8 October 2010
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR b.showers@jisc.ac.uk
KEVEN
KEVEN
First phase of reskin coding nearly complete
Start of term jinxed? Thank Friday for NGINX
OCT 07, 2010 12:16P.M.
OCT 07, 2010 12:03P.M.
The first phase of the reskin is nearly complete. Matt Spence has been working on the code received back from the company PHP2HTML . He has been fixing and marking-up the code for the search (simple and advanced), search results, and record screens.
Lulled into a false sense of security by our load testing results, we blithely thought we could let VuFind afloat in Welcome Week, where it would serenely bob around, being used by happy freshers (are you still allowed to call them that?).
So far, the results are only visible on Bane, our development machine, but they do look very impressive, and Matt has been able to apply his concept designs and put them into practice very well.
We didn’t bank (or had forgotten from all our previous experience with early days of WebVoyage) about the STICKY KEY on the OPAC terminal (are you still allowed to call them that?), or the carelessly placed tome of Blackstone’s Statutes on the keyboard. Oh boy.
He still needs finish the issue and bug fixing for these screens, and we need to conduct usability tests (yes, we are beginning to lag behind schedule a bit).
Luckily it came to light just before Welcome Week, and we had some time to react. VuFind has now been frontended with NGINX, which shuts out repeated requests from a single machine – meaning that the service no longer collapses.
The coding for the user account functionality screens has also been received back from PHP2HTML, and Matt will be working on that in the next iteration.
Further maintenance work will take place this term to improve the resilience of the server.
When KEVEN goes into production on https://catalogue.pilot.kent.ac.uk/ later this term, we hope everyone will be able to see what we have been up to for themselves.
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KEVEN
JISC LMS Programme Meeting at ECDL 2010 OCT 07, 2010 11:14A.M. Our two KEVEN developers, Stewart Brownrigg (Technical Lead) and Matthew Spence (Web Developer), attended the JISC LMS Programme Meeting at the ECDL 2010 conference in Glasgow in the second week of September. Matt and Stewart report how useful they found both the LMS programme meeting, and the ECDL conference sessions that they were able to attend. We have taken particular note of the dynamic location mapping project (“findmylibrarybook”) happening at LSE. Work at Sussex on CREDAUL and the SWWHEPSRCH project also have implications for us as an institution. Outside of the JISC LMS stream, we have been looking at the use of QR codes by Bath and Huddersfield.
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Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR b.showers@jisc.ac.uk
8 October 2010
Stewart and Matt agreed that one positive was the realisation that other OSS users (including VuFind institutions) were all having similar problems with support, development and maintenance, and how as a community, we might work together to share the load: especially as locally implemented solutions move institutions further away from “trunk” code bases, and given that some OSS (VuFind especially) are not designed to support this kind of modularity.
LMS MASH
Pondering the One Minute Pitches OCT 07, 2010 02:52A.M. I’ve been thinking about the ‘One Minute Pitches’ that each project was asked to complete following the Glasgow event. Given that I did a (short) Three Minute Pitch at the event it only seems fair that I give the One Minute Pitch a go too.
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CAMBRIDGE LIBRARY WIDGETS I felt that Cambridge Uni used imagery very effectively to explain their #CULWIDGETS project in Glasgow so I’m having a go at that approach too:
What a difference a day makes OCT 07, 2010 05:27A.M. The leaves are turning and the students are back in Cambridge. We always saw the start of this term as the real launch target for the library widget as a fully-fledged service. And taking a look at the Google analytics
Just in case you need a hand with the visual metaphors, here’s what I think we’re aiming to do with our project synthesis liaison work: - look at things from a different angle and share that view with the programme. - adjust our lense so that sometimes we’re picking up on detail and sometimes the whole picture. - share any external messages which seem appropriate (however tangentially). - and, at the risk of getting a bit deep, to ‘look through a glass, darkly‘ across the programme strands and within each project to reveal the gems that you’re all unearthing as your projects progress.
our little bird is ready to fly! Guess when the start of term was ... We’ve been working hard on getting the widget out there - blogging, inveigling it into library inductions, promoting at the Freshers’ Fair, tweeting and generally making a nuisance of ourselves.
I am a big fan of Wordles as a method of getting to the heart of what is being said ... the wordle below was made by taking the text from all the One Minute Pitches that were featured in the Tabbloid in my last post:
The embeddable version of the widget is now springing up all over the place, from our new unified Cambridge Libraries Gateway, to forming the account functionality for our (also new) LibrarySearch resource discovery platform. Everywhere you look the widget is gluing services and systems together, offering consistent functionality in a diverse online world. We’re hoping for 2,000 unique users a month by Xmas (c. a fifth of our undergraduates) and are well on the way. That kind of usage certainly makes the “real estate” at the bottom of the widget valuable property for messages and info for our users. So it was nice to see the usage figures take off on Tuesday - 24 little hours in Cambridge can make quite a difference! It’s possibly not an artefact that should be subjected to hours of academic scrutiny and analysis to distil its hidden depths but the things that stand out at first glance are interesting - I’m taking it as a good sign that ‘students’ feature so prominently, given the user centred nature of the programme
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Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR b.showers@jisc.ac.uk
8 October 2010
RESEARCHING USABILITY
Interview-based tasks
davidhamilluoe
The interview-based task is Spool’s answer to the shortfalls of the Scavenger Hunt task. This is where you create a task with the input of the participant and agree what successful completion of the task will mean before they begin.
