Abstract
This article describes a usability study of the University of Southern Mississippi Libraries’ website conducted in early 2016. The study involved six participants from each of four key user groups – undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty, and library employees – and consisted of six typical library search tasks such as finding a book and an article on a topic, locating a journal by title, and looking up hours of operation. Library employees and graduate students completed the study’s tasks most successfully, whereas undergraduate students performed fairly simple searches and relied on the Libraries’ discovery tool, Primo. The study’s results identified several problematic features that impacted each user group, including library employees. This increased internal buy-in for usability-related changes in a later website redesign.
Highlights
IntroductionUsability testing has become a common way for libraries to assess their websites
Within the last decade, usability testing has become a common way for libraries to assess their websites
Eager to gain a better understanding of how users experience our website, we assembled a two-person team and conducted the first usability study of the University of Southern Mississippi Libraries website in February 2016
Summary
Usability testing has become a common way for libraries to assess their websites. The Web Advisory Committee—which is tasked with developing, maintaining, and enhancing the Libraries’ online presence—wanted to determine if the content on the website was organized in a way that made sense to users and facilitated the efficient use of the Libraries’ online resources. Our usability study involved six participants from each of the following library user groups: undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty, and library employees. We included library employees in this study to compare their approach to the website to that of other users in the INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND LIBRARIES | DECEMBER 2017 hope of increasing internal stakeholders’ buy-in for recommendations resulting from this study. We will give special consideration to how the behavior of library employees compared to that of other groups
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