Here is the first installment in my round up of the blogposts and reports which JISC LMS project teams have published over the course of their projects. [Slight disclaimer] It's not meant as an exhaustive list of sources but if you do come across any useful posts that I've not included please feel free to add them via the comments box.
The blogposts tend to have come from 'Strand A' of the JISC LMS Programme which is called 'Usability Case Studies in Libraries Systems (embedding "UXers" in the library)'. It's worth noting though that usability was also a key concern of projects in the other strands so it's no surprise that some useful usability posts have also come out of projects within those other strands.
Virtual Academic Library Shared Discovery Platform project(#swwhepsrch) centres around evaluating the usability of Vu-Find discovery interface for the South West Wales Higher Education Partnership’s Virtual Academic Library project:
- the project reported on how they were introducing a 'feedback' link within the interface to remedy the less than perfect (from their point of view) consultation process.
- the project are also capturing user feedback on an ongoing basis within a dedicated blog: https://ifind.swwhep.ac.uk/blog/ on the SWWHEP website. This also gives them a place to report back on any planned/delivered enhancements and provides the potential for some ongoing dialogue with users.
The Blacklight at Hull project (#blathull) followed the Hull Uni's team as they implemented the open source Blacklight discovery interface system - the project ran two lots of usability testing and produced the following blogposts. They mention one of the things that many of the other projects have noted - namely that usability tests produce a lot of interesting information about user behaviour and search strategies - the overhead in terms of time needed to sift through and make sense of that information can't be overestimated:
- an overview of their May 2010 usability tests [part 1]
- analysis of the May 2010 usability tests [part 2]
- an overview of their October 2010 usability tests [part 3]
The {takes a deep breath} Simplifying resource discovery and access in academic libraries: implementing and evaluating Summon at Huddersfield and Northumbria Universities project [#summon4HN] have uploaded a couple of resources about the user focus groups/feedback from training sessions they carried out earlier this year:
- a pdf of a presentation given by Annette Coates
- a word document outlining their methodology and giving a summary of the key feedback from users. [note: there are links to test documents/session recordings etc but they are internally hosted and therefore not accessible externally to the university]
The Coventry University Primo Implementation Project [#covprimo] have gone for the popular 1; 2; 3 approach with the following blogposts:
- Post 1 gives an introduction / background to their usability testing approach and summarises their main findings and recommendations
- Post 2 focused on the findings from the search tasks and the resulting recommendations.
- Post 3 focused on tasks which required the user to find resources within specific databases and the resulting recommendations. There is also a summary other findings that came out of post-test discussions with the users and an overview of the team's general observations.
One of the findings that really stood out to me was in #covprimo's final post which was that none of the users they'd tested knew what the term 'Tag' meant. That started me wondering whether there could be other examples of everyday library vocabulary which we might be mistakenly assuming that the users know what they mean.
The 'OCLC WorldCat Local: case study of implementation and usability at York St John University' project team [#yocalcat] have managed a feat of wordpress witchcraft and turned their usability report into a single blogpost. The report goes through their usability test methodology and results in great depth. The tests highlighted opportunities for improving the information skills of York St John students (particularly in terms of their confidence with using faceted search functionality) as well as identifying enhancements for the OCLC search interface. Two of the students tested misunderstood a task to find 'The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe' and attempted to search for three separate titles. This misunderstanding was because they hadn't heard of the title before ... another example of how easy it is to mistakenly assume that something is common knowledge among students. York St John is a small university with a correspondingly small library team - they expressed concerns over the time/resource available to analyse the usability test results but they've managed to do an in-depth piece of analysis which other institutions might find a useful model to use.
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