Usability testing [1]

Posted on behalf of Diane Leeson:

With the prospect of our students soon to leave for their summer vacation we thought it useful to do some usability testing as soon as possible so organised this for May.  Although our own version of Blacklight was not yet ready, we realised we could ask users to test two versions already in operation: SearchWorks at Stanford University and VirgoBeta at the University of Virginia.  We set up a few tasks to be done in each system and also asked for some general opinions on search and record display.  Hopefully, the feedback from this can be used in defining our own system.

We managed to get a small group of mainly students and a couple of academic staff to help us with this.  One half of the group tested SearchWorks first and the other half tested VirgoBeta first, just to see make sure that one system was not always benefiting from users gaining some familiarity with the system format.  We are still in the process of analysing the results, but it looks like we will have some useful information to work with.

Tags: blathull