userslib.com

With anything these days, there’s always tons of debate over terminology, categorization, and placement of links on a page… We’ve been debating & testing our “Ask Us” (email & IM reference) service for over a year now and we still haven’t settled on something we all agree on (and the user’s agree on). So, Shana Kimball and I decided to do a little comparison of how some other libraries are doing it.

We’re not including any judgments in this report because we don’t have any data about how successful these libraries are - it’s merely a comparison. I’m sure there are many other libraries that have enticing graphics or wordings that we missed so suggestions are welcome.

Link to pdf of comparison chart (courtesy of the Usability Working Group).

One of my first projects in my current job was to create a website that would give me and the usability working group a place to share information about our projects. My hope was that it would draw attention to how important it is to do user testing on library interfaces. It also forces us to be better record keepers and provide context in our reports that might otherwise be overlooked (we know what something looks like our how it behaves, but others don’t and we might forget).

In researching this idea, I found some really nice examples of how other university libraries are sharing their usability research - so here they are (plus ours):

• University of Michigan University Libraries- Usability in the Library
  
• NCSU Libraries- Usability Research at NCSU Libraries
• University of Virginia Libraries- Web Usability Testing
• MIT Libraries - Web Advisory Group
• University of Washington Libraries - UW Libraries Usability