userslib.com

This is the second year of the University of Michigan Library’s iDesign competition. This year’s theme is virtual browsing and the challenge is to design an innovative tool which will enhance MLibrary’s discovery environment.

We received some fantastic entries! I especially appreciate the projects that employed UX research methods to inform their designs. If you are so inclined, you can vote on the projects or just have a look at the individual projects:

CataLIST

“…a recommender system could be developed to utilize this rich set of knowledge to curate subsets of the overall library collections, which could then be used to make recommendations to users. A large number of these subsets from across the university could be interconnected and used to surface new content to users, enhance their experience, and break down artificial barriers created by different subject areas.”

MyLibrary Mobile App

“Ever lend a book to a friend? Ever wish they would bring it back? Forget who you lent it to in the first place? MyLibrary will finally let you keep track of your personal collection.”

MLibrary Search
Designs for an improved multi-search interface

Aoide: Virtual Browsing Exploration for MLibrary Audio Collection

A-oi-de [ey-oi-dee] – noun: “A virtual browsing system that aims to facilitate new methods of interpreting search results through virtualized representations of audio CD materials for the University of Michigan’s Music Library.”

FilmGrid

A visual browser for Askwith Media Library

Usability guru Jakob Nielsen released a study this week about mobile usability: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/mobile-usability.html.

The result? “The mobile user experience is miserable.”

Here are some highlights:

• The average success rate for mobile websites was 59% compared to 80% for regular sites.
• Small screens are limiting since they have to show less at a time which results in more clicks and a heavier reliance on short term memory.
• Input is awkward and more error prone due to more scrolling, tiny buttons and links, tiny keyboards, etc.
• Connections are still slow.
• Sites that have a mobile specific interface have a higher success rate (64%) compared to regular sites (53%).
• If a site has a mobile version, make it easy to find. Best technique is to auto-sense users’ devices and auto-forward mobile users to the mobile site. Additionally, make sure to include links to “mobile site” and “full site” to allow users to switch.
• Touch-screen phones perform better.

The new bad usability calendar is out for 2009.

http://www.badusability.com/

The 2008 Bad Usability Calendar is out. Check it out.

http://www.badusability.com/

Here’s a cool video of paper prototyping in action (minus the tedious bits). The device being tested is a PDA for meeting new people.

{ found via www.guuui.com }

The University of Michigan’s Human Factors and Ergonomics Society recently announced the winners of their Bad Designs on Campus Contest.

Since these folks are from the engineering department it’s no surprise that many of the submissions were for bad design on North Campus – specifically the Duderstadt Center and Pierpont Commons. I worked in the Duderstadt Center for 4 years so I can personally attest to how frustrating some of the entries really are. I don’t think I ever went to the library stacks area without having to help someone figure out how to move the compact shelving or made it to the bathroom without having the external doors open unnecessarily.

{ link to contest | found via Field Guide }

Our web team and I recently did a survey to better understand our University of Michigan library patrons – their web use, their library use, and their perceptions of the library. It was mostly successful in that now we have more information about our users than we did before. As with all usability/survey studies, the results merely provide a window into understanding our users. The things we learned in this survey can now be used in conjunction with other studies and log analysis to form a more complete picture. This is just a preliminary report… A full analysis will be put online at some point in the near future. We also plan to do a version of this survey annually – so we will also be assessing the survey itself to determine what worked or didn’t.

[Library Web Survey Fall 2007 Results & Preliminary Analysis]

update: link updated

Inspired by a Smashing Magazine article – 20 (Alternate) Ways to Focus on Users – I thought I’d put together a list of alternative ways to focus on Library Users…

