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VOOZH | about |
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VOOZH | about |
Posted by: Lorraine on: October 20, 2010
Screen shot of University of Edinburgh’s AquaBrowser with resource discovery services highlighted.
The aim of the AquabrowserUX project was to evaluate the user experience of AquaBrowser at the University of Edinburgh (UoE). The AquaBrowser catalogue is a relatively new digital library service provided at UoE alongside the Classic catalogue provided via Voyager which has been established at the university for a number of years. A holistic evaluation was conducted throughout with a number of activities taking place. These included a contextual enquiry of library patrons within the library environment, stakeholder interviews for persona creation and usability testing.
The objectives of the project were three-fold:
There were a number of logistical issues that arose after the project kicked off. It became apparent that none of the team members had significant experience in persona development. In addition, the external commitments of subcontracted team members meant that progress was slower than anticipated. A period of learning to research established methodologies and processes for conducting interviews and analysing data took place. Consequently the persona development took longer than anticipated which delayed the recruitment of participants for usability testing (Obj3). The delay also meant that participants would be recruited during the summer months when the university is traditionally much quieter. This was a potential risk to recruit during this time but did not end up being problematic to the project. However the extension of time spent gathering qualitative data meant that it was not possible to validate the segmentation with quantitative data. This was perhaps too ambitious for a project of this scale.
The challenge of conducting the contextual enquiry within the library was to find participants willing to be observed and interviewed afterwards. The timing once again made this difficult as it took place during exams. The majority of people in the library at that time were focussed on one task which was to revise for exams. This meant that persuading them to spend ten minutes talking to researchers was understandably difficult. In addition to this, the type of users that were common in the library at that time were limited to those revising and whose needs were specific to a task and did not necessarily represent their behaviour at other times of the year.
Ensuring that real use data and participation was captured during the contextual enquiry was also a challenge. Capturing natural behaviour in context is often difficult to achieve and carries a risk of influence from the researcher. For example, to observe students in the library ethically it is necessary to inform subjects that they are being observed. However, the act of informing users may cause them to change their behaviour. In longitudinal studies the researcher is reliant on the participant self-reporting issues and behaviour, something which they are not always qualified to do effectively.
Recruitment for the persona interviews and usability testing posed a challenge not only in finding enough people but also the right type of people. Users from a range of backgrounds and differing levels of exposure to AquaBrowser who fulfil the role of one of the personas could be potentially difficult and time-consuming to fulfil. As it turned out, recruitment of staff (excluding librarians) proved to be difficult and was something that we did not manage to successfully overcome.
Resource discovery services for libraries have evolved significantly. There is an increasing use of dynamic user interface. Faceted searching for example provides a “navigational metaphor” for boolean search operations. AquaBrowser is a leading OPAC product which provides faceted searching and new resource discovery functions in the form of their dynamic Word Cloud. Early studies have suggested a propensity of faceted searching to result in serendipitous discovery, even for domain experts.
Closer to home, The University of Edinburgh library have conducted usability research earlier this year to understand user’s information seeking behaviour and identify issues with the current digital service in order to create a more streamlined and efficient system. The National Library of Scotland has also conducted a website assessment and user research on their digital library services in 2009. This research included creating a set of personas. Beyond this, the British Library are also in the process of conducting their own user research and persona creation.
Creating a set of library personas benefits the University of Edinburgh and the wider JISC community. The characteristics and information seeking behaviour outlined in the personas have been shown to be effective templates for the successful recruitment of participants for user studies. They can also help shape future developments in library services when consulted during the design of new services. The persona hypothesis can also be carried to other institutes who may want to create their own set of personas.
The usability test report highlights a number of issues, outlined in Conclusions and Recommendations, which the university, AquaBrowser and other institutions can learn from. The methodology outlined in the report also provides guidance to those conducting usability testing for the first time and looking to embark on in-house recruitment instead of using external companies.
