Usability testing to inform Institutional Repository upgrade June - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Usability testing to inform Institutional Repository upgrade June 13, 2019 Laura Henze, Kate Pechekhonova, Deb Verhoff, Jonathan Ji

THE MOMENT Our repository: • Originally rolled out in 2005 as a pilot • 21,863 items • 6.7 Terabytes • Papers, syllabi, datasets, images • User-driven organization • Minimal or no curation 2

THE MOMENT At a crossroads: ● Institutional commitment is high ● Our platform (DSpace) is gearing up for a major upgrade ● We have a new Dean who prioritizes data-driven design and outreach ● We want to implement Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) recommendations 3

TO BEGIN “Guerrilla” Usability Testing • Unscheduled, short sessions with 14 people, most undergrads • We gave them 2 simple tasks – search and browse • Everyone rated this site as very trustworthy • There was not much enthusiasm or curiosity about this site 4

THE QUESTION How can we make this repository mo more inviting and mo more engaging ? 5

IN-DEPTH USER INTERVIEWS To learn more: ● We interviewed 12 users ● Quantitative Inquiry (controlled vocabulary) ● Qualitative Inquiry (open-ended questions) 6

IN-DEPTH USER INTERVIEWS Current Site: Communities 7

IN-DEPTH USER INTERVIEWS Browse by Type 8

IN-DEPTH USER INTERVIEWS “Sunburst” Data Visualization 9

IN-DEPTH USER INTERVIEWS Paginated List on Homepage 10

IN-DEPTH USER INTERVIEWS Callout Added to Sidebar 11

IN-DEPTH USER INTERVIEWS Can you imagine a way an IR could be more useful to you and your peers? 12

IN-DEPTH USER INTERVIEWS On collection level “I wish I understood what I was looking at... Can I get a description?” – Almost every undergraduate we spoke to “Hard to know what the collections contain…(I’d like) some information that is not an abstract, but a color tag, which visually illustrate what the collections are.” – Several faculty members 13

IN-DEPTH USER INTERVIEWS On item level “People will get to my datasets from google and I want everything I added, the markup and the images, to be there on that page.” – Computer Science researcher using IR to disseminate large datasets The word “collection” is loaded for librarians and we want to use different terms (for general groupings). For example, “published papers.” – Librarian and scholar using IR to house curated collections 14

THE QUESTION How can we make this repository mo more inviting and mo more engaging ? 15

NEXT STEPS Time and time again, the issues seems to boil down to CONTEXT 16

NEXT STEPS Customized call-outs When a user logs in, we know their affiliation, so we can customize a welcome message that explains their privileges. 17

NEXT STEPS Current Community Page Google drive? 18

NEXT STEPS Community Page Intuitive groupings at the top level Do not have to reflect the database structure Top-level groupings need a description Show resource types whenever possible 19

NEXT STEPS Individual Item landing page We can create different landing pages for the types of items. Datasets GIS Survey Published Papers Conference Proceedings Online Journals e-Books 20

NEXT STEPS Using... COAR Controlled Vocabulary for Resource Type Genres DSpace Configurable Entitites 21

THANK YOU! Questions? Ideas? contact Kate Pechekhonova at ekate@nyu.edu or Laura Henze at laura.henze@nyu.edu 22