Enhancing Collaboration and User Experience: Study Insights from Molly Rogers, Stacey Knight, Zhan Hu, and Catherine Dumas

Description

Join us for an engaging presentation that combines two intriguing studies on 1) creating an approachable library systems department and 2) incorporating social VR technology in academic collaborative work. 

Learn about how active listening can be used as a tool to improve services and user experience and explore social VR technologies' feasibility, strengths, and weaknesses for information-intensive collaborative work. Learn more about the growing field of UX and its applications for today and the future. 

Presentation 1: "Creating an Approachable Library Systems Department: Active Listening as a UX Tool" Learn about the multi-pronged approach UVM Libraries’ staff uses to make connections with and understand the workflows and processes of colleagues and how they learn what library users need. The speakers will discuss the ways they’ve worked to gather feedback, goals for the future, and how this might be applicable to your workplace, even if you don’t work in an academic library. 

Presentation 2: "Incorporating Social VR Technology in Academic Collaborative Work: A Comparative User Experience Study of 'Horizon Workrooms' with Meta Quest" This presentation discusses the objectives, design, and preliminary results of a research study that investigated the user experience of graduate students collaborating on hypothetical class assignments in a virtual environment using VR technologies (i.e., the Meta Quest headset and "Horizon Workrooms") versus two other modalities, Zoom and in-person, to compare their collaboration experiences.