Overall the project outcomes from each of the objectives have been successfully delivered. The user research provided a great deal of data which enabled a set of personas to be created. This artifact will be useful to UoE digital library by providing a better understanding of its users. This will come in handy when embarking on any new service design. The process undertaken to create the personas was also fully documented and this in itself is a useful template for others to follow for their own persona creation.
The usability testing has provided a report (Project Posts and Resources) which clearly identifies areas where the AquaBrowser catalogue can be improved. The usability report makes recommendations that if implemented has potential to improve the user experience of UoE AquaBrowser. Based on the findings from the usability testing and contextual enquiry, it is clear that the contextual issue and its position against the other OPAC (Classic) must be resolved. The opportunity for UoE to add additional services such as an advanced search and bookmarking system would also go far in improving the experience. We recommend that AquaBrowser and other institutes also take a look at the report to see where improvements can be made. Evidence from the research found that the current representation of the Word Cloud is a big issue and should be addressed.
The personas can be quantified and used against future recruitment and design. All too often users are considered too late in a design (or redesign and restructuring) process. Assumptions are made about ‘typical’ users which are based more opinion than in fact. With concrete research behind comprehensive personas it is much easier to ensure that developments will benefit the primary user group.
AquabrowserUX Final Project Post
Now that the usability testing has been concluded, it seemed an appropriate time to evaluate our recruitment process and reflect on what we learned. Hopefully this will provide useful pointers to anyone looking to recruit for their own usability study.
As stated in the AquabrowserUX project proposal (Objective 3), the personas that were developed would help in recruiting representative users for the usability tests. Having learned some lessons from the persona interview recruitment, I made a few changes to the screener and added a some new questions. The screener questions can be seen below. The main changes included additional digital services consulted when seeking information such as Google|Google Books|Google Scholar|Wikipedia|National Library of Scotland and an open question asking students to describe how they search for information such as books or journals online. The additional options reflected the wider range of services students consult as part of their study. The persona interviews demonstrated that these are not limited to university services. The open question had two purposes; firstly it was able to collect valuable details from students in their own words which helped to identify which persona or personas the participant fitted. Secondly it went some way to revealing how good the participant’s written English was and potentially how talkative they are likely to be in the session. Although this is no substitute for telephone screening, it certainly helped and we found that every participant we recruited was able to talk comfortably during the test. As recruitment was being done by myself and not outsourced to a 3rd person, this seemed the easiest solution at the time.
When recruiting personas the main things I was looking for was the user’s information seeking behaviour and habits. I wanted to know what users typically do when looking for information online and the services they habitually use to help. The questions in the screener were designed to identify these things while also differentiate respondents into one type of (but not always exclusive) persona.
Screener Questions
The user research will be taking place over a number of dates. Please specify all the dates you will be available if selected to take part
26th August |27th August | 13th September | 14th September
What do you do at the university?
Undergraduate 1st |2nd |3rd | 4th | 5th year| Masters/ Post-graduate | PhD
What is your program of study?
What of the following online services do you use when searching for information and roughly how many hours a week do you spend on each?
Classic catalogue | Aquabrowser catalogue | Searcher | E-journals | My Ed | Pub Med | Web of Knowledge/Science | National Library of Scotland | Google Books | Google Scholar | Google | Wikipedia
How many hours a week do you spend using them?
Never|1-3 hours|4-10 hours|More than 10 hours
How much time per week do you spend in any of Edinburgh University libraries?
Never|1-3 hours|4-10 hours|More than 10 hours
Tell me about the way you search for information such as books or journals online?
There were a number of things that we would recommend to do when recruiting participants which I’ve listed below:
For more information on recruiting better research participants check out the article by Jim Ross on UX Matters: http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2010/07/recruiting-better-research-participants.php. There is also a similarly useful article by Abhay Rautela on Cone Trees with tips on conducting your own DIY recruitment for usability testing: http://www.conetrees.com/2009/02/articles/tips-for-effective-diy-participant-recruitment-for-usability-testing/.
