Website Design:
Testing
At the end of the spring semester, a usability test was conducted of the current site on five undergraduate students. Each student was given ten tasks to perform using the site; the numbers shown are the number of students that completed the task:
- 1. Does the library own the book Cujo? (5)
- 2. Find an article in an online encyclopedia on dog breeds. (0)
- 3. Give a title from the list of new books in the library. (5)
- 4. Give a title of a journal or magazine article on school violence. (3)
- 5. Can you determine what years the library owns of the New England Journal of Medicine? (5)
- 6. Who is the subject librarian for the Social Sciences? (4)
- 7. Does the library web site have a guide for doing research in Exercise Science? (2)
- 8. How do you log into your library account? (0)
- 9. Imagine that you're researching for a term paper and you've found a great book on your topic. Unfortunately the book isn't available in the catalog! How would you get the book? (2)
- 10. What is the phone number for the Reference Desk? (1)
Summary:
- students had trouble finding reference inforamtion, both research guides and ready reference
- students had trouble finding articles
- students had trouble Interloaning items
- Students didn't understand site lingo, eg. "collections" vs "databases"
Weblog Data
I also looked at our web data to see where stendent were going in our site:
- Catalog searches
- Databases by subject
- Fulltext databases
Comparison
I also looked at all the SUNY library websites. I studied the design and how links were labeled.
Common elements:
- Simple layout
- Simple language
- Catalog search bar on home page
Results:
- Ready reference and reference guides were separated
- Language simplified
- Search bar added to home page
- Some of the access points moved, ex. ILL link on 'find books page'