Los Angeles Public Library Comprehensive Plan
A comprehensive plan for the Los Angeles Public Library (LAPL) system that provides recommendations to improve library facilities. Responsibilities included leading user research, data collection and visualization (including leading the design of the dashboard), user interviews, and visioning sessions with project stakeholders.
Role:
UX Researcher, UI Designer
Team:
Alice Hricak, Gabrielle Bullock, Eubie Han, Nina Lahham, Lynnette Tedder, Dean Demko
Timeline:
Jun 2021 - Aug 2022
Tools used:
PowerBI, Miro, Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, Rhino 3D, Matterport
Design Problem
Like many public institutions, libraries are housed in humble facilities that age and evolve over time as operational needs change. The Los Angeles Public Library approached me and my team at Perkins&Will to develop a vision for the future of Los Angeles Central Library and its 72 branch libraries, and a strategy for updating its facilities as the largest-serving public library system in the United States.
Vermont Square Library in 1921 and 2021
Design Solution
Develop a vision for the future of LAPL and provide a strategy for updating library facilities (including services and programs) through stakeholder engagement, physical assessments, and data-driven research. The vision will ensure each facility is maintained and systems are in place for ongoing refinement as the needs of the Library, the stakeholders, and community evolve.
Library Branch Visits
To gain an understanding of the needs of the Library’s users and the process for assessing all 73 branches, my team and I visited 12 branches. During these branch visits, we:
conducted physical assessments (assessing the building systems, interiors, and experience on a scale of 1-5)
took digital and Matterport photography, and
interviewed the Senior Librarian of the branch
Throughout this process, we spent a lot of time refining the assessment criteria and rating scale of the physical assessments and discovering what questions were crucial to ask the Senior Librarian and how to navigate these conversations.
Screenshot of the Experience assessment on Jotforms
Senior Librarian interview and tour at the Studio City public library
Initial Observations
After visiting 12 branches and collecting quantitative and qualitative data for each location, we made the following high-level observations:
The physical built space needs to accommodate the changing demographics and needs of the community (e.g. co-working, study space, Zoom interviews, New American’s Center)
The importance of staff and security personnel to reflect the community’s language and culture
Importance of staff who are proactive in identifying community needs and training to serve specific community needs
Equity challenges related to Friends of the Library and city council members (e.g., funding for special amenities, groundskeeping)
A common respect and reverence evident for the library by the communities
More accessibility and visibility deter vandalism and loitering
Outdoor spaces are often provided but underutilized
Young adults are not being reached by the Library
Lack of individual workstations for staff
These observations informed our approach towards the dashboard and Visioning sessions, which eventually helped us determine the preliminary recommendations for Phase 1 to LAPL.
Dashboard
As part of the Phase 1 deliverables, LAPL asked us to provide an interactive dashboard with which they can analyze each library branch and branch region for future decision making. The dashboard we created is a combination of internal data we received from LAPL (e.g. patron statistics, collection sizes, branch special features), Experian data from LAPL (e.g. branch demographics), and data we collected through our site visits (e.g. branch assessments through Jotform surveys). The dashboard also includes links to Matterport scans for each library we visited. I led the creation, design, and user experience of the dashboard on PowerBI, connecting Excel spreadsheets to the PowerBI interface.
The dashboard provides information for the following categories:
Region overview
Branch overview
Branch demographics
Branch experience, facilities/building systems, and interiors (all from our self-conducted site visits and each with their own rating system)
Branch patron data
With this combination of quantitative and qualitative data, LAPL will be able to establish baseline metrics for determining future facility updates — and given the interactive features of the dashboard, will be able to update the data over the years.
Visioning
In addition to interviewing twelve Senior Librarians during the branch visits, I led a series of Visioning workshops to get a larger picture of the status of LAPL and their aspirations for the future. We had a total of nine Visioning workshops that covered the following six topics:
The Project (workshops directed toward LAPL Leadership)
Mission statement revisit
Success factors for Phase 1
Process for community engagement
Aspirational visions for the Library to better support Living Design principles
Experiences: commonalities and demographic changes in communities
Process for community engagement
The Library of the future
After conducting these workshops, we completed SWOT analyses to summarize our findings — an example of one of these analyses is to the right.
Screenshot of one of the Library of the Future sessions
SWOT analysis of the “Experiences: commonalities and demographic changes in communities”
Community Engagement
To prepare for future community engagement and gain a better understanding of the types of users LAPL would be interfacing with and designing for, I developed user persona and journey mapping studies. These studies summarized our findings from the branch visits and Visioning sessions, with the intention that these studies would be further refined upon engaging the community and understanding library users.
Karla, the high school student
Rod, the unhoused patron
Juan, the non-English speaker
David, the citizen patron and father
Microsite
Although the LA Public Library Comprehensive Plan is a work in progress, we have been working on deliverables to mark the end of Phase I. One such deliverable is a microsite compiling all the work done to date for LAPL to access from one location. This is an effort I initiated and have been leading.
Microsite home page:
Current site flow:
