The main purpose of the River Campus Libraries' website is to help students, staff, and faculty locate physical and digital resources including books, articles, videos, and journals. In the past, I have found this tool frustrating. First, the search often fails if you input a query in even a slightly different format than the format used in the resource's entry. Second, I have found a variety of annoying and confusing interface bugs. However, for the purpose of this blog entry I looked at the cite to see what tasks I might have my users do in a usability study.
Since, the whole point of this cite is to locate resource most of my task will probably ask the user to locate something using the system. Resources can be located by title, keyword, author, journal, call number, and a few others. I will probably have people locate a book using some of these different restricted searches. I would also like to give people different sets of information about a book and ask them to find it without telling them which search to use. Do they look it up by the title or the author?
I also want to explore tasks that begin once a book has been found. For example, how does the user find other books by the same author? Does the cite provide the flexibility to do things like this in an intuitive way?
Lastly, I would like to create tasks that test basic navigation. Can the user easily return to the homepage? Does the user understand where links should take him before he clicks.
Nate
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