Discoveries by the D&D Council

Over the past year, the Discovery and Delivery Council has made a number of changes to the online catalog, the library home page, and LinkSource, our link resolver. We decided last spring to conduct usability testing of these changes, as well as several other aspects of the libraries' online presence. A subcommittee of D&D conducted the testing, and spent the summer writing up and analyzing the results. The full report can be found here http://libstaff.uvm.edu/committees/DandD/2008_usability_study.pdf , which includes an overview of the methods used in the test, a list of the Council's priorities for making changes based on the test results, and the full set of tasks we tested and the observed results. Each task in the report includes an overview of the findings, as well as the detailed observational notes. (Remember that a login is required to view materials on the staff web site.)

Note that the highest priority item we will be addressing is the linking infrastructure (including the "Find it@UVM" button, ensuring that LinkSource is working optimally, and re-designing the "no results" page that patrons land on when LinkSource does not locate the full text of an article.) We will not be changing these things in the middle of the semester, however. We will work on fixes during the fall, and implement changes over the winter break.

We will be making changes soon to the Order on Demand ("Get This Book!") interface, however. The changes we are considering should make the service more transparent to patrons without being overly jarring.

A separate analysis of the Order on Demand pilot will go forward later this fall, unrelated to the D&D usability testing, to examine broader implications of the experiment on the collection, and the overall desirability of continuing the pilot (or not), modifying it, etc.

Also, a separate usability test will be administered relatively soon on the pilot study of linking out from the catalog to additional information in Google Books. The current report on usability predated the implementation of the Google Books experiment, so a similar sub-committee of D&D will be designing and implementing that testing this semester. (On a related note, we collected 96 completed surveys on the Google Books links [that is, those who responded who had linked out to Google Books], with 93% of respondents reporting that they agreed [42%] or strongly agreed [51%] with the statement "Google Books provided useful information about the book I was looking at.")

Overall, we found both disappointing and heartening results in this round of testing. We view even the disappointing results to be really valuable, though, because we now have tangible data to help us steer toward better technological and design solutions. One of our wider aspirations as a committee is to encourage a climate of testing in the libraries with the idea that, try as we might, we cannot fully anticipate how patrons will actually use the things we create for them, and usability testing is an ongoing way to improve the patron's experience with the libraries' points of access.

--Peter Spitzform for D&D