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)
It's interesting to compare the 'advanced' options. I think if I were asked to describe the #yocalcat and #summon4hn I'd probably say 'structured' rather than 'advanced'. This may well be my library background showing through - but neither of those have the concept of combining terms via boolean operators - which is what I'd tend to expect of 'advanced'. The boolean concepts are included in the #swwhep example, and this definitely conforms more to my expectation of 'advanced'.
ReplyDeleteHowever, to take a step back, perhaps the question is - what is the 'advanced' search for?
What searches might we expect to be carried out with the 'advanced' search options, and can these be done in any other way?
What types of materials are easily discoverable with 'advanced' search but not with the 'basic' or 'simple' search options? (if any)
Is the 'advanced' search option there just to respond to an expectation rather than any specific types of query? - and if so, is it an expectation of library staff, or library users ;)
It would be interesting to look at the searches that are being carried out via 'advanced' and understand what these interfaces are being used for - and whether this is due to a lack in the basic search, or simply to do with user expectations.