Thursday 9 December 2010

Theme Focus: Usability [part 2]

This is the second installment in my round up of the blogposts and reports which focus on usability. You can read the first installment here and there will be a third and final installment coming shortly which will cover the wealth of usability resources that have come out of the University of Edinburgh projects.

Blackpool and the Fylde College project team has also followed the popular 1, 2, 3 format for their blogposts [#bfcesearch]:
- Post 1 gives a high level overview of the methodology they chose for the usability testing they carried out back in May.
- Post 2 gives some more indepth insight around the results of their usability study. I was particularly interested in their finding that the more confident a user was in searching, the more positive they were towards the interface. There are also some interesting findings around the confusion that was caused by terminology such as 'Search Scope' and the positive response towards features such as tagging once they were pointed out and explained to the participants.
- Post 3 covers what the project team learnt when they asked participants what additional links they would find useful and what format they wanted additional help to come in. The participants were shown the University of Minnesota's Assignment Calculator (which is available to download as open source software) and responded enthusiastically to it. Some users felt that contextualised onscreen help would be more useful to them than having to leave the search page to watch a video tutorial. All interesting stuff!

The Jangle for Users of Sirsi project at Leeds Met University [#janglefb] was all about connecting their LMS to a widget in Facebook so it's no surprise to see that their conversations with users focused heavily on data security and the appropriateness of sharing library data within a social network:
- In this post the project team outline their approach to user consultation (focus groups and a user survey). Their list of stakeholders makes for interesting reading: the Student Union ‘Consumer Testing’ Group, a product consultant from Sirsi, academic staff and students on the Information Management MSc. It's also interesting to note that they were able to take advantage of use cases which have been produced as part of the library's 'User Communications Project'.
- This post shares some of the findings of that consultation. The consultation was on a small scale but enabled the project team to find out that Facebook was the most used of all the social networks amongst their participants. The users discussed their concerns around personal data and also identified mobile access as another route that they would be interested in accessing their library account through.

The Kent University VuFind Enhancement project [#vufindkeven] discovered back in June that £5 is all it takes to cause a 'bunfight' on campus when it comes to recruiting usability test participants. Here are the rest of their blogposts about usability testing:
- The project team reported that the results of the usability testing gave them greater confidence that implementing VuFind was right way forward. They also shared the high level findings on the Kent Uni Library blog.
- The team also ran mini-surveys on users' views about specific topics such as personal tagging. However, there was a disappointing response rate to their survey on social tagging and they've seen little evidence of tagging activity among users so far.

The Library Locator Project [#findmylibrarybook] at the London School of Economics wrote a fairly lighthearted post about how they could find some 'tame' library users and pondered whether they might be able to hijack their library colleagues' idea to run quizzes in the library using QR codes. Neil Stewart kindly pointed them in the direction of the work that Bath University are doing with QR codes.

No comments:

Post a Comment