Usability Tests, Card Sorting, and Databases

Pretty busy week, even though finals are wrapping up next week at Willamette. So we finished the month of April with a week-long sprint for me on Usability Testing. Sara volunteered WU for working with the Digital Objects in Primo with the Alliance and that ended up being the same week that we were going to do the Usability Testing for the new Academic Commons.

Usability Testing Takeaways:

1. We need to offer more than a $10 gift card if we want to get folks time for 20 to 30 minutes
2. Fewer tasks in a session are better than more.
3. Take the best notes you can, but having it videotaped would be so much easier. We have the technology lets use it.
4. I hope we can actually test the main website, but I have a feeling we are going to have to wait until the end of the summer.

Card Sorting:

1. Do not have a card sorting task with 66 cards in it, that's a bit of an overkill.
2. The Optimalsort from the Alliance which came from Optimal Workshops is pretty slick, I have now signed up for a free account and we may use it for our next testing.

Databases:

1. I finished going through all of our database entries so we were up to date with regards to whether or not the vendor had flipped to SSL. It was also just a good cleanup project, as a number of databases were not functioning. Then each time you might flip the URL to SSL you also had to update EZproxy configuration.