1. Interact with the patrons (outside of a usability setting): reference, email, suggestion box, etc. If reference isn’t part of your regular job duties, volunteer for a shift of your own (or just sit in on one now and then). If you’re lucky, you’ll have interactions dealing directly with the resources you are have a say in changing. But at the very least, you’ll get to experience the patrons on a human level – what brought them to the reference desk, what types of assignments they have, what language do they use to describe their needs, what they’re generally distracted by or have difficulty with…
2. Talk to the people who interact with the patrons: (reference & instruction librarians). Not only do these people interact with the patrons everyday, they’re the ones who have to develop lessons and explain all those difficult to use resources over and over again. I guarantee they all have something to say about the difficulties of using the various library websites, opacs, and other resources!
3. Log Analysis: what are they searching for on the library website and not finding? Are they searching for “Psychinfo” and not finding it because it’s actually “Psycinfo”?
4. Be where they are (online): search the web & blogs for mentions of your library. Are students taking lots of photos of your libraries or making videos in your library and putting them online? Are they posting to their blogs about the library or about research, and what are they saying? Join Facebook groups. For example there are facebook groups for UM incoming 1st years, individual schools and departments have groups, etc. You can find out a lot about what are they worried about, what technology they’re using, how much beer they’re drinking, etc.
5. Be where they are (in the library): go sit at a computer in the computer lab or group study areas in the library and eavesdrop. Just be stealth about!
6. Ask them (Guerilla Tests): if you have a simple question you’d like answered this is ideal. It could be as easy as “We have a service called _________ what do you think that means?” Or, print out the home page of your library website and ask them “where would you click if you wanted to find ____________?”
7. Ask them (Surveys): surveys are a great way to get lots of quantitative and qualitative information. My 2 favorite survey questions are open-ended “What do you like most about the library” and “What do you like least about the library” – you’ll be surprised how they have to say for both.
8. Ask them (student advisory groups): lots of libraries already have student advisory groups in place and chances are they’d be willing to let you use that group to conduct a focus group or do formal or informal user testing.

Yesterday during Scott Martin & Eric Frierson’s MLibrary2.0 Social Networking workshop, Eric mentioned that the UM Usability Working Group has used Facebook to find user testing participants. So here’s a little more information on that…

The Usability Working Group is currently preparing to conduct usability tests on various Library services and finding willing participants is always difficult, even when we offer incentives like we are for this test. We decided to advertise 3 different ways: a news item linked to from the main library homepage, a Facebook marketplace ad, and a Facebook Flyer.

The marketplace listing is free and from what I can tell, the ads only appear on the marketplace listings page. The Flyer is not free and the least amount you can spend is $5 for one day and the ad will be shown to 2,500 users (within the network of your choice) and the ad is larger and appears on the left side of various facebook pages.

We only had the flyer for 1 day, but had the marketplace ad and library website ad for a few days. So, in 5 days we have received 22 total responses. Unfortunately, since we put all our ads up at the same time, it’s difficult to tell where the respondents saw the ad. Perhaps as part of the actual usability tests, we’ll ask them how they found out about our call for participants. What I do know from looking at the web stats, is that there were 45 hits from the marketplace ad and 8 from the flyer. Granted, the marketplace ad was up for much longer, but still I think it turned out to be more successful (and you can’t beat free).

Facebook also offers a poll service. For $6 you can ask one question to a target audience of your choice. Hmmm. I wonder if this could also be useful for getting a quick response about some library issue – like “If your librarian was on facebook, would you add her/him as a friend?”

This morning is our kickoff event for the MLibrary2.0 program.

The first speaker is Peter Morville who spoke about findability and how we need to expand on the idea of usability to findability.

“Can users find our website, can they find their way around our website, can they find what they need despite our website”

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” So how do we deal with our massive findability issues? We can’t leave it to microsoft or google. Its up to the librarians -this ain’t your mama’s metadata! There’s an explosion of metadata on the web with tons of sites and services that let users generate their own content (wikipedia, flickr, delicous, etc.) So we need to find ways to make the old (cataloging) and the new (tagging) work together – bring taxonomies and folksonomies together. Etsy is good example of using these two techniques.

Guided navigation is also something we should be paying more attention to. Remember berrypicking from library school? NCSU and other schools have started incorporating faceted browsing into their catalogs. The basic idea here is to help the patrons find things they didn’t know they needed to find.