Studying Family During a Usability Study
For the big project in my internet fundamentals course, I conducted a usability study on an out-of-state, public library website. My participants were five male family members ranging from ages 34 to 71. Two of them are blood relatives, and three of them are marriages relatives. All five have varying levels of a college education: one is currently a student, one dropped out after a semester, two took several courses during the mid 1960s and late 1990s, and one graduated with Master’s degree a few years ago. Three family members are veterans (Marines and Navy). Four of the family members occasionally visit their local libraries because of their kids or grandchildren. The singleton visits his local library regularly to use its computers.
For the study, three family members (the grandfather, the one-semester, and the singleton) used a laptop. The college student used his smartphone, and the college graduate used his tablet. Each family member participated in the study without the others in the living room. A usability study is supposed to test the website in question, not its participants. However if I were testing my family’s researching abilities, this is what I discovered:
1. Only the college student answered all catalog lookup questions in 90 seconds or less by using specific search filters. He used a keyword search at first for the question about finding books by Judy Blume before changing it to an author search.
2. Four family members mostly used a keyword search as the first response to all catalog questions. When asked to look up non-fiction books about World War II, the one-semester typed the inquiry exactly how the question read. The veterans found those books about a minute quicker than the two civilians.
3. All family members had different responses to the following question: “You want to borrow a book that the library does not own. Where on the website do you need to go for information?” Four of them remarked that if the book was not at the library, they would either look up the book on Google (the singleton and the one-semester) or buy it from Amazon (the college student and the grandfather). The college graduate stated that he would contact another library. All of them didn’t think the answer was going to be on the website.
4. I rephrased the abovementioned question: “Please look the library’s interlibrary loan policy.” “Huh?” responded two family members. “What’s that?” responded two others. The college graduate heard of interlibrary loan but wasn’t sure what it was.
5. I rephrased the question again: “You want to borrow a book that the library does not own. Where on the website do you need to go to find the library’s interlibrary loan policy?” After each family member had understood the question, they searched …and searched …and searched. Unfortunately, the website’s navigation prevented the laptop users from locating the policy, and two of them skipped to the next question after about four minutes. The college graduate couldn’t click the sub tabs on his tablet fast enough because they kept disappearing after two seconds. The college student could click the sub tabs within the two seconds on his smartphone, did not find the policy. However, he found a link to WorldCat and settled on that as an answer.
Based on this, I realized that most of these family members could benefit from a tutorial about catalog use. Learning how to navigate library catalogs well would save them time in the future. Meanwhile, being aware of their local libraries’ interlibrary loan policies could save them money as long as the policies are easily searchable.
