Study Population

I limited the study population to people working in academic libraries. Academic libraries tend to share similar organizational structures, so limiting the study to this population gives multiple examples of similar structures of UX work. In addition, as MacDonald (2015) noted, it can be difficult to recruit people who do UX work outside of academic libraries.

Unlike MacDonald, I did not limit my participant population to UX librarians, as I examined a variety of structures in which UX work happens, including UX work done by non-librarians. Although I asked participants to share their job title, I did not ask them about their education, as any differences between librarians and non-librarians was not relevant. Similarly, I did not ask about age, gender, or other demographics.

Methods

Because this was exploratory research, I used semi-structured interviews with general questions, so I could follow up on points of interest (see appendix A). I did not want the interviews to take more than one hour, particularly since I did not offer any incentive or compensation. In order to maximize the interview time, I used an email questionnaire for topics that did not require probing for detail and that might surface contextual differences among the participants (see appendix B). There were thirty participants, and each completed both the interview and the questionnaire.

Procedures

I recruited participants at the UXLibs conference in June 2019, through Twitter and my own blog. When this did not elicit a large number of participants, I directly emailed people who had expressed interest and those I thought might be interested. In addition, when I noticed that many early participants worked in large libraries, I sought out and directly emailed people from smaller institutions.

Interviews took place between July and December 2019. Most interviews lasted about an hour but ranged between 40 and 80 minutes. All participants chose to communicate using Zoom or Skype, and I set up the sessions as audio-only. With participants’ consent, I recorded the interviews using an external digital recorder. I took extensive notes during each interview in case of recorder failure, which happened once. I did not make transcripts of the interviews, but I used the recordings to fill in my written notes, ensuring they captured the overall themes and any direct quotations.

Analysis

I assigned a random numeric code to participants in order to link interviews and questionnaires and stripped out all personal information, such as names and names of institutions. I did a thematic analysis, first coding my interview notes in NVivo for the basic themes of structure, types of UX work done, support, and impact. Then, I used an inductive approach to find themes within these basic areas. I analyzed these themes to look for patterns across structures of work and other data points or themes. Where I found patterns, I examined the underlying interview extracts to make sure they provided good support for the themes and patterns. For the purposes of this paper, I concentrated my analysis on the basic themes mentioned above, although the data is much richer than what I present here.

When analyzing the theme of impact, I saw that some participants openly said their work had not yet had any impact on users or that the impact had been small. I wanted to explore any differences in context between people who saw small impacts and those who described bigger impacts. I classified impacts as big when participants described the results of larger scale or ongoing iterative work, or when they described many small impacts that demonstrated persistent UX work. Examples of big impacts were a library website revamped through iterative testing to have a more intuitive structure and clearer language and the ongoing adjustment of physical space based on observing changes in user behavior. I classified impacts as small when people cited only one or two small projects or described their own impact as small. Examples of small impacts were fixing obvious mistakes or bad links on the library website and purchasing whiteboards after observing students using flipchart paper for their work.

Participants gave their own perceptions of the impact of their work. However, when participants spoke generally about impact, I followed up to ask them how they knew—or what made them think—there had been impact. Although they were still describing perceptions of impact, this generated evidence of those perceptions. In this way, the impacts I describe here are more concrete than MacDonald’s (2017) “perceived benefits” (p. 200).

Limitations

The participant population was not a random sample but a combination of convenience and purposive sampling. The findings are based on the thirty people I spoke with, at the time I spoke with them. Many participants were in the midst of changing structures—starting new committees, changing departments, experiencing library reorganizations—so may already find their new structures work better or worse than the ones they described to me. There are certainly structures that are not represented here. This study is not meant to be an exhaustive description of how UX work is structured in academic libraries, nor are the findings generalizable to all library workers doing UX in academic libraries. Part of the intention here is to uncover patterns that will help people who are struggling with their UX work to move toward structures that will work better for them, given their particular organizational context.

