The process of design is often far more fluid organic than project plans and schedules allow it to be. There are a couple of tricks we’ve picked up along the way to make sure we stick to our focus of user centered design and keep our promise of delivering something very useful that fulfils the project aims beautifully.

Documenting Need / Canvassing Broadly / Creating a wishlist

First and foremost is making sure we find out as much about how users (heavy users and non users alike) currently use their library and what they want from it, Directly from them!

Although we have a fairly good idea from usage statistics on usage and our own experiences, actual user stories are crucial in making sure we’re not making assumptions about why users behave in certain ways,  especially if we’re trying to make a noticeable positive dent in usage patterns by extrapolating how they might behave in the future! So we want to be on tangible footing.

We’re going to document and complete these findings with what the library project team want to get out of the project and arrive at a set of features, or essentially a wishlist of all the things that would make lemontree amazingly efficient at fulfilling the needs and aims of the project. We’re then going to evaluate each of these on a cost basis (dev. time, priority) and then write up a detailed work spec. Thats the theory anyway.

We’re in luck to be in such close proximity and familiarity with the University, essentially the next step is for our project lead at the University (Andrew Walsh) to set up a meeting for us with students. I believe so far the student union have been approached.

We’ll document our findings and process on the day here.

So far.

We’ve started canvassing lecturers having lunches  to discuss how they use books as part of their curriculum and we’ve been monitoring what people are saying about reading lists too and seeing what other initiatives and products are around!

What’s really lovely to see is peoples willingness to be a part of our experiment, be the first to try and be helpful in shaping it, which is always a good sign, passionate users make for the most honest and useful systems in our opinion!