I have a new True Love Forever (sorry, NPR, but we can still be BFF's). Rather than build the suspense, I'm just going to blurt out the identity of my TLF: usability testing. It is intoxicating and I cannot think of how I went through life without it. I mean, I've heard others talk about how informative it is. How useful. How utterly revealing. So I've been wanting to try it for years. But it wasn't until I sat down knee to knee with usability testing that I . . . well, I swooned.

Let me pause my gushing for a moment and tell you why I am in love with usability testing. Basically, we can learn if you use things the way we think you use them: things like our website or our catalog. If you do, awesome, life is good. If you don't, however, we now have information about how to modify our website so that it does work the way you expect it to. The obvious outcome being that, if it works the way you expect it to, you will find the information you need.
How do we figure out how you use things like our website? There are a variety of ways to conduct usability tests. For this round, we developed some tasks for volunteers to complete using our website. We have a computer with software loaded on it that will record how the volunteer moves through the website and we have a microphone that will record the volunteer explaining why she (or he) clicked where she did. Plus, a couple of us librarians observe and jot down notes, in case the software goes on strike. The process for the volunteers takes between 10 and 20 minutes.
It honestly takes only a few people before we start to see trends, and a few more before we've reached saturation. (That's a research methods term that I learned this semester--it means that you've hit the point when you've interviewed enough people that you are getting the same information over and over and learning little that's new.)
If usability testing is so out of this world awesome, why weren't we already aboard the usability train? Mostly, it was because we didn't have the right mix of time, resources, and interest. But, this fall, we hit that sweet spot of synergy. A small group of us in the Libraries (Dale Askey, Thomas Bell, Jennny Dale, Donna Ekart, Steven Shelton, and myself, with support from our building services, finance, and tech people) came together and began planning. That planning flowered last week with our first usability testing. Right now, we're looking at how well people can find information on our website.
Once we've gathered and reviewed the results, we'll submit our findings to our library interfaces team.
Usability testing is an ongoing, iterative process, and you can trust that this is just the first of many usability studies we conduct. Because, we all need to remember, "If the user can't find it, the function's not there."
Image credit: Usability Testing in Progress by Roebot on Flickr.com
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