Organizational Structure

Libraries and library workers create various structures to perform UX work. I’ve classified these organizational structures into four groupings:

• UX positions: These are held by people whose job is formally dedicated to UX work, either wholly or in part.
• UX groups: These are formally structured to do UX work and include committees, working groups, and departments.
• Non-UX groups: These are formally structured committees or working groups that do some UX work but have another primary focus (e.g. website, signage, assessment).
• Helpers: These are informal groups of colleagues who do UX work together, either on a regular basis, as time permits, or as projects arise. Although informal, helpers do UX work as a group and in this way differ from volunteers who assist with UX projects on an ad hoc basis.

These four groupings can combine in different ways, so that one participant may be in two different groupings. The most common combination is a UX position supported by one of the other groupings, but in one instance helpers supported a UX group. In this discussion, I focus on the four groupings but occasionally examine combined structures (e.g. people in UX positions supported by a UX group, people in unsupported UX positions) where there was sufficient data to show a strong pattern of response.

Organizational Location

UX can live in a number of departments in a library’s organizational chart. As one participant in MacDonald (2015) put it, “‘There’s no natural home [in the library] for UX’” (p. 5). Participants’ libraries used a variety of department names, but most fell into four areas:

• Digital: e.g. Systems, Digital Initiatives
• Liaison: supporting faculty and students in specific subject areas
• User services: e.g. Public Services, Library Services, Customer Services
• Flat: organizations with no departmental structure

The participants outside these four groups either reported directly to senior library leadership or were in a department focused on general library operations. There were no noteworthy patterns among the departmental groupings.

UX Responsibility

Where the responsibility for UX work lies defines another facet of structure.

• Solo UXers have sole responsibility for UX work in their library. Solo UXers may have help from their colleagues with specific projects, but they are the primary drivers of UX in their libraries. Solo UXers are all in UX positions, but not everyone with a UX position is a solo UXer.
• Leads lead a team of people who all have some responsibility for UX work, which may be formally assigned or informally taken on. Leads head up either UX groups or helpers.
• Informal UXers have no formal responsibility for UX work in their job description. Said one, “What’s formally part of my duties is thinking about how to provide space and services in the best way possible, so I can easily incorporate it [UX] into my formal duties.” Most of these participants use UX work as a way to do their jobs, rather than an add-on to their jobs.

Focus on Web UX

As I listened to participants and worked through the data, it became clear that people whose work is mostly focused on the library website have a lot in common. Many of these participants also work in digital departments, but there were many more similarities among participants focused on web UX than among those in digital departments.

• Web-focused are those whose job is structured for mostly web UX.

Understanding These Facets

As mentioned, these structures intersect as facets that define the context of the participants’ UX work. A web and UX librarian who is the only person doing UX work in their library, with occasional help from their web committee, would have the facets of UX position, non-UX group, digital department, solo UXer, and web-focused. A subject librarian who works with a group of colleagues to help improve UX in their library where possible would have the facets of helpers, liaison department, and informal UXer.

I discuss each facet on its own, rather than combining the facets in this way. Partly, there is not enough data to support such a narrow analysis; the article would essentially become thirty case studies. Also, these facets can combine in more ways than the thirty participants in this study. Examining the facets separately should allow people doing UX work in any combination of these structures to see themselves reflected here.

The structures of UX work in this section differ slightly from those described in the literature. I separated UX groups and non-UX groups because the experiences of participants in those groups were very different. I put UX departments with UX groups, as their experiences were quite similar. The helpers category is different from the ad hoc project teams described in the literature, although it may align with what Blake and Potter described before forming their UX group (2018). Participants in various department structures showed very few distinct patterns, so I found the departmental structure was less of an issue than the work itself; it may not, therefore, matter that UX has no “natural home” (MacDonald, 2015, p. 5).

