Is anyone else doing Codecademy’s Code Year? I’m really enjoying it so far, even though I’m a bit behind where I should be. I took one course in C++ in college, which I disliked (mostly because it was a huge class and, as one of only a few humanities majors, I felt left out), so it’s encouraging to be able to learn to code a bit on my own just for fun. Plus, Javascript, HTML, and CSS are all important things to have in one’s toolkit these days.
First round of testing
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.
Recruiting testers
Today I need to find someone to run through my usability test with me. I need to figure out roughly how long it will take to administer the test to a typical user. For the test, I’ll start by reading instructions from a script, asking some pre-test questions, administering the task-based scenarios, and then asking some post-test questions. I anticipate it taking about ten minutes, but it may take longer.
I might be able to ask some of my colleagues to help me out, but I don’t want to take them away from their work. Maybe I will collar someone at lunch!
Usability
I’m working on a practicum this spring with Vanderbilt University Libraries. The libraries have adopted a search and discovery tool called DiscoverLibrary, which is powered by Primo. I’m going to get a few things done by May:
- Design and carry out a study on how students, faculty, and staff use DiscoverLibrary
- Create a guide that library staff members can use when they conduct usability tests on library tools in the future
- Tweak the search algorithm in DiscoverLibrary to see how that changes search behavior in the tool (and hopefully improves things for people using the system)
- Present the results of this information to a group of Vanderbilt librarians
Whew! That’s a lot of stuff to work on. So far, I have worked on my guide and have all the paperwork ready to go for my usability test, which should happen sometime next week.