Designing the Digital Experience: David Lee King Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library

Experience and design-what is it? "an approach to creating successful experiences for people in any medium.”

Ways to Go About It:
1. Structural path-create a better experience by improving ease of use. Navigation does not get in the way.

• building experiences. Strategy->scope->structure->skeleton->surface
• uncover (the customer need)->define the experience brief (what will the customer experience be?)->ideate (immerse yourself in the experience->then build and design it
• getting real, by 37signals.com goal is speed and getting product out to public-->fine tuning should be done by customers--they say write a one page story about what your customers need to do on your site. Make it simple.

How does this work with the library website? His website-lots of focus groups and discussions first, trying to be fluid and get updates out there first. Fix it now and move on.

Look at your site with critical eyes think about the potholes (what makes people stumble and remove it) Big goal: Don't make me think. Customer doesn't want to think about how it functions, if they are forced to do it, you have failed.

2. Community Path: how does it provide positive experiences: a memorable experience created by online participation and community. Digital community experience- customer reviews and ability to rate those reviews. Amazon has done this, a digital community experience. There are five ways to do this:

• real conversation is taking place-commenting on blogs, twitter, online forum, flickr --patrons holding conversations with us, allowing customers to connect with you the librarian and each other. Setting up book clubs on the blog.
  
• invitation: passive and active. Active--asking questions--what's in your top five-you say yours and invite them to add theirs. Passive--content enablers making content compelling and displayed well, creating compelling content - making it interesting and web 2.0 enablers-allowing commenting and moderate promptly.
• participation--other part of invitation point-if you have no participation you have no community online. Allow comments. Goal is to participate in the discussion. Share thoughts and opinions. I want you to add your thoughts, I want to hear what you are saying!
• sense of familiarity--you feel like you know someone because you have 'befriended' them on blogs, twitter, flickr, etc. introduce patrons to library's 'personality'.
• telling our stories--people want to know who you are as an individual as an organization, do you like using your library and what shortcuts you take when using it. People want to participate in the story --they want to feel like they are part of it. See that a lot in Second Life. You can do that online in social networks. For example, Katrina hurricane, people told their stories as it developed. Patrons want to do this. Library stories: what you've read, what you liked, what you are doing. Twitter for the library--
• goal is to hold conversations and connect with community
• focus on the customer path. - customer journey mapping
  

New Strategies for Digital Natives

Helene Blowers-Digital Strategy Director, Columbus Metropolitan Library
Joey is our new digital patron:

The big story in the election was the kid who helped Obama reach out to the digital natives.

We used to chase information, now it has flipped, information finds us. Still, studies show that RSS is kind of flat across all demographics; people still don’t know how to get info to find us. Good role for librarians.

digital native realities:

1. Identity: digital natives: online identity is same as real identity. Idea of having one identity is intuitive to them. It is how they influence and assert themselves online, exchanging information, bantering that goes back in forth.

Top 5 Social Networks – jan 09
1. Facebook 1.19 billion monthy visits
2. Myspace 810 mill visits
3. Twitter 54 mil visits
4. Flixster 53 mil visits (movie reviews
5. Linkedin 43 million visits

These are where digital natives are leaving their footprints. The idea of social identity has become so important that we are graphing it. Linkedin based on the premise of who do you know to further your career. Average age of digital immigrants –42.

Social graphing:
6 degrees of separation
touchgraph
friendwheel on facebook

Renaissance Generation: Patricia Martin: Cultural consumers thrive on information and ideas to fuel their creative self-expression. Creativity very important to them.

• 93% of teenagers are online and intensifying
• Nearly 2/3 of online teens are content creators~Pew Study, Teens & Social Media, 12/07
  

Posting pictures, sharing artistic work, blogging, etc...creates their social identity.
Teens:

1. post messages
2. download music
3. download videos
4. upload music
5. update personal website or online profiles
6. post photots
7. blog

We are starting to see a shift from authoritative control to collaborative control of information. How do you influence people? By sharing information.
OCLC Study --number one resource of getting information online is friends. Libraries are down in the bottom.
In January 09 Encyclopedia Britannica added a wiki layer so that people could add to it. Collective control--->they realized there are advantages to this new form of gathering information. What info source do you trust the most for your company's purchasing decisions: user generated content (blogs, discussion groups, online comm, wikis, etc.) from a study, interesting to see--first hand experience that you get from blogs and rating sites are where people are looking for trusted information.

2. Digital Safety --only .08% of all students say they've actually met someone in person from an online encounter without their parents' permission --national school board study July 2007.
Most teens ignore or delete stranger contact and are not bothered by it. (Pew Study).

3. Digital Opportunity
The world has become more accessible for digital natives. Every day the Internet becomes more and more important to society. There are no barriers, the playing field is leveled, you can mashup and mix up online, all you need is access (if you don't have access, library provides it), access is universal, connection is ubiquitous , it's all about me. Their sandbox is huge to play in, to assert their identity and creativity.

