by 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.
