It's no good waiting for library feedback to come to you; you need to actively seek it

Andy Priestner provides a case-study in the Toolkit book about marketing upwards - it's a really compelling piece. I also asked him about getting feedback from users, and here's what he had to say:

Clearly usage statistics for a product don’t provide the whole story. For a database for instance, we might only know that a user visited it, not whether they stayed for long, or actually found the information they needed. Similarly for new services we need to go beyond the quantitative and find out about the qualitative user experience too.

User feedback is obviously the most important and persuasive measure of success of a new service or idea. However, I have found that it is no good waiting for feedback to come to you; instead you need to actively seek it. You should of course do this in a traditional way via online surveys, annually, after training sessions, or after unveiling a new service. However, if you are seeking more valuable marketing content you shouldn’t leave it at that. Why not actively solicit testimonials as well? You will be amazed how many people are willing, if asked, to write a personal testimonial and positively astonished at how favourable the content of these testimonials can be. The fact that you solicited the testimonial should not take away from its value, think of it instead as simply providing another mechanism by which users can tell you what they think. The fact that we don’t receive a huge number of unsolicited testimonials and praise is not necessarily because we offer a poor service, but perhaps more to do with human nature and/or the demands on the time of our users. Last year we even solicited short video testimonials from our users and these proved hugely useful components of our new induction presentations as old students told new students: why they should use our service; the databases they liked the best; and how library staff could support them. Of course the message was all the more powerful because it wasn’t coming from us, but from peers.

Other than online surveys and testimonials, we gather useful information about our new ventures in person via focus groups and usability testing. Both remind to me mention that you should never assume that you know how a user will react to a product or service and that if you have got it wrong then that is absolutely fine, much better at that stage than after you launch. These information-gathering sessions will also reveal that users will not necessarily agree about everything and that you cannot possibly build a solution that will take all the comments you receive into account. It is also worth noting that sometimes users will actively oppose a new service or product that they may, in time, come to adopt and use intensively.

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Andy Priestner is Information & Library Services Manager at University of Cambridge's Judge Business School. He's also a writer and a publisher: he writes a blog called libreaction and has co-written a book called Personalising Library Services, due out shortly from Ashgate, which you can read more about here.