Thoughts on usability testing the next-gen catalogue

Libraries and information, User experience of the next-gen catalogue 3 Minutes

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

What I like about usability testing

I have always found usability testing library systems enjoyable – as a participant, facilitator, and manager – and gotten useful things out of it. My preferred style is Steve Krug’s “Lost our lease, going-out-of-business-sale usability testing” from Don’t make me think (2006) with about five subjects and a very focused idea about what I wanted to get out of the process. By that I mean specific problems that needed user feedback to inform our judgments.

What I like best about this method is it represents effective action you can take quickly on a shoestring. You can short-circuit the endless librarians-around-a-table discussions you can get into about Web stuff: let’s test this out rather than just talking about it! I have defended using this method with small groups, as even testing a few users tells you something about what your users are actually doing whereas testing no-one tells you nothing at all. In writing that I realised I was paraphrasing Jakob Nielsen, “Zero users give zero insights”.

We’ll likely employ this method when we rework the Senate House Library Web site next year.

What I don’t

I think there are some problems with this style of testing as a methodology so have been looking into other methods for investigating Encore.

My main problem is the artificial nature of the test. Putting a person in your usability “lab” with a camera recording and asking them to do various tasks does not produce a natural experience of using your library catalogue. Your methods of observing the test will alter the users behaviour: these are observer effects you cannot hope to control for. In my dissertation interviews I tried to temper this by focusing on subject searching, browsing, and exploration of the next-generation catalogue interface rather than asking for subjects to complete tasks. I used a form of close questioning to explore participants’ understanding of Encore. This relies on asking probing questions along the lines of:

  • How?
  • Why?
  • What?
  • What if?

Ultimately this is based on a contextual inquiry approach described by Beyer and Holtzblatt in Contextual design (1998), but done with the understanding that it was taking place in an artificial environment not “the field”.

In truth the usability testing-style part of the investigation was meant as a warm-up towards comparisons between two or more catalogues using the repertory grid technique. I thought this worked reasonably well. The usability test section yielded up a good deal of qualitative data and certainly worked to get participants to the right frame of mind for grid construction.

It also produced useful results about for tweaks we could make to improve Encore as a better fit to readers’ expectations of a library catalogue. That is, it worked as usability testing.

However as I did the work I was aware of the artificial nature of the process affecting how my subjects behaved and their problems engaging with the process in anything like a natural way. The cognitive walkthrough style is difficult on two levels: it feels odd and a bit embarrassing to do it as a subject, but also it makes you think about what you are doing and how you should express yourself which affects your behaviour. Several participants picked up on this during their interviews and criticised it.

I’ve found our readers experience of the catalogue is deeply affective, and think we need to dig deeper into that affective layer to understand the user experience. I think ethnographic methods like the contextual inquiry approach is the way to go here, and will return to this in my next post.

Final point. I know our vendor has done their own usability testing on the Encore interface including informing changes to the current look and feel, in use on our catalogue. I have no reason to doubt its effectiveness or rigour. We could do usability testing of Encore, but I doubt we would add much beyond what the vendor already knows.

References

Beyer, H. and Holtzblatt, K. (1998) Contextual design. London: Morgan Kaufmann.

Krug, S. (2006) Don’t make me think. 2nd edn. Berkeley, CA: New Riders.

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