MacDonald (2015, 2017) discussed solo UXers as I describe them here. The case studies of Kavanaugh Webb et al. (2016) and Fox and Keisling (2016) described leads, but only as project leaders, whereas the leads I describe here manage ongoing work. The literature has not explored informal UXers, as the focus has been on people in UX positions or groups undertaking a specific project. The distinction between using UX to do your job and having UX as an add-on to your job may be useful framing for people who want to do UX work but have no formal responsibility for it.

Type of Work

Many participants in UX positions talked about acting as UX consultants for their colleagues, including leading training sessions. One participant said they were trying to “make UX part of the everyday for more people” by making training and resources available to all staff. Another, who worked in a library with two partial UX positions, said:

Several participants in UX positions said they did—or wanted to do—work concerned with longer-term or bigger-picture UX work. I’m calling this “UX strategy.” One example is the participant who talked about bringing the UX of discovery “back to basics: do we really know that much about how people discover resources at the library? And going from there.” Another participant wanted to work with the library leadership team “to jointly determine for the upcoming year: here are the areas of focus, here is the level of change we might be able to push, depending on what we get back [from user research].” Participants in UX positions were the only ones who mentioned that they were currently doing UX strategy work, and most of those who wanted to do UX strategy were also in UX positions.

I asked what they would need in order to do UX strategy work. One participant wanted people to help with regular UX work to create time for them to work on strategy. Another couldn’t see how they could get more people because “everyone is over their capacity, and asking people to take on more than what they’re currently doing seems impossible.” When I asked what they needed to be able to do more UX strategy work, someone else said, “Probably just a total culture shift” and laughed.

Formal Supports

Participants in UX positions talked about formal supports for their work, but not many and not often. Many of them wanted a kind of support they did not have: the authority to push their colleagues to implement recommendations and to make their colleagues accountable. One participant who did UX research for colleagues wanted to be able to say, “Hey, we recommended that you do these three things six months ago. How can we help you with that, how’s that going?” rather than let their reports go ignored.

Informal Supports

Although many participants described feeling support from their colleagues, those in UX positions did not feel that same level of collegial support. A manager told one participant “staff felt unfairly targeted” by their work on a particular UX project. The participant wasn’t sure if the staff actually felt this way or if it was just this manager, but the lack of support meant the project did not proceed. Another participant spoke of failing to have their colleagues implement their recommendations because “I’m not their boss, and they realize that.” Yet another noted, “Doing the work is not the hard part, it’s getting people on board to believe your results and trust your results.” They went on to say,

Participants in UX positions without the support of a group or helpers were particularly vocal about struggling with a lack of support from their colleagues.

Impact

Many participants in UX positions spoke about the personal impact of feeling isolated and wished they had an additional person to help with the work. As one participant put it:

The participant who spoke of keeping the feedback they get “for promotion purposes but also for not-being-sad purposes” also seemed to be indicating feelings of isolation.

Feelings of isolation were most pronounced in participants in UX positions unsupported by groups or helpers, but this was also common among people in UX positions who were supported by non-UX groups or helpers. None of the participants in UX positions with the support of UX groups spoke about feeling isolated.

Most participants in UX positions described concrete impacts of their work on users. About half discussed big impacts of their work and half talked about small impacts.

Type of Work

Even more than participants in UX positions, those in UX groups spoke of doing UX training or consultancy work with their colleagues. One discussed a template they’ve created for staff to determine “what is it you want to find out, and why do you want to find this out,” so someone from the UX group could “sit down with [them] and work through and come up with ideas, and then set up and support them.”

Like participants in UX positions, people with UX groups showed interest in moving into UX strategy work. One wanted to explore how students’ needs change throughout the term, so they can “ask the right things at the right time.” When I asked what they would need to be able to do UX strategy work, one participant said they needed more people to help with regular UX work, so they could dedicate time to strategy: “A lot of library employees are really interested in the idea of UX, but there’s never enough hours in the day.” Another fully intended to tackle UX strategy but was only six months into a new role and had other tasks and priorities.

