Posted on behalf of Diane Leeson
Analysis of the usability testing we did back in May on two other existing Blacklight implementations – SearchWorks at Stanford University and VirgoBeta at the University of Virginia – shows the following general results.
Not surprisingly, doing a basic search was the thing which users found to be the easiest with all participants getting this right first time. Clicking on the title to get the full record on screen was also easy in almost all cases. The elements which gave the most difficulty were related to refining searches, in particular limiting to online items and finding items in an individual library. However, by the time users were asked to refine a search to just books at the end of the SearchWorks test they all got this first time round, which indicates that they were starting to pick this up as you would expect.
When viewing the full record users generally identified the class numbers ok, but had more difficulty in identifying the number of items and the location. This may reflect a lack of clarity in those areas, although it could also just be unfamiliarity with the layout.
There was one element of each of the different interfaces which divided opinion. On SearchWorks this was the tag cloud on the main search page which some testers liked and others hated. Interestingly, a quick look at SearchWorks today shows that the tag cloud now seems to have been removed. On VirgoBeta the controversial element was the Recently Added book covers which some testers thought was helpful, but others felt this was too random and irrelevant.
We also asked our testers to give their opinion on which interface they preferred. Results were:
- 7 preferred VirgoBeta
- 5 preferred SearchWorks
- 3 liked different aspects of both and made no choice.
The fact that there is no strong preference for one interface over the other suggests that both are acceptable. Our own version of Blacklight shows more resemblance to the VirgoBeta model than the SearchWorks one at present.
Tags: blathull
