6.3 Service Design as Method – Library Services Developed from Users' Needs
Creators: name: Dahlbäck, Eva
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2016
Subjects: library, user needs, services, digital, technology

description: In the library community we often consider ourselves as experts on what our users need from us, and from there we develop services that we think they need, this considering that our user groups are big and diverse. But do users need these services? Do they use them as much as we thought they would? And if the services aren’t so frequently used, why is that the case? Was there no need for them or can our users just not find them? The digital revolution has been apparent for libraries during the last few years; the world has changed in the way how people use and find information. As libraries we have to change with the times and be at the forefront in order to meet our users’ needs, perhaps even before they realise they are missing something? This has made us think about how we do things; we concluded that we in Stockholm University Library need to understand our students’ and researchers’ everyday lives better. How do they solve their information needs? Are we at all a part of their daily routine? Do they use our services? Do they need our services? What is working well and what is not working at all? How high are the thresholds to reach the information users need to full fill their studies and research? To answer these questions we have used ‘Service Design’. The ‘Service Design’ method is quite new in the library world and has its origins in product design but it has gradually become applied in design services within a wide range of companies and organisations. The method relies on interviewing users qualitatively and analysing the responses to identify different behaviours. Based on these patterns, you can reach conclusions about users’ needs and habits. This is an agile process, it is iterated, the interviews and analyse are repeated, and between each round we check which patterns have been detected and perhaps make changes before the next round of interviews. The end result is a suggestion of how existing services may change and new services can be created, hopefully with an enhanced customer experience. In association with a service design agency we have carried out an in-depth study of our users’ daily lives and needs. With its methods the agency has helped us to find user patterns and showed results to us in a clear way, illustrations of the user’s way to use the library and the its information. This has helped us to understand our users’ needs and on this basis we can design our library services. We think that this also could be a starting point for a change in our cultural mindset, put the focus on the user and develop our services from there. In this presentation we will give you some examples of the discoveries we made as well as some of the actions we plan to take on the insights received. <strong>Eva Dahlbäck</strong> is a Process Manager in Stockholm University Library, working earlier at the Library as a librarian and manager for the Customer Service Department. At LIBER 2014 in Riga she presented ‘Going Digital in the Closed Stacks – Library Logistics with a Smart Phone’. She has a degree in Geography from Stockholm University, and a Master’s in Information and Library Science from Uppsala University. <strong>Martin Wincent</strong> is Process Manager at Stockholm University Library. Since September 2015, he has been part of the Process Manager team that work with business development at Stockholm University Library, and to find new ways to make sure the library meets the users’ needs and the ever changing task of a research library. He was previously engaged with facilitating the process of building Stockholm University Press, which is a new and unique way of academic publishing in Sweden. Previously worked on strategic and visual communication in various campaigns at the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), and specifically with the centre’s lmpact Factor- listed journal Eurosurveillance. He also has a firm grasp of working with communication within academia as he has been working on a number of strategic communications-related assignments at Stockholm University since 2011.