Formal Supports

Participants who worked with UX groups cited concrete management support, including management allowing non-UX staff to take time to do UX work. One said that “a lot of senior managers will be quite generous in terms of the time they might offer up for their staff to take part in UX activities.”

Another formal support was the authority people had to get things done, and people with UX groups talked more than other participants about having the authority to do UX work. One participant explained, “If it’s a decree from the Dean that says this is an important thing that we’re doing, it really paves the way for us to do our work.”

Most of the participants who cited the support of committees and other formal institutional bodies were people with UX groups. These participants talked about being a member or chair of a formally structured group or being able to draw on one of these groups as a resource. They saw these formal bodies as a way to address specific people in the library, a way to hear from certain people, or a way to solicit help from “people who have self-identified as folks willing to think about and work on” things such as the website, signage, or space. One participant spoke of sitting on their library’s leadership team:

Informal Supports

All participants with UX groups were quick to cite their colleagues as a support that helps them with their UX work. Said one, “The key [support] is the enthusiasm and drive of your fellow staff....We really couldn’t do it without all of the interest and drive that people have, and how much importance individuals place on challenging what staff’s assumptions are.”

Impact

All participants with UX groups cited concrete impacts on their users, and most described big impacts. These participants also saw an impact on their colleagues’ mindset. Everyone in a UX position supported by a UX group who talked about having an impact on their colleagues or the general library culture also saw big impacts. One participant noted that library employees are able to see that the UX group is “talking to real users, and then see what their answers are, and then how those have informed decision-making. Having an evidence-based decision-making process has really helped with change management internally in the library.” Another participant described how staff listened to what the UX group was doing and wanted to know more:

Formal Supports

None of the participants with non-UX groups cited management interest in UX, nor mentioned any management support beyond funding.

Impact

Participants with non-UX groups described feelings of isolation and lack of direction. When discussing how their work personally affects them, the only positive impact they described was feeling joy in working with users. Very few of these participants talked about concrete impacts of their work on users.

Formal Supports

Only one person in a UX position supported by helpers mentioned management interest in UX. In contrast, all participants in a helpers-only structure (i.e. no one has responsibility for UX in their job) cited management interest in UX as a helpful support to their work. “Management interest” may not sound particularly concrete, but participants explained what this support looked like:

• “I think that helps when you have someone really enthusiastic who can help you get things rolling.” This participant also mentioned their boss will ask what tool they might use to investigate a particular question.
• “My immediate manager is generally quite interested in what I’m doing and has got some ideas, and he’s quite keen to back the ideas when we come with suggestions.”

Despite this kind of support from management, helpers also talked about struggling with a lack of authority.

Informal Supports

Everyone in a helpers-only structure, as well as the majority of those in a UX position supported by helpers, spoke of their colleagues as a helpful support for their work:

• “First of all, having other people be receptive towards it. Because I’ll always bring it [UX] up as an option, and I know there are others who will always bring it up as an option.”
• “So, people. It’s absolutely people. Bottom line.”

Impact

All participants in a helpers-only structure talked about having an impact on their colleagues’ mindset towards UX. One participant spoke of how the success of a recent UX project “threw attention back to UX, and it got people thinking about how it can be good....That’s why people decided to take it back on board and use UX as a methodology when trialing other changes.”

Informal Supports

Although they were not vocal about getting support from their coworkers, a number of solo UXers talked about the importance of a community of colleagues outside their libraries. They mentioned reading the literature—specific to UX in libraries or UX in general—and finding community on Twitter or at conferences. One participant said they found it helpful to hear other people reflect on difficulties because it “helps to reinforce that just because it’s hard doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong or that you should stop doing it. It just means that it’s the hard part.” Another participant put it nicely:

Impact

Many solo UXers described the positive personal impact of having a lot of freedom to take their work in whatever direction they wanted, but at the same time not having a clear understanding of what their priorities should be frustrated them. “It can feel a little bit aimless,” said one. One participant recalled, when they were newly hired, “I remember asking for, if there were any focuses they wanted to focus on...they said ‘no, there’s nothing, we don’t have any direction for you to go in.’”

