Theme Focus: Search

Search functionality is a fairly fundamental element of each of the JISC LMS projects so it would be foolhardy of me to try and document every single blogpost. The blogposts I've linked to below give a good representation of the sorts of issues and challenges that the projects have been tackling.

One of the things that often comes up as soon as you get anywhere near a library search interface is the thorny issue of 'advanced search'. I am starting to wonder whether it is only librarians themselves who can truly love this feature. It would be interesting to look at usage stats to see whether advanced searches get as much usage as library staff think they do/should do [and also whether that usage is changing over time].

Making a user friendly 'advanced search' interface is a particularly thorny challenge. During inhouse training sessions the #SWWHEPSRCH project team got feedback that the iFind advanced search was 'a little confusing'. The #BFCESEARCH team also reported that few users chose to use the advanced search function, and those who did 'found the option boxes confusing'.

When the #BLATHULL project analysed the results of their usability testing they found that opinions were divided on the usefulness of a) a tag cloud and b) a display of 'recently added' bookcovers(they were comparing SearchWorks at Stanford University and VirgoBeta at the University of Virginia). If the users are divided in their feedback then this makes getting the interface right all the more difficult.

Of course, implementing a new search often uncovers all sorts of data conundrums:
- http://yocalcat.wordpress.com/2010/08/27/progress-report-search-interface/
- http://blacklightathull.wordpress.com/2010/10/31/union-search-and-revised-categories/

The UX2.0 project crafted some indepth technical guides to share how they're implementing faceted search, Apache Solr and Dublin Core Metadata:
- Part 1
- Part 2

The #AQUABROWSERUX project also shared their know how around how you can develop realistic user tests when looking at search functionality.

The #ENCLAVELMS team have written a relevant blogposts on whether wordclouds are the future of search and also their thoughts on what library search functionality could be usefully embedded within their VLE.

Lastly, just to mix things up a bit, here are a couple of high profile and large-scale beta search interfaces that may be of interest:
- http://library.wales.org/catcymru/
- British Library search beta

Theme Focus: Usability [part 3]

This is the final part of my theme focus on usability and it's a treasure trove of blogposts and reports which have been written by the good folks at the University of Edinburgh. There are officially two Edinburgh Uni projects within the JISC LMS programme {#AQUABROWSERUX and #ENCLAVELMS} but they are also running the #UX2 project so I've included things of interest from that project too.

It's a bit hard to know how to structure this post so that it doesn't get a tad confusing but here goes ...

This blogpost gives an overview of the thinking behind the user testing and user centred design approach being taken for the UX2.0 and AquaBrowser projects.

As well as sharing their step-by-step guides for developing your own user personas the team have also published their own user personas for you to compare and contrast to yours:
- UX2.0 / AQUABROWSERUX User Personas
- [Part 1] User Research and Persona Creation: Data Gathering Methods
- [Part 2] User Research and Persona Creation: Segmentation – Six Steps to our Qualitative Personas
- [Part 3] User Research and Persona Creation: Introducing the Personas

The #AQUABROWSERUX project produced a full report on their usability testing. It has some particularly interesting findings around the usability (or lack thereof) of the AquaBrowser wordcloud and how useful the participants found being able to view a book's table of contents in helping them decide whether they'd found a book that would be useful for their studies. They also posted videos showing highlights of the user testing:
Video 1: Faceted Navigation
Video 2: Information Seeking
Video 3: Word Cloud

The project team have taken a very reflective approach to their usability testing so there's lots of lessons learnt to dig through:
- Recruitment evaluation and screening for personas
- Realism in testing search interfaces
- SWOT analysis of the persona research phase of the project (which also contains a link to their interview script)

Boon Low's guide to 'in the wild' usability evaluations also makes for good reading.

The #ENCLAVELMS project produced some useful analyses of the UX2.0 and AquaBrowser usability test resport as part of their Work Package 1 Report [pdf].

I don't feel like I can really hope to do justice to all that the project teams have managed to produce so I'd encourage you to have a dig around on the UX2.0 wiki for other hidden gems. The full usability report [pdf] from the UX2.0 project would also be a good place to start.

Tabbloid #11: 10 Dec 2010

Open publication - Free publishing - More lmsmash

Last week's Tabbloid proves that big announcements come in small packages:
- the #ENCLAVELMS project announced that the code for their wordcloud software has been uploaded to sourceforge and are inviting suggestions for how it can be enhanced.
- the #OSSVIAB project shared news that version 3 of the United Kingdom Core Specification has been made available under a Creative Commons licence.

Tabbloid also picked up an interesting post from the UX2.0 project at Edinburgh University which reported on a number of university libraries (in the UK and further afield) which are offering services via mobile devices