In the beginning of December, the Belgian delegation traveled to Gothenburg for the final activity in our Erasmus+ project ‘An inclusive perspective to digital tools in lending libraries’. During our last exchange days, we had workshops and made study visits to Fritidsbanken, who lend out equipment for sports and leisure, as well as the city library of Gothenburg. This post will focus on our last workshops during the project.

 

Meeting the developers

During the last activity of the project, we were also accompanied by Gene from My Turn, who participated digitally, and Alan from Lend Engine. My Turn is the platform that many Babythek and toy libraries in Belgium use and Lend Engine is the platform that the toy libraries in Sweden (Leksaksbiblioteket and Vänersborgs Leksaksbibliotek) use. 

The facilitator for the workshops was Ines Vanlangendonck, who also facilitated the co-creation session in Belgium in Activity 2 and the workshop during Activity 3. The topics for the workshop were user experience and digital Inclusion. Gene and Alan presented their backgrounds and told us more about My Turn/Lend Engine and also shared their thoughts on upcoming features and solutions for each software. Alan also told us that he had started a library of things! The library had started with lending out tools, but the library has now expanded with different categories. 

 

Digital inclusion

Once the developers had presented themselves, the workshop started on the topic Digital inclusion. We were divided in pairs where we discussed if we could recall a situation where we had felt excluded and how that made us feel. All project members had experienced this and agreed that these situations were associated with anger and frustration. 

The project members discussed digital inclusion with LendEngine and MyTurn and summarized inclusive software as: 

• Easy to use - for everyone
• Available for all
• Flexible

 

User Experience

The project participants were introduced to guidelines for user friendly design, for example to use a language and symbols that the end users understand, during the last workshop. Consistency is also important. For the end user, it might be easier to learn a new system that has symbols they already know from another system or website they use frequently.

During this workshop about user experience and digital inclusion, there was a task where everybody was supposed to purchase a baby blanket from a German webshop. The website did not have a visible button where the user could change the language. This task was easy for the participants who knew German, but the rest of the group had difficulties completing the task because the website was not designed as we are used to. We learned that we are used to finding categories and searching in a certain way, which did not work in this webshop. Some of the participants were not able to solve the task within the given time. 

 

Co-creating user friendly software for both end users and administrators

During the workshop, the participants were given the task of creating "the best product page" in groups. The groups had some time to work with their product page before handing over the sketch to another group. The second group analyzed the sketch and gave the creators their feedback. 

 

After this, the roles were reversed and the second group received their feedback. The groups had some more time to develop their ideas before another feedback session.Different groups had different views of what information that needs to be visible on a product page. Some of the participants preferred links to similar products while others preferred a more minimalistic design. 

 

The groups were also given a similar task where they would create the page where you add an article to the inventory. There was a lot of discussion in this assignment. Which information is necessary to add a new article? What information is needed to add a new item of a product that already exists in the inventory? Some of the groups built this page with a new volunteer in mind that does not know the software very well, while others built the page for a Superuser.The workshop ended with a brief presentation of the creations from each group.

 

After the presentation, all the participants were given some time to write down the most important thing to change within our digital software. All the suggestions were clustered on a wall, where all the participants could see them clearly. Each participant was given 3 points to give out to the suggestions (3 points for one suggestion or 1 point for three different suggestions).

 

What did we learn? 

• A closer connection between the developers and the toy libraries/babythek. We found a common ground for discussing features that can improve. It was great to hear that the developers want to hear more from their users and their needs.

 

• Symbols and "terms" that we recognize from past experiences online make it easier to understand a new website or digital tool. 

 

• People have different views of how they want to navigate a webpage and what type of content they wish to see when and where. Some of the participants preferred suggestions on a product page, while others preferred a more minimalistic design. 

 

Although the project is now officially over, a lot of the participants expressed that they felt like this is only the beginning. The organizations in Belgium and Sweden are planning to stay in contact and the work with improving our digital softwares will continue. 

 

Thank you to all project participants, De Transformisten, VOS, Kollaborativ Ekonomi, Leksaksbiblioteket i Gävle & Vänersborg, MyTurn and LendEngine. A special thanks to the European Union for their support!