Relatedly, solo UXers also expressed feelings of isolation. One said, “I would love to have one other person in the library whose job this is. I would love to have another practitioner who I could talk to about questions of methodology, or should we consider these aspects?” In both cases—frustration with a lack of direction, and feelings of isolation—there was a marked difference when comparing solo UXers to leads.

Type of Work

Leads described a greater variety of UX work than solo UXers did, and they did more UX consulting and training with colleagues. One described some of this work:

Leads also expressed more interest in pursuing UX strategy than solo UXers did.

Formal Supports

Leads mentioned management supports more than solo UXers. Leads cited both management interest in UX and management allowing non-UX staff time to do UX work. One lead said their immediate boss, who is a senior manager, “really believes in user experience and understands that it can really help the rest of the library be very successful.”

Informal Supports

All leads talked about their colleagues as a helpful support for their UX work.

Impact

While leads and solo UXers were similar in citing concrete impacts of their work on users, many more leads talked about having an impact on their colleagues’ mindset on UX. Said one lead, “It’s helping them see things differently and help them to understand why something might be challenging for a user or might not be a good experience.”

Informal Supports

All informal UXers cited their colleagues as a helpful support for their UX work. Said one, “People who are happy to get involved, that really helps.”

Impact

Almost all informal UXers talked about the personal impact of the efforts they made to convince their management or colleagues of the value of UX. Most saw expending effort to convince colleagues or management positively, as in the participant who described the importance of “feeding back regularly to wider staff, so they’re kept in with exactly what’s happening, and why we’re doing it, and what we’ve found, and just kind of advocating it.” However, for some, these efforts caused frustration. One informal UXer described their ongoing work with management: “I’ve written it up, I’ve sent it to you, I’ve presented it to you, but you’ve not done anything with it. Or you’ve done the really simple things, the easy quick wins rather than the wows.”

Almost all informal UXers were able to cite concrete impacts of their work on users as well as impacts on their colleagues’ mindset around UX. One participant described the impact on library staff who read student comments on feedback boards: “Staff seeing that also helped humanize the students a little bit more. It made it so it was like, ‘Oh, they’re trying; they have a lot on their plate. How can we do things to improve the space?’”

Type of Work

Although participants who mainly or exclusively focused on the UX of their library’s web services also did non-web UX work, they described less variety of UX work than those in positions without a web focus. In particular, only one web-focused participant mentioned doing UX training or acting as a UX consultant for their colleagues. When I asked what kind of UX work they’d like to do, web-focused participants expressed interest in moving beyond web UX. Said one, “I would like to do more general UX work that’s not aimed at solving an immediate, known problem. I’d like to do more open-ended observations or interviews.” Said another, “Why am I really here then, if I’m just moving things around the page? I’m trying to get deeper. I’m trying to get a better understanding.”

Formal Supports

Web-focused participants spoke about wanting the authority to implement changes:

• “The UX work is actually informing something else to happen. Whether that’s a space being reorganized or a webpage being redesigned—the UX work is informing this other work, right? So it would be easier for me to do the UX work if I could actually do the work that it’s informing.”
• “Every time I propose it, nobody disagrees per se, it’s just that nobody’s willing to lift a finger to move the idea forward, and I can’t move it forward all by myself. They also won’t give me the authority to move it forward by myself.”

None of the web-focused participants talked about management interest in UX when discussing supports that were helpful to their work.

Informal Supports

Web-focused participants discussed struggling with a lack of support from colleagues; only one cited supportive colleagues. Few web-focused participants mentioned support from the external community.

Impact

Some of the web-focused participants I spoke with were having a hard time with the personal impact of their work. One told me,

When I asked how they stay motivated to keep doing UX work, one person answered, “Right now, I’m not at all,” and went on to say, “I’m definitely struggling right now with trying to make people understand why we’re relevant and why this is important.”

