The document summarizes a website usability study conducted by Michael Greenlee and Lavanya Kumar of the Jackson District Library from March 2nd to 6th, 2015. 5 library patrons with varying technical skills participated in behavioral questions, usability testing of tasks on the website, and paper prototyping. Key findings included that the placement of features on the homepage did not match usefulness ratings, homepage icons lacked intuitive content, difficulty finding related events, and confusion over which vendors provided different media formats for downloading. Recommendations proposed reorganizing sections on the homepage and adding visual cues to icons and vendors.

1. Website Usability Study
Michael Greenlee
Digital Services Specialist - Jackson District Library
Lavanya Kumar
Masters Student - University of Michigan, School of Information
March 2nd - 6th, 2015

2. Table of Contents
Introduction …………………………………..3
Executive Summary ………………………….6
Methods ………………………………………8
Personas ……………………………………..18
Findings and Recommendations …………29
Discussion …………………………………...44
Conclusion ..…………………………………48

3. INTRODUCTION

4. Founded in 1863, the Jackson District Library
has a long standing history of technological
advancement and innovation. Its website,
myjdl.com, provides the community with
information on services and events. With thirteen
branches situated throughout Jackson County, the
website acts as a nexus and is the library’s official
presence on the Internet. Patrons use it to borrow
eBooks, stream movies, and request items from any
one of the branches. Moreover, the site facilitates
borrowing items from institutions statewide via the
interloan service Michigan eLibrary.

5. With patrons from various backgrounds all trying to use the
website for different reasons, it is important to understand the
site’s usability. Conducting a website usability test allows us to
answer several questions. What are the most important features
to have on a homepage? How intuitive is the wording and
images of homepage content? Questions can also be more
specific and relate to popular tasks. What are some pain points
when a user tries to download music from one of JDL’s various
vendors? What are some common frustrations when trying to
find out more about a library-related event?
Many of these questions were answered during our user
research sprint. Over the course of five days, five library patrons
spanning a swath of age and technical skill levels were recruited
to participate. They were asked behavioral questions, observed
while completing tasks on the website, and even given a chance
to contribute to the redesign process. Each participant was
presented with a $15 Starbucks gift card at the end of session to
thank them for their participation.

6. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

7. FINDINGS
Finding 1: The placement of features on the homepage
is not contingent with how useful patrons find them.
Finding 2: The content of homepage icons is not
intuitive and prevents users from locating specific data.
Finding 3: Users have difficulty locating related events
after searching for a specific event.
Finding 4: When looking to download and stream,
users could not figure out which vendor served a
particular media format (i.e. What is OverDrive?).

8. METHODS

9. USERS
U01
Gender: F Age: 26
Occupation: Librarian
Level of Tech Competence: 5
U02
Gender: M Age: 59
Occupation: Unemployed
Level of Tech Competence: 2
U03
Gender: F Age: 64
Occupation: Retired
Level of Tech Competence: 3
U04
Gender: M Age: 16
Occupation: Junior in High School
Level of Tech Competence: 5
U05
Gender: F Age: 21
Occupation: Nursing Student at U of
M
Level of Tech Competence: 5

10. The
Workspace

11. Script: Having a script allows for consistency between
sessions and helps keep the subject thoroughly informed.

12. A. Behavioral Questions: These questions provide
us with a better understanding of who our target users are
and how their background influences their behaviors.

13. B1. Usability Testing: Usability testing is key to
understanding the motives behind a user’s actions. It is
a good way to “get inside their heads.”

14. B2. Usability Testing: During this portion of the
study, we captured audio recordings of our participants,
video recordings or screen captures of their interactions
with the website, and asked participants to “think out
loud” or verbally explain their thought process when
making decisions.
Blue Yeti Microphone for Audio Recordings
Quicktime Software for Screen
Captures

15. C. Paper Prototyping: Paper prototyping allows the
participant to become involved in the design process. Here,
they can actually contribute to the potential look of the
interface in a fun, hands-on manner.

16. D. Survey/ Rating Questions: Surveys
(especially questions that require “rating”) are a great
way to quantify data and turn that data into graphs.

17. Brainstorming

18. PERSONAS

19. PERSONAS
AL
“The Late Technology Adopter”
ROSE
“The Antiquing Retiree”
SAM
“The Millennial Student”

20. Meet: AL
“The Father and Late Technology Adopter”

21. Meet: AL
“The Father and Late Technology Adopter”
Age: 59
Occupation: Unemployed
Level of Tech Competence: 2
-I visit the library anywhere from four to seven days per week.
-I have a cell phone and want to learn more about texting because
my son has a hearing disability and he prefers texting.
-While I enjoy browsing the net and using sites such as Facebook
and YouTube, I don’t like myjdl.com.
-I would use the internet more often if the library increased hours of
usage per day..
-I am most comfortable reading when I am holding an actual book in
my hands.