OCT 05, 2010 04:19A.M. When carrying out usability studies on search interfaces, it’s often better to favour interview-based tasks over pre-defined ‘scavenger-hunt’ tasks. In this post I’ll explain why this is the case and why you may have to sacrifice capturing metrics in order to achieve this realism.
When using search interfaces, people often develop search tactics based upon the results they are being shown. As a result they can change tactics several times. They can change their view of the problem based upon the feedback they are getting.
In 2006, Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering wrote an article entitled Interview-Based Tasks: Learning from Leonardo DiCaprio in it he explains that it often isn’t enough to create test tasks that ask participants to find a specific item on a website. He calls such a task a Scavenger-Hunt task. Instead he introduces the idea of interview-based tasks.
Whilst testing the Aquabrowser catalogue for the University of Edinburgh, participants helped me to create tasks that I’d never have been able to do so on my own. Had we not done this, I wouldn’t have been able to observe their true behaviour.
When testing the search interface for a library catalogue, a Scavenger Hunt task might read:
One participant used the search interface to decide her approach to an essay question. Together we created a task scenario where she was given an essay to write on National identity in the work of Robert Louis Stevenson.
You are studying Russian Literature and your will be reading Leo Tolstoy soon. Find the English version of Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’ in the library catalogue.
She had decided that the architecture in Jekyll and Hyde whilst set in London, had reminded her more of Edinburgh. She searched for sources that referred to Edinburgh’s architecture in Scottish literature, opinion on architecture in Stevenson’s work and opinion on architecture in national identity.
I’ll refer to this as the Tolstoy Task in this post. Most of your participants (if they’re university students) should have no trouble understanding the task. But it probably won’t feel real to any of them. Most of them will simply type ‘war and peace’ into the search and see what happens.
The level of engagement she had in the task allowed me to observe behaviour that a pre-written task would never have been able to do.
Red routes The Tolstoy Task is not useless, you’ll probably still witness things of interest. So it’s better than having no testing at all.
It also made no assumptions about how she uses the interface. In the Tolstoy task, I’d be assuming that people arrive at the interface with a set amount of knowledge. In an interview-based task I can establish how much knowledge they would have about a specific task before they use the interface. I simply ask them.
But it answers only one question – When users know the title of the book, author and how to spell them both correctly, how easy is it to find the English version of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace?
Realism versus measurement A very specific question like this can still be useful for many websites. For example a car insurance company could ask – When the user has all of his vehicle documents in front of him, how easy is it for them to get a quote from our website?
The downside to using such personalised tasks is that it’s very difficult to report useful measurements. When you pre-define tasks you know that each participant will perform the same task. So you can measure the performance of that task. By doing this you can ask “How usable is this interface?” and provide an answer.
Answering this question would give them a pretty good idea of how well their website was working. This is because it’s probably the most important journey on the site. Most websites have what Dr David Travis calls Red Routes – the key journeys on a website. When you measure the usability of a website’s red routes you effectively measure the usability of the site.
With interview-based tasks this is often impossible because the tasks vary in subject and complexity. It’s often then inappropriate to use them to provide an overall measure of usability. Exposing issues
However many search interfaces such as that for a university library catalogue, don’t have one or two specific tasks that are more important than any others. It’s possible to categorise tasks but difficult to introduce them into a usability test without sacrificing a lot of realism.
I believe that usability testing is more reliable as a method for exposing issues than it is at providing a measure of usability. This is why I favour using interview-based tasks in most cases.
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Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR b.showers@jisc.ac.uk
8 October 2010
It’s difficult to say how true to life the experience you’re watching is. If they were sitting at home attempting a task then there’d be nobody watching them and taking notes. Nobody would be asking them to think aloud and showing interest in what they were doing. So if they fail a task in a lab, can you be sure they’d fail it at home? But for observing issues I feel it’s more reliable. If participants misunderstand something about the interface in a test, you can be fairly sure that someone at home will be making that same misunderstanding. And it can never hurt to make something more obvious.
JANUS - LEEDS MET JISC PROJECT
jiscjanus OCT 04, 2010 04:32A.M. Glasgow 7th/8th September 2010 Ian Maitland, our Team’s Technical Consultant, shares his reflections on attending this event This was my fist jisc meeting and I did not know what to expect. Thank you to those who organised it for a very well run and enjoyable two days. The first session was a three minute introduction by each of the jisclms project teams about who they were and what their project was aiming to do. This gave a good overview of the scope of the projects being undertaken and pointers to institutions undertaking work in a similar field to us. Mike and I split ourselves in the next session between the User Experience stream and the Open source stream. It was interesting to hear that other institutions are attempting to grapple with the same issues of user engagement, representative surveys gaining buy in about the importance of UX expertise and the difficulty of getting vendors to listen. It was agreed that we would hold a follow up meeting with some UX training and a follow up conversation based on research that we could bring to the table. The real benefit of the meeting was the chance to network, set up contacts and discuss with people from different institutions the challenges being faced and how together we may be able to pool resources in an attempt to overcome them.
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