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.
Showing posts with label usability. Show all posts
Showing posts with label usability. Show all posts
Thursday, 9 December 2010
Tuesday, 7 December 2010
Theme Focus: Usability [part 1]
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.
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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