Tuesday 31 August 2010

live music, live systems and real live users

While I was standing in muddy, windswept fields in Wales and Yorkshire enjoying live music (and a pint of ale or two) the JISC LMS projects have been zooming forward at a rate of knots. Some of the significant events from the last week or so are:

- 26th August: York St John University carried out usability testing #yocalcat
- 27th August: York St John University went live with their local WorldCat implementation #yocalcat
- 27th August: The #AquaBrowserUX results of live user testing were published
- 30th August: Edinburgh published part two of their guide to creating user personas #AquaBrowserUX #ux2
- 31st August: Northumbria University's Summon instance (NORA Power Search) went live. #summon4hn
- 1st September: There has been a lot going on with the VuFind KEVEN project at Kent University and the new interface goes live on the library website tomorrow https://catalogue.kent.ac.uk/ #vufindkeven

And that's probably not everything! I'll post any other significant updates here as and when I spot them.

The AquaBrowserUX 'contextual inquiry' usability results made for very interesting reading:
- there's evidence to support my pet theory that users have a low awareness of library catalogue search 'brand' (in this case, AquaBrowser).
- the users wanted to start their search with a blank slate and went to unnecessary lengths to achieve this objective.

A blogpost on the #SWWHEP project blog about user feedback on their iFind advanced search has got me thinking about just how difficult it is to make search intuitive and simple as soon as you go beyond the 'one box fits all' Google-style search interface. I thought it might be useful to post links to a few of the other projects' advanced search pages to allow for easy comparing and contrasting:
- #SWWHEP iFind advanced search
- #YOCALCAT advanced search
- #SUMMON4HN Nora advanced search

It will be interesting to share usability tips between the projects and look at what the logfiles reveal about how often users actually use the advanced search feature vs the simple search.

As part of the synthesis role I'm carrying out Dave Flanders has given me a mandate to be slightly leftfield so I'm also going to share a couple of advanced search examples from outside of the #JISCLMS programme:
- International Children's Digital Library advanced search
- The Leeds Library advanced search (using Heritage LMS)

Tuesday 17 August 2010

Initial observations and noticings {HH}

I've started the, ever so slightly daunting, task of looking through all the JISC LMS projects so that I can start synthesising with alacrity. I'm starting to get into the habit of logging everything I do on the project website change log and I'm tagging relevant web content on Delicious with a little note to remind myself why I thought it was worth tagging. If there's anything that I think is relevant to a specific project then I'll highlight it to them directly but I'll also try and remember to add those links to Delicious so that it builds into a useful source of information.

Here are the project websites that I've commented on so far:
Some very early observations/possible themes I've identified for me to explore over the coming weeks:
  • I'm wondering whether the short project descriptions for each project could be stripped back so that they would genuinely be understandable to someone without specialist LMS domain knowledge/an understanding of JISC. If projects can really get to the heart of what their projects mean for users then it will make it easier for them to talk to others about what they're aiming to do.
  • There are some good tips for successfully engaging users in surveys and usability studies being captured in the project blogs - I'm interested in distilling some of those tips to share among the projects and the wider world.
  • Where a project has some heavy lifting to do in terms of the review and analysis of usability data and additional cataloguing I'm wondering whether co-opting students in a 'citizen scientist' could help by providing the project with additional resources (at the same time as further increasing the engagement of students in the project and giving them a 'living' information literacy learning experience).
In response to a request from Owen Stephens I've been keeping a look out for any projects which are using or planning to use JUICE - I haven't spotted any yet so please let me know if your project is.

Thursday 5 August 2010

Je suis une synthesiser

Hello world, my name is Helen Harrop and I am a synthesiser. More accurately, I am carrying out the 'Synthesis Liaison' role on the JISC Library Management Systems (#jisclms) programme. I officially started this role two days ago so I'm currently in start up mode and feeling my way around the project website. To help me get my head around the role and the various strands of the programme I drew a diagram:



My role is shown by the chevroned hoop running around the outside. If I had more time and my artistic skills were up to the task then I'd probably have drawn it as a 3d model with lots of connected ribbons weaving to and fro between the strands. This will have to do for the moment but I might try and make something with plasticine and shoelaces at some point in the future. Suffice to say that my role is a kind of serendipity stimulator ... all will become clear in the fullness of time but, for now, this is just a quick post to say 'hello, I have arrived'.