Even though we haven’t posted to the blog recently, we have been thinking about, talking about, and developing our fourth usability test.

Welcome to Phase 2 Library Website Incremental Redesign and Guerrilla Usability Study!

In Phase 2, the keywords of the study and redesign are intersectionality and inclusion. Our previous data collection was focused on users within the library. We want to expand the data to capture users who may not feel comfortable coming to the library and increase our inclusivity to marginalized students. We recognize that research shows that the more marginalized the student, the less likely they are to use library services/university services. Yet the more students utilize library and university services, the more successful they will be.

There are two ways we will endeavor toward inclusivity in Phase 2: through a homepage pop-up survey and taking usability test 4 outside the physical walls of the library. We’ve also included a summary of the other redesign projects on which we are working.

Home Page Pop-up Survey

In our effort to be more inclusive (overall, but specifically) to target marginalized students, we will be adding a pop-up survey to the homepage. The survey will collect the demographics of our users and we have added one question to capture first generation status.

We are hoping to learn who some of our users are, what brings them to our website and whether we are providing them what they expect to find.  The survey will launch as soon as next week.

Upcoming Usability Test: Commuter Students in the Wildcat Den

We are finally leaving the library and will be engaging in a usability study in the Wildcat Den with commuter students in mid April. As part of our effort toward inclusivity, we will be doing our best to reach out to students who might not normally come to the library.

We are excited to try something new with usability test 4: test an alternative interface to the homepage. This alternate interface will feature a prominent textbook search and several layout adjustments. We’re looking forward to seeing what we learn and we plan to share our findings in the next blog post.

Change Ideas: Contact Icons

In order to make room for new content we are testing out an alternative contact access point in the top-header on the homepage.

 

 

 

 

 

In our tests students were not using the contact icons in the middle of the page and we have hypothesized that this bright orange link will draw their attention. We will measure the success of this by comparing clicks in Google Analytics and testing out contact-related tasks in future usability tests.

Textbook Reserves Tab: work in progress.

The textbook reserves tab project began as a takeaway from one of the earlier usability tests. We found, as we noted in a previous post, that there is a disconnect between the language librarians use for our library resources and the language used by students. One of the terms in question is “course reserves.”

We also observed issues in the functionality of the search (for example, users cannot perform title or author searches). To fix this issue we are going to add a scoped search on the website that will only search items classified as reserve books. Before we can do this, however, we need to edit the MARC records of the textbooks to add an item in the notes field that will allow us to n limit our searches to just textbooks. Clara is working hard on this project and we’re excited to put this into production soon.