Whether you’re planning and managing your acquisitions, justifying your expenditure, designing and managing your online catalogue and website, raising awareness of your offerings, providing user support, or developing training tools to help library users get the most out of your products and services, a solid understanding of your user’s needs and behaviours lies at the heart of all effective library strategies.
In 2016 Taylor and Francis and Loughborough University worked together to explore the library user experience (UX) of a specific segment of library customers – the Postgraduate Research Student (PGR). We wanted to identify opportunities for libraries and publishers to improve the services and products we offered PGRs through uncovering the answers to 7 key questions:
You can read all about our findings here. We have also put together this research toolkit to help you undertake research into your own PGR students’ library user experience.
The Library UX Research Toolkit covers:
- How to survey your users
- Questions to ask
- Sample topical questions
- Highlights from our own findings
- Tips on analysing your findings
- Advice from our steering group
- Questions raised
We hope you find this useful, and look forward to hearing your own findings.