identify gaps and innovative approaches in managing electronic resources. A quantitative approach was adopted, involving 115 postgraduate students from three universities in Limpopo Province. Data were collected through structured surveys focusing on metadata consistency, accessibility, and satisfaction with current organisational practices. The analysis, conducted using descriptive and inferential statistics, revealed that metadata plays a central role in enhancing discoverability, usability, and user experience. Postgraduate students demonstrated a strong preference for electronic formats and rely heavily on specialised databases, grey literature, and scholarly repositories to support advanced research. However, resource constraints, technological limitations, and institutional disparities continue to hinder efficiency in resource organisation. The study recommends improving metadata interoperability, investing in AI-driven resource management tools, and strengthening librarian competencies through continuous professional development in metadata curation, digital troubleshooting, and research support. Enhancing technological infrastructure and aligning library services with postgraduate research needs will significantly improve resource accessibility, usability, and overall satisfaction.

This essay attempts to combine the concept of spatial realism, which is revealed through an analysis of historical cinematic techniques, with a framework for studying the efficacy of physical spaces in the academic library. This framework will help librarians gain a better understanding of the user experiences happening in the library. Furthermore, analyzing space and user experience through this holistic framework can help ensure that decisions regarding redesign will be as efficacious as possible. In a rapidly shifting information environment, the spatial realism framework can assist librarians concerned with measuring spatial efficacy and user experience when they are otherwise unsure of how to start such an analysis.

Using digital environments to design inclusive and sustainable communities of practice in academic libraries