Empowering Users through Usability Testing: What We Learned About our Library Catalog

Usability testing allows librarians to directly experience a program or application with the user. By testing programs and applications, we learn what works and what does not, helping to better serve our community. Randall Library at UNC Wilmington recently performed usability testing of our online catalog. Our online catalog has not been significantly redesigned in many years. With the release of a recent API upgrade, we now have the ability to change the entire look and feel of the catalog. But without usability testing, we were not sure where to start. In our tests, we observed students at UNCW performing various tasks in our catalog, such as searching for items, retrieving items, saving items to lists for further research, and accessing electronic resources. In this session we will explore further how librarians can easily perform usability testing with users, what we learned from testing our online catalog with students, and our plans for the future of our library catalog based on the findings of the usability study.
Slides available here

Empowering Users through Usability Testing: What We Learned About our Library Catalog Presentation