Lib Guides Usability Study: Site and content study
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CHALLENGE
The subject guides on the UW Library site provide students with topic-specific research guidance. Each guide is handcrafted by a subject expert librarian using the LibGuides content management system. The challenge of this project was to create guidelines for subject expert librarians that allowed them to redesign their guides in a way that addressed key usability issues while keeping in mind:- The subjective nature of each subject
- Technical limitations of LibGuides
- The complexity of the change and time required to make it
MY ROLE
As a Usability Engineer for the UW Libraries, I managed this study, including: recruiting participants, creating a test protocol, moderating each of the ten participants, collecting data, analyzing results, creating a highlights video, making preliminary recommendations, and presenting to subject liaisons
PROCESS
- Create a usability strategy
- Meet with stakeholders to discern main issues
- Write research questions
- Conduct usability study
- Analyze data & report findings
- Generate preliminary recommendations & design rationale
- Meet with stakeholders and liaisons to create a checklist for guide authors to make changes
RESULT
Though this project is still in its implementation phase, feedback has already been received. A reference librarian approached us, relieved that the changes we recommended were being acted on, as she had issues in the past with guides that did not have enough subject-specific material. My team and I also received positive feedback after our findings presentation, and a poster for this project has recently been approved for the Teaching and Learning Symposium.