Adults

OPL provided us with recordings of three contextual interviews they'd conducted in January. Each was about 15 minutes long and showed an interviewer and subject going through a loose series of questions.

We reviewed the recordings and took notes.

Insights

• Long, dense text—people skip it the way they skip Terms of Service language.

• More graphics.

• Too much information!

• Users want a customizable experience, something that feels theirs. Let people become experts.

• Organize eresources by format, audience, etc—not by vendor.

Kids and Teens

Since OPL had previously only interviewed adults, we decided to add some interviews with young people. We interviewed five children and five teenagers to get their perspectives on the site.

Insights

• Different page appearances (layout, color, font, logo) confuse people. "It looks like a different website now" was a common post-click complaint.

• Kids and teens may not realize when they've left the library's website, so links to other sites should be used with extreme caution.

• We heard "where are the books?" a lot. It wasn't clear to young users when they were looking at a book or not. For that matter, several kids didn't know what a website was. It was all screens to them and they didn't know the difference between a website, an app, and an ebook.

• Kids really liked photos of real people, more than cartoons or pictures of animals.

• Avoid bucket words like "resources," which one four-year-old participant defined as "Mommy, a computer, a jellyfish... monster trucks... and tigers."

• Spanish content must be expanded.

• "Don't surprise your users."