Beatrice Downey

Name Pronunciation

bee-uh-tris down-ee

Pronouns

She / Her

Libraries Fellow

Department:

User Experience

Phone: (919) 515-3087

Email: bcdowney@ncsu.edu

My areas of expertise

Selected Works

Shout-outs From My Colleagues

Over the past year, Beatrice Downey has worked to wrangle the Libraries' 150+ (and growing) videos in order to improve the browsing experience for users and the organization experience for staff. During the first phase of this project, Bea went through all the existing videos and categorized them by topic. She was always receptive to feedback and suggestions from stakeholders along the way. Once the videos were appropriately categorized, she added desired features like a search bar and a "sort by" dropdown. The resulting page (lib.ncsu.edu/videos) is a great improvement for users and library staff alike! After she had brought order to the videos page, she turned her attention to our old tutorials and interactive guides page. She worked with others in the User Experience Department to rebrand that page as a Learn on Your Own page (https://www.lib.ncsu.edu/learn-on-your-own). I'm particularly excited about the opportunities this page will afford us to continue to present non-video asynchronous learning materials to our community! Thanks so much, Bea, for your dedicated efforts toward this project!

— Anne Burke

Bea recently co-presented "Conducting Pop-Up User Research That Moves a Project Forward" with me at the TRLN 2023 Annual Meeting. That presentation was about a larger-than-usual user research study for which she willingly and capably took the lead when I (the original organizer) had to be out sick. She ensured that everyone knew their roles, split up the set-up work, and dealt ably with multiple curveballs. Bea's leadership, organizational skills, and sheer competence are a boon to the Libraries!

— Robin Davis