2015

Congratulations to the LITA UX Contest Winners

The results are in for LITA’s Contest: Great Library UX Ideas Under $100. Congratulations to winner Conny Liegl, Designer for Web, Graphics and UX at the Robert E. Kennedy Library at California Polytechnic State University for her submission entitled Guerilla Sketch-A-Thon. The LITA President’s Program Planning Team who ran the contest and reviewed the submissions loved how creative the project was and how it engaged users. From the sketches that accompanied the submission, and from looking at the before and after screenshots of the library website, it was clear the designers incorporated ideas from the student sketches.

Conny won a personal one-year, online subscription to Library Technology Reports, generously donated by ALA Tech Source. She gets to have lunch with LITA President Rachel Vacek and the LITA President’s Program speaker and UX expert Lou Rosenfeld at ALA in San Francisco. She gets a free book generously donated from Rosenfeld Media. And finally, her winning submission will be published in in Weave, an open-access, peer-reviewed journal for Library User Experience professionals published by Michigan Publishing.

There were so many entries submitted for the contest, picking a single winner was difficult. The Planning Team unanimously agreed to recognize first and second runner-up entries.

The First Runner-Up was the team at the University of Arizona Libraries who submitted their project Wayfinding in the Library. The team included people from multiple departments in their library including the User Experience department, Access & Information Services, and Library Communications. Congrats to Rebecca Blakiston, User Experience Librarian, Shoshana Mayden, Content Strategist, Nattawan Wood, Administrative Associate, Aungelique Rodriguez, Library Communications Student Assistant, and Beau Smith, Usability Testing Student Assistant. Each team member gets a book from Rosenfeld Media.

The Second Runner-Up was the team from Purdue University Libraries who submitted their project Applying Hierarchal Task Analysis Method to Discovery Tool Evaluation. The team consisted of Tao Zhang, Digital User Experiences Specialist and Marlen Promann, Graduate Research Assistant. Each team member gets a book from Rosenfeld Media.

In the coming months, interviews with the winners from each institution will be posted to the blog.