Library Website Terms
Library Website Terms
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Improving how students find librarians on the library's website
Improving how students find librarians on the library's website
Overview
Librarians discussed a better way for students to discover them through the website to learn about librarians' various skills outside of traditional librarian skills. Various terms were shared. These librarian suggested terms were used for the case study:
Librarians by Subject (previous/original term)
Librarians by Academic Subject (current term: after research)
Librarians by Academic Discipline
Librarians by Area of Expertise
Librarians by Specialty
Areas of Expertise
Assistance by Expertise
Our librarians have backgrounds in areas such as open educational resources (OER) and data literacy that exist outside their normal duties. We want to market those skills to make our librarians more accessible to users. First, we needed to figure out which labels users preferred from the librarian-proposed terms when they searched for a librarian on our home page. Were we generating user-friendly terminology that was intuitive for librarian discoverability? We also wanted to figure out what they expected to “see” once a particular label was chosen by asking their expectations for the landing page. Determining this expectation would help us discover users’ understanding of these labels. This research resulted in a published paper: Terminology for Librarian Help on the Homepage.
Goals
Help the university community find librarians on the webpage.
Through the website, show the various skills of librarians.
Understand how students navigate the website for research.
How It Was Done
Paper Prototype
Paper Prototype
I changed some of the terms on the homepage to reflect the librarians’ suggestions. The list of terms were placed on the left or right side of the page. I printed the page to show students and asked prescribed questions about what they would “click” to find a librarian.
We recruited 14 students to participate in the usability testing. We asked the participants to point to the label they would click on to find a librarian under two circumstances: 1) seeking assistance in their major and 2) seeking assistance outside their major.
Contextual Interviews
Contextual Interviews
Students were asked questions about how they would navigate the website to find a particular librarian and/or resource related to possible research. Questions included:
When looking for librarian for information related to your major, what link would you choose?
When looking for help from a librarian for information outside your major, what link would you choose?
These two questions helped us differentiate between the way people may search for librarians. We wanted to find out the way students search when they need librarian assistance outside their academic disciplines such as Maker Literacies or harvesting data, as well as within their disciplines. By asking the non-major question, we wanted to address the best terminology that would lead students to librarians that have skills outside their traditional duties.
A/B Testing
A/B Testing
The list of terms were placed on the left or right side of the page in the pilot phase of the research. We wanted to find out where they naturally looked for information and use this to choose a location for the final terms on the library's homepage.
Fessenden’s (2010) eye tracking study found that 80% of web users look at the left side of the screen while 20% look at the right side of the screen. Our usability study showed that students chose labels most often from the right side of the screen. However, this does not negate the fact that they may have mostly looked on the left side of the screen. Eye tracking could have been useful to find out where students look for discoverability of librarians, but it was not part of our study.
What Was Discovered
- A 39% increase in clicks for “Librarians by Academic Subject” from summer 2016 to summer 2017.
However, when it came to finding librarian help outside the student’s major, none of the librarian-proposed terms were strong contenders.
39%
39%
of students chose
Librarians by Academic Subject
Students chose other labels from the website as well, such as “Ask Us.” This shows that we are losing a portion of our student population (12%) when they are seeking librarian assistance. Some didn't use the labels we expected them to use. Also, searching for librarian assistance outside their major (Question 2) held no significant click rate for any particular label; the librarian-proposed labels were chosen one to two times.
This finding shows that we need better labels that are intuitive and that resonate with students when they search for a librarian on the home page.
Preference for terms on the library's homepage: Librarians by Academic Subject vs. Librarians by Subject according to students major and other courses.
Next Steps
Allow students to create terms
Allow students to create terms
Students also provided their own labels, such as “Librarians by Research Interest,” “Librarian Assistance by Expertise” and “Librarian Assistance by Specialty.” Further research would allow students to create labels instead of choosing from terms generated by librarians. According to Gillis (2017) knowing certain terms does make navigating easier, but we must be aware that jargon can create obstacles for new users. Allowing our users to create labels may make their search easier.
Observe students as they "naturally" search
Observe students as they "naturally" search
If we observe how students navigate the website, naturally for research, we will find the terms they choose from the homepage and question their decisions. The prescribed questions may have "forced" them to look for librarians and it may have influenced their decisions. We may also find that students aren't looking for a librarian to begin with.
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