Academic User Experience: Students, Faculty, and Libraries

Academic User Experience: Students, Faculty, and Libraries Derek Poppink September 15, 2010

What is User Experience?
A Quality
“A person's perceptions and responses that result from the use or anticipated use of a product, system or service” - ISO 9241
Emotions, beliefs, preferences, perceptions, physical and psychological responses, behaviors and accomplishments
A Discipline
“Multi-disciplinary field incorporating aspects of psychology, anthropology, sociology, computer science, graphic design, industrial design and cognitive science”
A Process
“Places the end user at the focal point of design and development efforts, as opposed to the system, its applications or its aesthetic value alone”

What is User Experience?

Accessibility
“The extent to which products, systems, services, environments, or facilities can be used by people from a population with the widest range of capabilities to achieve specified goals in a specified context of use.”
Recent News
Department of Justice & Department of Education ask colleges and universities to refrain from requiring inaccessible electronic readers (June, 2010)
Department of Justice announces plans to prepare new ADA regulations (July, 2010)
Websites as “public accommodations”
College web pages are ‘widely inaccessible' to people with disabilities according to UW study (August, 2010)

Improved Accessibility Benefits All Users
Curb Cuts
Wheelchairs
Strollers, skaters, bikers
Subtitles
Hearing disabilities
Noisy or quiet environments
ReadSpeaker
Visual disabilities
Mobile, multitasking, language learners

Credibility
“The objective and subjective components of the believability of a source or message. Traditionally, credibility has two key components: trustworthiness and expertise.”
Stanford Web Credibility Guidelines
Make it easy to verify the accuracy of the information on your site.
Show that there's a real organization behind your site.
Highlight the expertise in your organization and in the content and services you provide.
Show that honest and trustworthy people stand behind your site.
Make it easy to contact you.
Design your site so it looks professional (or is appropriate for your purpose).
Make your site easy to use -- and useful.
Update your site's content often (at least show it's been reviewed recently).
Use restraint with any promotional content (e.g., ads, offers).
Avoid errors of all types, no matter how small they seem.

Academic Credibility

Desirability
“Aesthetically pleasing objects appear to the user to be more effective, by virtue of their sensual appeal.”
Emotional Design Dimensions
Visceral
Behavioral
Reflective

Academic Desirability

Findability
“The quality of being locatable or navigable. The degree to which a particular object is easy to discover or locate. The degree to which a system or environment supports navigation and retrieval.”

Academic Findability
Project Information Literacy (PIL) Findings
Students relied on a small, familiar set of resources (especially Google and Wikipedia).
Students tended to use the same information resources for both academic research and everyday life research.
Students turned to course reading lists first, followed by Wikipedia.
90% of students used online scholarly research databases.
80% of students make “rare” or no use of librarian services.
Students preferred instructors over librarians as “coaches”.

Usefulness
“The quality of being of practical use.”

Academic Usefulness
Project Information Literacy Findings
Time constraints and information overwhelm lead to student research strategy of “satisficing”.
Students attempt to develop domain knowledge before engaging scholarly research databases.
70% of students use Wikipedia to “background” a topic.
Students also use course materials and instructor to “get unstuck” at the outset of research.
Instructor’s written guidelines are crucial for defining information-gathering context for students’ research.
Most handouts do not provide critical guidance students need on how to identify a focus and how to use search tools effectively.
“ The need for context-sensitive presearch sources and coaching services appears to be in high demand. There is a need for solutions that logically bridge the early stages of research with the rest of the research process and deliver…efficiencies students expect.”

Usability
“The capability of the software to be understood, learned, used and attractive to the user when used under specified conditions” – ISO 9126
Jakob Nielsen’s Usability Heuristics
Visibility of system status
Match between system and the real world
User control and freedom
Consistency and standards
Error prevention
Recognition rather than recall
Flexibility and efficiency of use
Aesthetic and minimalist design
Error recognition, diagnosis, and recovery
Help and documentation

Prioritizing Web Usability
Home Page Behavior
25-35 secs on Home page
23% scroll (avg 0.8 screenfuls)
Subsequent visits are lower
Priorities:
Identify site
Describe benefits
Summarize content
Provide navigation choices
Site-Specific Success : 66%
Lower for web-wide tasks
Experience difference ~14%
Interior Page Behavior
45-60 secs
Viewed (in order): content, header, left column, right column, footer
Priorities for deep links
Logo, Home link, Search
Hierarchy (breadcrumb)
Related resources
Search Dominance/Success
Google, Yahoo, MSN: 56%
Others: 33%
Used 88% time in web-wide tasks
51% click first link

What is Academic User Experience?
Accessible = Universal
Credible = Citable
Desirable = Engaging
Findable = Convenient
Usable = Simple
Useful = Relevant

B.J. Fogg, Stanford Web Credibility Guidelines (2002)
Department of Justice, www.justice.gov (2010)
Don Norman, Emotional Design (2005)
Head & Eisenberg, How College Students Use Wikipedia for Course-Related Research (2010)
Oracle Accessibility Program, www.oracle.com/accessibility (2010)
Peter Morville, Ambient Findability (2005) & Semantic Studios (2002, 2004)
Jakob Nielsen, Prioritizing Web Usability (2006)
Randall Munroe, xkcd.com (2010)
SitePoint Glossary (2010)
Tadeusz Szewczyk, SEO Blog (2008)
Thompson, Burgstahler, & Moore, Web Accessibility: A Longitudinal Study of College and University Home Pages in the Northwestern United States (2010)
University of Washington, Project Information Literacy (2010)
Various, Wikipedia (2010)
Thank My Sources

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Academic User Experience: Students, Faculty, and Libraries

by Derek Poppink

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Academic User Experience: Students, Faculty, and Libraries Presentation Transcript