By JACOB ROSENBLOOM
This week has been particularly good for beginning to brainstorm. It has been quite enjoyable to be leveraging some techniques I picked up from projects with HCI students. Before our client meeting on Tuesday, we sat together and discussed what we needed to find out or what information we thought would be useful for us to know about the libraries. We all took notes during the meeting, and after going over the notes, we were able to develop a list of what we saw as the library’s needs. This was a bit overwhelming because the library wanted a lot of different things. They wanted to have the younger patrons help the older patrons with tech support, to increase the visibility and accessibility of their resources, to have the library serve as a community center, to allow patrons easier search functionality of their databases, to bring in patrons that were between 5 and 18 that they lose to schools and other social venues, to improve the experience of their online component, and to make the library a more autonomous experience for their patrons to free up librarian time.
They wanted a lot, but we were able to use an affinity diagram to help sort all of their desires and give ourselves more clear objectives. This yielded three high-level categories into which all of the library’s requests fell. They were getting patrons to engage with the library space, getting patrons to engage with the library services, and getting patrons to engage with each other. Having these high-level goals for our project definitely showed us that not all of the library’s desires can be filled by this project; it would just be out of scope. We decided we could focus on one of these areas and hopefully create something that could be used as scaffolding for future projects to try and support the other two categories we did not pursue. We could now pick a direction for our project, but we were still lacking in crucial information — information that would determine the direction and form of our project.