When these participants talked about the personal impact of their work, they spoke the least about how their work or work environment positively affected them and the most about how it negatively affected them. Most of the positive personal impacts were about the joy of making changes based on their work or the joy of working with users:

• “Having that story to tell about how we fixed something is a big motivator.”
• “I really do like interfacing with users the most....That’s when I feel like I’m doing the most impactful work.”

Web-focused participants found it difficult to provide examples of concrete impacts of their work on users. Although a few described redoing user tests and seeing improvements or observing changes in user behavior, others talked about fixing issues or making changes without further reflection. One said, “We made these changes...so we hope that that’s having an impact,” and another, “I sure hope it means that our patrons are better able to find what they need.” A participant who did both physical and digital UX work put it this way: “The physical one I can see, I can see the students using the space so I know...that square footage has more bodies in it than it did before. The other ones [e.g. digital], I don’t really know.”

Compared to participants in other structures, web-focused participants gave fewer examples of concrete impacts on users and more often mentioned making changes without further reflection. In contrast, almost all participants in positions that were not web-focused talked about concrete impacts of their work.

Type of UX Work

Solo UXers and leads differ both in the types of UX work they do and the types they want to do. With a stronger feeling of support from both management and colleagues—plus a group they can readily draw on—leads feel able to use methods or engage in projects that require more people. Leads seem happier with the work they are already doing, mostly wanting to do more of it.

Many web-focused participants are interested in moving beyond web UX, but most did not see a clear path toward that. They talked about needing a different job description or organizational shift to be able to do more than web UX. It’s possible that this could be a self-imposed boundary, but given that web-focused participants don’t cite management interest in UX and also struggle with support from their colleagues and a lack of authority, it’s likely that the organization has explicitly or implicitly narrowed the scope of their UX work.

Although participants in UX positions and with UX groups are doing UX training and consulting for colleagues, web-focused people are not doing it at all. Web-focused participants described a lack of support from colleagues, so engaging them in UX training may be a way to bring their colleagues on board. However, as I mentioned above, these participants may have been given a narrow view of what their UX work can entail, and therefore may feel—or know—they are not allowed to take on a training or consulting role.

Participants who were doing UX strategy work cited support from colleagues and management. At first, it seemed strange that so few participants were doing—or wanted to do—UX strategy work. However, given that many participants in UX positions are still struggling to get support from their colleagues, they may be stuck in an advocacy stage and not yet able to spend time on strategic work. Many who expressed a desire to do UX strategy work said they would need more people to help with their regular UX work. It would be interesting to examine whether UX strategy work can only come once the organization has a certain level of underlying support for UX; perhaps successful UX advocacy is a necessary first step of UX strategy work.

I want to note that when I asked about the UX work they do, a few participants mentioned projects in which library workers take the user’s perspective. Those projects included journey mapping without users, auditing signage that library staff think would be problematic for users, and configuring third-party interfaces based on what staff think will help users. Some acknowledged this wasn’t ideal and talked about wanting to work directly with users. Others seemed to consider “thinking like a user” as valid UX work. While UX workers can definitely draw on previous user research to inform their work, UX work requires us to engage with the experiences of actual users. Friberg’s keynote at UXLibsV clearly made the distinction between having a “user perspective” and having a “user’s perspective” (2020, p.13); “thinking like a user” is not sufficient.

Support

Many participants across UX work structures mentioned supports in their institutional bodies, including committees the participant could draw on as a resource, be a member of, or chair. The people who talked about this saw it as a way to address specific people in the library or to hear from certain people. Although these participants all cited the specific bodies as a support, the common thread was the ability to have the right people hear their voice. The institutional body facilitates this communication by providing a formal platform for it.

