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UX - web

The website is everything

April 2, 2014 by 0 Comments

I recently conducted a survey about my library’s website. We’re doing a redesign and wanted feedback on how our website it used, and more importantly (to me anyway) what our users felt was working and what needed improvement. We sent it out to the entire university community and were thrilled to get about 2000 responses (about a 10% response rate). I’m excited that our users have some strong feelings about library resources and want to share them.

We’re still going through the survey results and conducting analysis. It’s probably a good sign that, so far, there has been nothing terribly surprising. Things we thought were pain points are in fact causing problems for our users. What’s become even more apparent to me is that everything that is online/linked to from the library website is considered the website. I’d guess that about 1/3 to 1/2 of the comments so far have actually been about problems that are not the website but the OPAC, the discovery layer, our databases or the link resolver.

As librarians, we know the myriad of systems that our libraries use. Our users do not. And ideally it shouldn’t matter to them – they just want to easily find their resources, regardless of what it is. A large problem is that our systems don’t always play well with each other. The navigation changes between them. The look and feel may change between them. It alters, and usually reduces, the overall user experience as our users move between systems that we have varying degrees of control over.

So when we ask about the library website, we get feedback about all of our online resources. Is this bad? Of course not! In one fell swoop, we’ve gotten feedback on all sorts of resources we absolutely need more user feedback on. I expect this one survey will keep me busy for quite some time.

For me, the bigger question is how to get all of these online resources to work better, integrate better, and create a better user experience?   I also wonder if our goal of consistent branding across resources causes confusion and reinforces the idea that it is all the library website or helps provide a seamless experience. In the end, we need to make the experience easy for our users – and the survey has certainly shown me that we can do lots to improve it at my institution.

web

The Power of Observation

January 27, 2012 by 0 Comments

I’m new at this whole web services librarian gig. I’m still excited and have tons to learn and read. One of the top things on my to do list was to get a better idea of how people are using the library website. Of course, I’ve fiddled with it but I don’t search like everyone else. Now that we’re into the throes of the winter term, I took the opportunity to watch some of my colleagues as they taught library resources to students. It’s been an enlightening experience in many ways. True to form, no two librarians taught the same way and they all approached using the library website and library resources in slightly different ways. I’ve come away from the experience with a new understanding of the website and a list of things I could change to help make things a little easier.

What’s next? Putting some of these changes in place where I can. I also plan to observe on the reference desk when I return from Super Conference (say hi if you see me), as I expect there will be further issues that are highlighted there.

While observing my colleagues as they teach and use the library website is useful, they are not the average user. Observing in classes, I was able to observe the students as well and see if they tripped over navigating our resources. Watching my colleagues is useful but I must admit, I’m really excited to start observing students and faculty without library aid. We will get a much better idea of how our users approach our website.

So, why am I doing this? In regards to observing my colleagues, it helps provide a context as to how they use are resources. The same will happen when I expand observations to students and faculty. Why do I want context – to design a better site. We’re in the process of evaluating possible CMS and the more I know, the better informed decision I can make. I recently attended a webinar on website usability. One of the things I took away (and strongly agree with) was simply this: move decisions from opinion to data. That’s what observation is helping with – I’m collecting data on how people actually use the site and from there, I can help make the library website a more useful resource.