2015 Charleston Library Conference

User Experience (UX) is high on libraries' agendas today as they strive to make collections discoverable, optimize resource usage, and support users in achieving their academic goals. Intuitive, user friendly discovery services are key to making this happen and therefore, many libraries are performing usability or user studies for their systems and services. This session will provide useful insights into the process for completing such studies, ways to put the results into practice, and user interface and user services design in general.

The session will reflect different viewpoints and discuss the stages of designing a new User Interface. It will showcase expertise in UX in general and focus on real examples from the usability tests and discovery tool implementations of The University of Kansas (KU) and Tulane University and the new User Interface design of Primo (Ex Libris).

The University of Kansas will present the process they underwent in order to engage their library staff with their discovery tool – including a survey with KU librarians comparing Primo to Google Scholar and their favorite databases , the implementation of the suggested improvements to the discovery tool, and a second survey to test the success of their changes.

Tulane University will present the redesign of their Primo User interface, including usability tests, identification of improvement areas, implementation of changes and follow up usage analysis to understand the effect of the changes.

Ex Libris will present the main principles for the new Primo user interface , and discuss benefits of state-of-the-art technologies, such as Angular, when considering re-design and customization of websites and discovery services.

Audience members will be asked to share their experiences and priorities with user services and user interface design.