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

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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

THE MOMENT

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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

THE MOMENT

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“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

TO BEGIN

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

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THE QUESTION

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To learn more:

IN-DEPTH USER INTERVIEWS

• We interviewed 12 users
• Quantitative Inquiry (controlled vocabulary)
• Qualitative Inquiry (open-ended questions)

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Current Site: Communities

IN-DEPTH USER INTERVIEWS

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Browse by Type

IN-DEPTH USER INTERVIEWS

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“Sunburst” Data Visualization

IN-DEPTH USER INTERVIEWS

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Paginated List on Homepage

IN-DEPTH USER INTERVIEWS

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Callout Added to Sidebar

IN-DEPTH USER INTERVIEWS

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Can you imagine a way an IR could be more useful to you and your peers?

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

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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

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IN-DEPTH USER INTERVIEWS

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

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THE QUESTION

Time and time again, the issues seems to boil down to

CONTEXT

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NEXT STEPS

When a user logs in, we know their affiliation, so we can customize a welcome message that explains their privileges.

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NEXT STEPS

Customized call-outs

Current Community Page Google drive?

NEXT STEPS

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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

NEXT STEPS

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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

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NEXT STEPS

COAR Controlled Vocabulary for Resource Type Genres DSpace Configurable Entitites

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NEXT STEPS

Using...

Questions? Ideas? contact Kate Pechekhonova at ekate@nyu.edu

• r Laura Henze at laura.henze@nyu.edu

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THANK YOU!