I’m looking for help and ideas about user studies conducted during the beginning of the academic year.
With the beginning of the school year just around the corner, it might provide an opportunity to find out something useful about users and especially about non-users. The idea was sparked by a recent discussion about focus groups held last year as part of a building renovation project. There was low turnout but some of the ideas captured there were very useful and provocative.
The question raised was how to move forward getting input from users. Rather than try to lure students away from or interupt their other activities, the beginning of the year afforded a rare opportunity to find them standing around with nothing to do; waiting in lines, at the bookstore, at the registrar, at the photo ID booth, at the parking office.
Since this would be too early to get anything about user experience with information seeking or library use, this survey would focus on the material circumstances of the students. We’re particularly interested in the technological world they live in, the hardware and the systems they use, the services they depend upon and expect to have available, and what the library needs to consider when we design our services.
I’d also like to capture more about students’ study habits. During the focus groups we had a strong indication that students want the library to be open 24×7, but I’d like to test that view against some concrete information about where and when they actually do their school work. However, I think it is too early to gather this sort of information now.
Any thoughts? Anyone have experience with a similar project and is willing to share what they did? Thanks for any suggestions.
– Lee Jaffe, UC Santa Cruz
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