1. Acumen Usability Study Conducted January 2012 Amanda Presnell

2. On January 17 & 18, we conducted a usability study on the Acumen interface and searching capabilities. We set up a poster on the first floor of Gorgas advertising $5 Starbucks cards as a reward for participants. We gave ourselves 4 days to recruit 10 participants, but due to word of mouth, we were able to complete the study in just 2 days.

3. Goals of the Study Determine the most significant usability issues that are preventing users from completing their goals or are resulting in inefficiencies. Determine what aspects of Acumen work well for users. Determine what users find frustrating. Determine the most common errors or mistakes users are making.

4. Demographic Information 3 graduate students 7 undergraduate students 6 claimed previous experience with databases like this one 1 had visited Acumen before Political science, psychology, international studies, economics, human environmental sciences, business, mathematics, library science

5. Task 1 Explore the Acumen homepage and see what you can learn about the site. Survey o Have you visited this database before? o What do you like or dislike about what you see? o What can you tell about this interface about what is available here? o What is the first thing you clicked on (or wanted to click on) and why?

6. Task 2 William Crawford Gorgas was the son of Amelia Gayle Gorgas, who this library is named after. He was the surgeon general of the United States and I know he did some work yellow fever. Would you see if you can find any of his work on that subject in this database? How would participants conduct a search? Expected results

7. What participants actually did: o “William Crawford Gorgas yellow fever” in one box = 2 results o “William Crawford Gorgas/ yellow fever” = FATAL ERROR o “William Gorgas, yellow fever” = 1 result o Exact Words, “William Crawford Gorgas yellow fever” = 0 results o Any Words, “William Crawford Gorgas yellow fever” = 54,489 results o Wanted an advanced search option but couldn’t figure out how to search more than one term o Attempted a Boolean search in one box, “William Crawford Gorgas and yellow fever” = 1 result o Searched on the wrong tab o Opened finding aid to look for items but got lost

8. Task 3 You are doing a project on Robert Kennedy and you want to know if there is anything in this database you could use for your project. How would go about that search? How would participants deal with different types of materials, such as photographs & audio? Expected results

9. What participants actually did: o Most did the search as we thought they would o Searched on research tab o Exact words, “Robert Kennedy,” chose Subject from field drop-down menu = 0 results o Exact words, “Robert Kennedy,” chose Title from field drop-down = 3 results

10. Survey for Tasks 2 & 3 Survey o What did you think of the results you found? o How do you think this interface could be improved? o What was easy or difficult about this experience?

11. Suggestions for General Improvement It is helpful that individual Corolla pages have metadata, but the titles should be something other than just “Page 146” so that the searcher knows what the item is. (7/10)

12. All items should have descriptions next to the title in the search results list. (6/10)

13. Many participants just had no idea what Acumen was. An explanation is needed of what kinds of things can be found in Acumen. There is a bit of this information on http://lib.ua.edu/digital but it could use some more detail and it should be considered if this is the best place for that description. (5/10)http://lib.ua.edu/digital What is a guide to a collection? (3/10) Participants got confused when they clicked on the “Browse Collections” link because it took them out of Acumen. (2/10)

14. Searching The fields drop-down menu should either be explained, simplified, or removed. Even when participants attempted to use this menu, it often greatly limited the results they were getting. For example, a search for “Robert Kennedy” ignoring the fields drop-down returns 12 results. A search for “Robert Kennedy” with the field restricted to “Subject” only returned 8 results. (5/10)

15. Make the + button to add a second search term more visible or make it easier to see how to add a search term or perform an advanced search. (4/10) The difference in searching using 1 box or 2 is confusing. For example, searching “William Crawford Gorgas” in one box and “yellow fever” in another returns many more results than searching “William Crawford Gorgas yellow fever” in one box. (4/10)

16. Slow load time for searches. (3/10) Would like a way to limit the kinds of items a search returns, such as the ability to exclude photos from search results. (1/10) Is the “Ignoring Case/Considering Case” drop-down menu necessary? (1/10)

17. Audio It is difficult to understand how to play audio files when an item has multiple “pages.” You have to click through a couple of different web pages to get to the audio file. (3/10) Audio files claimed to have transcripts with them in the description, but transcripts were no where to be found. (1/10) Audio file icons should be labeled so you don’t have to click on them and open a new page to see what they are. (1/10)

18. Viewing Bigger viewing box for items. (2/10) Scroll bar for when an image is zoomed in. (2/10)

19. What They Liked Thumbnail images on the homepage and the fact that the title displays when you hover over an image. Subject headings.

20. Improvements Already Made We heard from several participants about the need for a “Back to Search Results” button. Will Jones has already created this for us. Thank you Will!

21. What We Learned Good general information about how new users might interact with Acumen. Lack of understanding about possible uses of Acumen/ digital collections. Search and display issues. Focus on more specific issues and/or users for future studies?