userslib.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]

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.

Since many libraries don’t have official usability positions or even committees, the idea of conducting user tests can be quite intimidating. But they don’t have to be! We do a lot of what we call Guerilla tests (a form of “discount usability”). There are a few methods- heuristic evaluation, paper prototypes, quick questionnaires, scenarios, etc.

If you are specifically looking for user feedback, paper prototypes/questionaires are ideal. The basic idea is to tackle one, maybe two key questions you might have about what terminology to use, order or placement of links on a website etc. The results of this type of test, like many other types of usability tests, can only indicate that there may be a problem with the interface element you’re testing. If it’s obvious that there are bigger problems with the interface, more extensive testing may be in order.

For example, our Usability Working Group decided to test the effectiveness of the link label “Get books, articles, and more,” that links to the library’s various delivery services. It was fairly clear that the current label was misleading (users could easily misinterpret it as being about circulation, research, how to find books etc.). So we looked at about 30 other library websites to see what other’s use and then made a list of these and a few other options to use for the test. We then basically split the test in 2 and asked one set of participants a set of questions and the other set different types of questions. The first set of participants were shown a printout of the library website, the current link was pointed out, and they were asked what they thought they’d find if they clicked the “Get books, articles, and more” link. The 2nd set of participants were shown the list of delivery services and asked if they could think of a name that would describe the contents of that list. They were then shown the list of alternate labels and asked to pick the one that best fit their understanding of the listed services. This test both verified that the current label was problematic and also gave us a sense of what other terms best fit the user’s expectations.

Tips:

• Ideal time for entire participant interaction should be 5, 10 minutes tops.
• Because the test is fast, try to test as many people as possible to get a decent consensus
• Choose a simple issue and make sure wording is clear. If questions are simple, you can often fit 5-7 questions into one test
• Demo the test with a co-worker or test subject to fine tune wording.
• Use a printout of the interface (using a live version or computer based mockup can be too cumbersome to do quickly)
• Choosing participants: we typically go to locations where there are many students - like the reference area, student union, etc. After approaching a few students, it becomes easier to tell who might and might not be willing to participate.

Some links:

• Usability on the cheap By Suneet Kheterpal
• Guerrilla HCI: Using Discount Usability Engineering to Penetrate the Intimidation Barrier by Jakob Nielsen
• Usage and Usability Assessment: Library Practices and Concerns by Denise Troll Covey