Design / Redesign

As one of the participants in last month's IAI-sponsored workshop on UI Design for Physical Spaces (at MAYA Design and the Carnegie Libraries of Pittsburgh, CLP), I've had a little time to think about some other implications of the workshop and how it might apply in other domains. Peter Merholz wrote up a terrific review of the workshop, which he organized with MAYA on behalf of IAI. His outline of the process and his insights are well worth reading.

There were a few things that stayed with me though - first of all, MAYA's approach should not be viewed as a generic, global approach reusable in any integration of UX with architectural design. The project was uniquely structured to fit the needs of the Carnegie Library, which was looking for a holistic design to solve several problems (as pointed out in Peterme's discussion). Their user-centered design approach accounted for persona types, typical patron goals and needs, and the flow of interaction between 3 "organizers": Space, other people (librarians, etc.), and "categorizations." Categorizations included the catalogs, content descriptions, messages that guided flow within content.

The library redesign project provides an excellent case study for:

• Process, as achieved by the CLP and their design team triad of architects, visual information designers, and UX designers,
• Product, notable in the end result of a greatly improved physical environment and user-centered flow,
• and People, or the resulting experience for the library patrons.

See more shots at Flickr:


While this approach works well for the problem as explored, there were a few design paths not explored in this approach that might be considered in other physical information spaces.

• Discretionary use of public space: Design for the itinerant mobile office and other emerging patron types.
• The "space of the content" : Design for the content experience, for locating and branching from books and topics of interest to the patron. This flow was left to the traditional library systems.
  
• Future Planning: Design for an immersive, sensor-driven, ambient intelligent space.

I could be missing something here, but if one of the main tasks of the patron is to locate a specific book or article, or to browse certain ranges of content types, the design model appears to miss this opportunity. There are several ways that content could be retrieved and engaged at the point of need, in a sort of stepped-flow of ambient information:

Step 1 Ambient Info: Kiosk display or printout based on recognition of patron and recent check-outs
Step 2 AmInfo: Recommendations of new books on topic, recent magazine articles indexed to topic or author, etc.
Step 3 AmInfo: Online, website: Instant renewal, leading to recommended or reserve queue
Step 4 AmInfo: Recognition response at library alerts librarian to provide reserved books, media, etc.

Another opportunity is found in observing actual uses of the library physical space over a longer timeline. What do repeat patrons do when they show up day after day? A lot of library use is discretionary and not task-related. People have time to kill while waiting for an appointment - what do they tend to do? Does the space support them? (See Peterme's and James Melzer's shots of the Squirrel Hill branch to see how people are camping out).

But another emergent use, pointed out by my CMU colleague Yang Cai, is the use of the public library as a mobile office. Yang camps out with his laptop and cell phone, to actually get work done away from CMU. In his opinion, the arrangement of space for his purposes is wanting - he is looking for a bit of privacy, not a sharing of public space like the Coffee Shop or reading room. Perhaps the library does not want to encourage this though? Something else to observe ...