Although some participants cited the formal structure of their position as a useful support for their work, libraries need to provide support beyond simply creating a UX position. Solo UXers’ libraries valued UX enough to staff their position, but not all included UX in their strategic thinking or planning. In these cases, it is up to the solo UXer what kind of UX work they do, and many struggle with this lack of direction. While quite a few participants spoke about enjoying the freedom in their jobs, that freedom can be a bit of a double-edged sword: if it doesn’t matter what you do, then it can feel like what you do doesn’t matter.

Leads also talked about having freedom in their work, but none of them mentioned this same struggle with strategic direction or priorities. Leads cited management interest in UX and support for non-UX staff doing UX work, so they may be better able to see that their work matters. This kind of support may explain why leads were generally more positive than solo UXers when talking about how their work affects them personally.

Participants with the support of a UX group or helpers cite their colleagues as a helpful support and generally feel that management is interested in UX. That sense of support might be part of why they feel positive about their work and their workplaces. It’s not simply that working with any group of colleagues leads to a feeling of collegial support, as participants who work with non-UX groups do not feel supported in or positive about their work. Participants in UX positions talked about a lack of support from their colleagues; this could be what has led to feelings of isolation that are common among these participants.

None of the participants who talked about struggling with lack of support from their colleagues cited management interest in UX. If management isn’t interested in UX, that could make it more difficult to convince colleagues to take an interest. When neither management nor colleagues are interested in UX, it’s not surprising that UX workers feel isolated.

Impact

Although it would seem that people in UX positions are well-placed to conduct impactful UX work, many participants working in these positions were not able to articulate impact. Participants in UX positions without the support of UX groups or helpers seemed to struggle most with describing the impact of their work. Even when looking at examples of impacts that are less concrete, we see that few people in unsupported UX positions talked about shifts in mindset or culture. Most people in supported positions did describe this kind of shift. There seems to an issue with unsupported UX positions not being able to create impact or not seeing the impact they are having.

Since participants were self-reporting, it’s possible that people in unsupported UX positions were downplaying their impact. Another possibility is that they have less need to reflect on and communicate the impact of their work, so they did not have examples at hand during the interview. In contrast, almost all informal UXers and leads pointed to concrete impacts and also spoke about the efforts they make to convince colleagues and management of the value of UX work. This kind of communication within their libraries may have helped prepare them to state examples of their work’s impact.

Participants with the support of UX groups were all able to give examples of concrete impacts on users, regardless of whether they were in a UX position or not. Additionally, almost all informal UXers cited concrete impacts. It’s possible for UX workers to see concrete impacts without having a UX position.

Overlapping Structures

Many web-focused participants are also solo UXers and, like them, spoke negatively about how their work affects them. However, unlike a lot of solo UXers, they did not mention seeking out external community. Given that they don’t find their colleagues to be supportive, reaching out to an external community for support might be beneficial.

Most participants with non-UX groups are both solo UXers and web-focused. Sadly, they seem to experience the worst of both worlds. They feel the same isolation and lack of direction as solo UXers, but, like web-focused participants, they don’t find support from the external library UX community. Like web-focused participants, they don’t cite management interest in UX as a helpful support, they struggle to describe concrete impacts of their work, and they are much more negative than positive when discussing how their work affects them. Most likely it is not the non-UX groups themselves that are causing the problem, but rather the participants chafing against a structure that does not allow them to focus on UX work.

The Context of Organizational Culture

I noted above that formal supports can facilitate UX work, but the informal organizational culture can play a big role in whether that work is accepted, supported, and acted upon. Interestingly, no patterns emerged when looking at the participants who cited support from their library’s existing culture. These participants work in a range of structures, for a range of departments, with a web focus and without, as solo UXers, as leads, and as neither. Some have seen a big impact from their work, some have seen small, and for some, impact is still to come. Their work personally affects them in both positive and negative ways. Their libraries range from very small to very large. It seems that a supportive culture for UX in libraries can, and does, exist anywhere. This would appear to be good news. However, no particular structure or context ensures a supportive culture for UX. As one participant noted, “There’s no one magical support that will make our work more accepted by our colleagues.”