4. Digital Piracy
Digital piracy to them is digital sharing. File sharing has become the new normal for most. Copy, remix me. Fanfiction, music parodies, mashups, movie trailers, remix contents, remix fansites (Nine Inch Nails - encouraging fans to remix their content), creative commons (has spurred this whole rethought of copyright). Total Recut: video remix challenge.

In the past you were what you owned--now you are what you share. A collaborative remix culture. How do we respond to it as librarians?

5. Digital Privacy
Facebook:
82% send private messages
84% post messages to a friends page or wall


Lifestreams
Idea of lifestreaming all these social networks can be aggregated and look at it as a lifestream. Digital natives can trace their lives online.

6. Digital Advocacy
The idea of what you do online actually makes a difference. Young people as networkers, organizers, promoters to create their leadership potential, saw it in the election.

What can libraries do?

1. Idea of engagement to enable customers to connect with library staff, services and with each other in meaningful ways. Layering over OPAC with interactivity, twitter? Engagement is important because people want to feel connected. Patrons feel connected. Make the library a facilitators of connection.
2. Enrich - to provide customers with a rich online experience that enhances their local branch experience and daily lives. Our digital space should enhance not be separate, active engagement. All libraries get their funding from somewhere, that funding should be valuing their lives in some way.
3. Empower: to enable customers the ability to personalize and add value to the library experience and allow the community to celebrate themselves.

NYPL Paul Holdengraber

Today's keynote is an interview with Paul Holdengraber—he was brought in to ‘oxygenate’ the New York Public Library—"to make the lions roar in the front to make this heavy institution levitate. To make the building less formidable to make it sexy."

Paul Holdengraber:
Funny guy! He grew up in Belgium, born in Texas, went to Princeton, he taught at Princeton and other colleges, He was a fellow at Getty. Brooke Sheilds was one of his pupils.

Quotes: "52 million items in the library; at first you feel small, then it should empower you to want to learn, to grow, to discover, to get a tingle in the spine" He is interested in transforming things, in what happens in this public place where we go to do an activity that is extremely private. That relationship between public and private fascinates him. He had to make the library irresistible.

"If I knew where inspiration came from I would go there more often."

He institued “Live from the NYPL” --he’s had Bill Clinton, Martin Scorcese, Mario Balti, and many more. He invites people from all walks of life – his favorite moment Myra Kalman – illustrator –Illustrated the elements of style http://www.livingstonbuzz.com/2007/10/26/the-elements-of-style/
“I never ask for permission, only for forgiveness.”

“When a great man dies, a library disappears with him.”

He changed the demographics of the audience that comes to a younger audience.

Talking about twitter and blogs: "Info has a life in haiku form on twitter. However we can’t ‘tickle ourselves’ still need to be together."

"Maybe a librarian needs to be a lifebrarian. We need humor in the library. People are bleak cause of the economic situation. We need humor. Create havoc in the library. The books on the shelf are there-what should we do about it—what is our role—take those books off the shelf and make people desire them deeply. Libraries are places of desire. We deeply believe in communicating and transmitting this experience that we probably had as children with a book…how can we imagine a world without books, would I rather have my library or kindles lying around everywhere."

"Digression is the sunshine of narrative."

What is the future of libraries? Fascinated by how libraries might be able to make us focus> in an age of utter distraction, we can go to a library where you learn things, a repository where you can learn things, a place to focus. Use these technology tools to focus on new discoveries. And a great place for opportunities, especially in these times. The reading room in the NYPL is packed…it’s a haven. Our job is a job of hospitality, make people feel at home, public programs is a beautiful way of welcoming others into the home you work in. We have Facebook but let’s get into the face to face encounters. Explode that home, a library without walls, a library that is everywhere, the gift of ubiquity.

Since we are near Washington DC, he wants to end with this anecdote. Here’s how Barack Obama found his community organizer job in Chicago: In 2005, Obama told American Library Magazine that people always mention libraries in terms of sources of reading and research, but he probably wouldn’t be in Chicago if it weren’t for the NYPL, because he was looking for a job as a community organizer in NY…the librarian helped him find these lists of organizations, one of them wound up being an organization in Chicago that he got a job with…..the rest is history….

If Paul doesn't make you feel good about being a librarian, I don't know what will!

Internet @Schools East Presentation

This is the presentation I gave yesterday at the Internet @Schools East Conference. There's a lot to digest here, including some tips from some of the gurus I respect and have learned from, including David Warlick, Joyce Valenza, Mark Wagner, and David Pogue. For those of you who attended the session yesterday, I hope this helps! Leave a comment and let me know what you thought about the presentation!

Internetatschools

View more presentations from kkliegman.