The first round of testing went really well. Yesterday I took a few hours off from work to go to the science library, where one of the librarians was kind enough to let me use her office. My awesome supervisor provided a free sandwich lunch to anyone who would participate in my test, and I ended up with five undergraduate students (1 freshman, two sophomores, and two seniors) and one staff member. I recorded all the sessions in Adobe Captivate so that I could focus on directing the sessions rather than taking notes by hand or on a computer. I’m so glad I learned to use that in school a few semesters ago; it was nice not to have to learn a new piece of software.
I used a script to explain the test to the participants. After that, I moved into the test itself, which consisted of four pre-test questions, three “general impressions” questions, seven task-based scenarios, and four post-test questions. The sessions took from 11-16 minutes to complete. I need to watch the recordings, but I feel like I got a significant amount of feedback about the DiscoverLibrary design. There are definitely a few easy fixes the design team could make that would help students navigate the site more easily.
My next task is to take notes on all the sessions and somehow impose order on the many, many opinions I got during the testing session. I’ll put it in some sort of report to present to the librarians at the end of the semester.