User feedback and problems with the next-gen catalogue

This is the first post in a series exploring user understanding of next-generation catalogues:

• Part 1: User feedback and problems with the next-generation catalogue
• Part 2: Thoughts on usability testing the next-gen catalogue
• Part 3: Towards ethnographies of the next-gen catalogue user

Our situation

We made our next-generation catalogue / discovery interface, Encore by Innovative Interfaces live in June 2011. Since then I’ve been trying to better understand the causes of the problems readers have with it.

As a starting point I’ve been doing this through the lens of the mental models theory; but I’m trying not to see every problem in terms of one particular theory just because that’s what I’m looking for. Sometimes a missing feature is just a missing feature, to paraphrase something attributed to Freud.

I’d expected some experienced users would find problems moving to a next-gen catalogue because their “bibliographic retrieval” mental model fitted to a traditional library catalogue would not fit so well to a “web search” style catalogue. To view this in reverse, and much more fairly blame the catalogue than the user: I had thought the next-gen catalogue in trying to be like a Web search engine would cause some problems for experienced users. I’m looking at this as mental models failure or mismatch, not implying it’s people not wanting to change.

I expected problems would surface easily as we positioned Encore aggressively, making it the default search (named Quick Search) when you visit the Senate House Library catalogue front page. This was meant as a nudge: you can select the old WebPAC catalogue but you’re not offered it as the default and it’s a little bit of effort to choose it.

Because of this my staff training for Encore focused on helping staff better explain how Encore works, with a view to building better models in the minds of readers.

User feedback

I’ve been gathering feedback reported via staff, Twitter and Facebook, and our online feedback form. Broadly they fit into these categories:

• A general I like it (~10%) / I don’t like it or really don’t like it (~20%)
• I can’t work out how to do x like you can in the old catalogue / It lacks feature x the previous catalogue has (~20%).
• Suggestion for an enhancement (my personal favourite) (~9%)
• Questions or feedback not about Encore (~40%)

The numbers of comments not about Encore suggests the first thing I should do is put an easy-to-find “Ask us a question” and a “Report problem with this record” link on each page! We don’t have that on the old catalogue so I expect we’re missing out on picking up potential enquiries there.

A good chunk of problems related to “I can’t work out how to do x” represent application of mental models from the old catalogue onto the new catalogue. For example an expectation of being able to browse based on phrase indexing of fields like title. It simply doesn’t exist in Encore, and it can be baffling if this is what you expected. I also got some interesting comments about the look and feel of Encore as “cluttered” or “busy”, which affected the user’s perception of the catalogue functionality way beyond what you’d expect. Innovative have since released a new Encore skin which is subjectively much cleaner and pretty much nails that problem.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised to receive positive comments at all as my expectation in a customer service situation is people are more likely to spend the time if they want to say something negative. I think twitter helps with this as it’s much easier to say something immediately by microblogging than marshalling your thoughts and filling in a ponderous official-looking form. Overall I’m happy to get a 1:2 ratio of positive to negative, and of course each negative comment is an opportunity to say something about Encore and better explain it.

By the way, some of the positive comments are wonderful such as this tweet:

BL Catalogue breaks when you search for “cassell’s”. SHL Catalogue has sexy new look; finds it at once. #senatehousewins @SenateHouseLib

— Will Tattersdill (@faceometer) June 10, 2011

Next steps

It’s useful to get any feedback about what you’re doing, but passively collecting data is not going to get us where we need to be. The question I want to answer is along the lines of: how can the library make this catalogue better support readers and improve their experience of Senate House Libraries? This is going to be more complex than answering usability-type questions about the Encore interface versus the old WebPAC, or comparing the difference in tweaking around the edges of the Encore configuration. Not to say I haven’t done plenty of that already…

To do this we need to actively gather data on our readers’ experiences with Encore and how they make use of it during information seeking. More to come on this later.

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