22. Meet: AL
“The Father and Late Technology Adopter”
Scenario
On a snowy Friday morning, Al walks from his home over to the Meijer
Branch of the Jackson District Library. Once he arrives, he heads straight
to a computer, logs in, and opens a browser which defaults to myjdl.com.
Al had just checked out a book on South Asian films, and wants to see
when it is due. When he selects “My Account” on the website, he is asked
to log in again. He isn’t a very fast typer and has to enter his library card
number again. It doesn’t seem to work. He soon gets frustrated, walks
over to the front desk and asks a librarian to look up the book’s due date
for him.
Interested in historical artifacts, Al is trying to find images of South Asian
kings during the Mughal dynasty. He arrives on the homepage and looks
around, not even sure when to start. There is no indication that any feature
of the homepage caters to historical images. After clicking around doesn’t
yield any results, he types “www.yahoo.com,” in the current address bar,
replacing “myjdl.com.”

23. Meet: ROSE
“The Antiquing Retiree”

24. Meet: ROSE
“The Antiquing Retiree”
Age: 64
Occupation: Retired
Level of Tech Competence: 3
-I like collecting antique buttons from the 20s and 30s.
-I visit the library often each week.
-I search WorldCat for specialized books about buttons. I also use
eBay.
-I often borrow playaway audiobooks for going on walks or for
listening in the car.
-I use Wikipedia for general research interests.

25. Scenario
After lunch one day Rose heads over to the library with “The Big Book of
Buttons 2013 Edition,” an expensive reference book she owns. She wants to
borrow the newest edition to compare it to the one she has. She also wants
to search the web for more resources. She logs on to a computer, opens
myjdl.com, and searches the catalog for books on antique buttons. Unable to
find anything, she tries again with the words “new book buttons”. She still
can’t find what she wants and opens a new window to navigate to
worldcat.org.
Rose recently attended a seminar hosted by the library on “Button Collecting
from the Twenties.” She really enjoyed the event and vaguely remembers the
instructor mentioning a similar seminar on button collecting from the thirties.
However, she doesn’t remember the time of the event and proceeds to
“myjdl.com” to see if she can find related events to the one she attended.
However, when viewing the details for the seminar she attended, she isn’t
able to find any “Related Events” and decides to proceed to the calendar
view to scan through all the events listed for the month.
Meet: ROSE
“The Antiquing Retiree”

26. Meet: SAM
“The Millennial Student”

27. Meet: SAM
“The Millennial Student”
Age: 21
Occupation: U of M Nursing Student
Level of Tech Competence: 5
-Technology plays a huge part in my daily work.
-I frequently use Reddit, YouTube, and Tumblr for entertainment as
well as research.
-I enjoy playing video games and watching TV shows on Netflix.
-I do many school assignments on my iPad and use Google Scholar
and the CINAHL database.
-I am a knitter and am always looking for craft ideas on Tumblr.

28. Meet: SAM
“The Millennial Student”
Scenario
Lately Sam has been having some car troubles and wants to fix the
problem since she has to commute to Ann Arbor everyday for
school. She decides to check myjdl.com and easily logs on to the
computer as well as her account. Next, she searches for “auto repair”
in the library catalog. The first result is “Chilton’s Repair Manual.” It
looks like a book, and she would prefer an internet source. Also, Sam
isn’t sure what “Chilton’s” is or if this source is even relevant. Tired of
trying to find a resource she can relate to, she closes the myjdl
website and heads to YouTube to find a tutorial.

29. FINDINGS &
RECOMMENDATIONS

30. FINDINGS
Finding 1: The placement of features on the homepage
is not contingent with how useful patrons find them.
Finding 2: The content of homepage icons is not
intuitive and prevents users from locating specific data.
Finding 3: Users have difficulty locating related events
after searching for a specific event.
Finding 4: When looking to download and stream,
users could not figure out which vendor served a
particular media format (i.e. What is OverDrive?).

31. Finding 1: The placement of features on the homepage is
not contingent with how useful patrons find them.
Evidence 1: As a result of our survey exercise, participants
gave “Upcoming Events” an overall “usefulness” rating of
4.3 and “JDL News” a rating of 2.9. We felt that the
location of these two sections should be switched on the
homepage since users tend to spend more time looking at
the left-hand side of a page compared to the right side.
(Nielsen Norman Group, 2010)

33. Current Page

34. Proposed Design

35. Finding 2: The content of homepage icons is not intuitive
and prevents users from locating specific data.
Evidence 2: One of the tasks during the usability testing
asked users to find a resource on “auto repair” that was not
a book. Instead of selecting the “Research” option from the
homepage (which has an entire database dedicated to Auto
Repair), users would attempt to search the library catalog.
We thought that changing the logo to actually indicate that
“Research” helps users find information on various topics
would aid them in this task.

