Touchstone tours — UX tool for your school library

Seeing the library through your user’s eyes

User experience (UX) is a discipline dedicated to understanding how people access, use and interact with services and products.

Taking notice of how your students interact with the library can help you identify gaps, barriers and opportunities to improve your library’s collections, services and spaces.

Why touchstone tours?

Touchstone tours are an effective way to gather authentic and honest student voice about the school library.

Hearing how students describe library services, spaces and collections in their own words is powerful. You can use these tours as part of a regular cycle of evaluation to find out what is working well and what could be improved.

How they work

It can be as simple as having a student take you on a tour of the library as if you are a visitor or a new student or asking, ‘where can I find graphic novels?’

Let the student take control and guide you through the library wherever they want to go. Only prompt or ask questions to clarify a point or check understanding — such as ‘tell me a little more about that’ — their voice and perspective is the important thing here.

During the tour

Take note of what students talk about as they show you around the library. You could record the tours with a video camera or phone, record just the audio or take photos as you go. Pay attention to any feelings and emotions students mention.

Remember to make notes to help you review and analyse the information later.

Analysing the evidence

As you review your recordings or photos and notes, check what students say about:

• things they like or don’t like

• specific areas of the library

• parts of the collection they identify or use, including print and digital resources

• displays around the library and on shelves

• how they find books, for example, signage, the library catalogue or spine labels

• library staff and other people — how they interact in the library

• what they say about class visits, and about using the library during break times.

Conversely, what are students not talking about? Why do you think that is?

As you analyse the information you’ve gathered, you might group their comments into different categories.

Think about what changes could be made to improve students’ experiences in the library. What is going to make their visit better, easier and more enjoyable?

Examples of students’ comments

As part of our library review work with schools, we’ve conducted touchstone tours with students across different year levels. Here are some of their comments, as examples to show what touchstone tours can look like, and what difference they can make.

Ah, welcomes you, makes you feel at home, gets you to read books, encourages you. Y’know when you come in it’s like you don’t feel a stranger. Y’know you feel like just I can be here, I can relax, I can do what I want.

This is magazines and stuff. I haven’t really seen many people issuing stuff from this area, it’s usually just if you’re walking around, you might just pick up a book. Like I said before, there’s no labels on this stuff [indicates fiction books] so you can’t really tell what the books are about if you just glanced over.

Something I like about this area is it actually has what the books are about, so when you’re actually coming to find a certain thing, you know where it is [indicates words and labels on non-fiction shelf dividers].

More about touchstone tours

• Touchstone tours — UX methodologies — Academic Libraries North UX Community of Practice.

• Touchstone tours (April/May 2019) — Andy Priestner, UX research and design consultant.

• Touchstone tours UX study — University of Guelph — includes their methodology for gathering students’ impressions, knowledge and personal opinions. The final report includes a list of words students used to describe the library.