Post Poster from Emerging Leaders Team D Usability Project

I wanted to share the poster from the Emerging Leaders Team D Usability Project, in case you had a scheduling conflict that prevented your seeing it at annual. I asked the members of Team D ( Susan Franklin, Beth Larkee, Zeth Lietzau, Jack Maness) to design a project that would build on some interesting threads that emerged from the focus groups held at Midwinter. They were asked to follow up on Council and NMRT, looking for age or ALA-experience vs. newbies differences in website usage and needs. They did a really fantastic job!

Some key facts:

• Over 75% of respondents in both groups felt consistency of layout, navigation, and labeling across similar parts of the site (division pages, committee pages, office pages) was either very important or somewhat important; the exception was that only 64% of Council respondents considered round table consistency to be important.
• While almost half (49%) of the respondents thought information was easy to find on the site, 45% thought it was difficult, and 6% did not find the information they were seeking. (This latter group would be interesting to follow up. Did they not find it because it wasn't there, or was it there but in an unexpected area, labeled in an unusual way? And if it wasn't there, is it something that should be on our website, or is it something that does not exist anywhere? During the next fiscal year, we will set up an exit survey on the site to gather this type of information in more detail.)
• Council respondents used the site more frequently, and tended to be looking for office or meeting/conference/event information, while NMRT respondents looked for Round Table information and used the site to look at jobs.
• 51% of respondents browse to locate information. Respondents under age 35 were equally likely (16%) to search using the internal search tool as a browser based search engine but were significantly more likely (16%) to use an outside search engine to locate results than older respondents (5%).

Lynn Williams ("Council") and Krysten McKnight ("NMRT") are the personas that emerging leaders team D developed for our use as we engage in ongoing usability and design of the website.

Warning: this almost 60 megabyte poster file will take minute or two to download, but it makes for fascinating reading.
http://ucblibraries.colorado.edu/engineering/el%20team%20d%20poster.pdf

Louise Gruenberg
Sr. Usability Officer