Doing Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: An Approach to Keeping it User Centered

Keeping any large technical project user-centered is challenging at best. Adding in something like an extremely tight timeline makes it too easy to dispense with this completely. Say, for instance, six months to migrate to a new integrated library system that combines your old ILS plus your link resolver and many other tools and a new discovery layer. I would argue, however, that it’s on a tight timeline like that that a major focus on user experience research can become a key component of your success. I am referring in this piece specifically to user experience on the web, but of course there are other aspects of user experience that go into such a project. While none of my observations about usability testing and user experience are new, I have realized from talking to others that they need help advocating for the importance of user research. As we turn to our hopes and goals for 2016, let’s all make a resolution to figure out a way to make better user experience research happen, even if it seems impossible.