36. Current
Page

37. Proposed
Design

38. Finding 3: Users have difficulty locating related events after
searching for a specific event.
Evidence 3: Another task during the usability test required
participants to search for a particular event and then find
related events. We discovered that the section titled
“Related Events” was difficult for participants to locate.
They would frequently navigate back to the “Events” page
and make their own judgements on which events were
related. We propose moving the “Related Events” section
higher on the page so that users don’t have to scroll down
to view it.

39. Current Page

40. Proposed
Design

41. Finding 4: When looking to download and stream
information, users could not figure out which vendors
offered particular media (e.g. music, movies, eBooks, etc).
Evidence 4: A final task for our usability study asked users
to find “information on a resource that JDL provides to
download music.” While users successfully navigated to the
“Download and Stream” page, they were unable to
determine which resources provided music, movie, or
eBook downloads. We suggest adding visual cues to each
vendor’s logo to say what categories of media they provide.
Making the media filter across more obvious would
enhance the user’s experience as well.

42. Current Page

43. Proposed
Design

44. DISCUSSION

45. LIMITATIONS
While our study yielded very interesting results
about the usability of the JDL website, we also faced
several limitations. For example, the level of technical
competence across our users was quite broad. Some of
our usability tasks had to be altered to cater to our
participants, as we hoped they wouldn’t get frustrated
interacting with the site in front of us. Also, many
patrons complained about having to login multiple
times when accessing various features of the site.
Unfortunately, this is difficult to work around and is
necessary for library patron authorization purposes. This
was a concept that was difficult to explain to frustrated
user testing participants.

46. AREAS TO EXPLORE FURTHER
The time allotted to complete this study and draft the
report was very short, and there are still several areas that
we would like to explore in the future.
1. Inclusion of menu bar content in paper prototype activity.
It was very useful to gain an understanding of how components of the home
page should be arranged based on the paper prototypes. To take this activity
one step further, we would like to see what specific content user’s prefer in
the menu bar. This is an aspect they interact with on every page and plays an
important part on how they navigate through the entire website.

47. 2. Conduct a usability study around the mobile view of the
website.
The implementation of responsive design and the use of smart phones are
rapidly growing areas in the technology space. Conducting usability studies
purely on the mobile view of the website would be very relevant.
3. Further study the various filters used to search within the
library catalog to understand what patrons would find most
useful.
When conducting our usability tasks, we noticed that a combination of users
heavily used or glanced over the left filters in the library catalog page. It
would be curious to get a better understanding of which filters are used more
often or which are not used at all. However, the scope of this problem is
actually quite large and would required an entirely separate usability study.

48. CONCLUSION

49. While much of our study focusses on the content of the
home page, it is important that users actually navigate through
the site. Our patrons come from various backgrounds and have
a broad spectrum of technical expertise, so it was difficult
trying to cater to all their needs, especially when it came to
content on the home page. The overarching theme of our
findings is that the site should lessen and even mask “pain
points” such as frequent clicking and scrolling by creating easy
to use and enjoyable interfaces. The user interface should be
intuitive so that users want to explore myjdl.com. Problems that
are difficult to tackle such as multiple logins or frequent clicks
can be temporarily dealt with by implementing a clean design
and user-friendly content. The Jackson District Library website
is a hub of information for students, community members, and
staff alike. It is important and beneficial to improve its usability
so that patrons can continue to enjoy the process of
discovering the Library’s abundant resources.

50. REFERENCES
Chow, Tiffany, Ted McCarthy, and Yiwei Ma. "Pancreapedia User Interview
Report." (2011). Web. 1 Mar. 2015.
Krug, Steve. "Usability Test Script." Rocket Surgery Made Easy. Sensible.com, 1
Jan. 2010. Web. 1 Mar. 2015.
<http://sensible.com/downloads/test-script.pdf>.
Nielsen, Jakob. "Horizontal Attention Leans Left." Nielsen Norman Group. Nielsen
Norman Group, 6 Apr. 2010. Web. 5 Mar. 2015.
<http://www.nngroup.com/articles/horizontal-attention-leans-left/>.
Snyder, Carolyn. Paper Prototyping: The Fast and Easy Way to Design and Refine
User Interfaces. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 2005. Print.

51. About ASB (Alternative Spring Break)
Alternative Spring Break is a five day project conducted by
the University of Michigan School of Information during
which students engage in service-oriented learning
experiences. These projects help students apply skills they
have learned in the classroom to professional projects and
allow the school to better its connection with the
community. Projects range from website usability, to
database design and are located in Jackson, Detroit,
Chicago, and Washington D.C.