User Profile
The University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) is home to 28,000 students. The campus is located in the heart of the city of Las Vegas, just a five minute drive from the popular tourist destination "The Strip". The university includes a 300,000 square foot main campus library, Lied Library, that includes a large special collections department focusing on gaming history and casino design. Students at UNLV are diverse in many ways, the university hosts thousands of international students at the highly ranked hospitality college. Many students are first generation college students, work to put themselves through school, and live off campus. The university is considered a commuter campus as the the majority of students live in off campus housing in and around the Las Vegas valley.
Students are often on campus for the majority of their day and thousands flood through the doors of Lied Library to use the computers, meet with friends, grab a cup of coffee in the cafe, and study until their next class begins. The gate counts for the weekday can be as high as 30,000 for the Lied Library. This means there are plenty of real website users to recruit for usability testing sessions.
Recruitment for Testing
Undergraduate students were easy to find within Lied Library as there are thousands in the building at any point during the week. I was able to ask groups of students if they would like to participate in usability testing for the library website and had a few volunteers. The five undergraduate participants our study required were easy to secure with the promise of free library branded "swag".
Graduate students proved to be elusive as they are not as plentiful in numbers as the undergraduate population and they are not on campus as often, or for the extended period of time, due to the difference in the class scheduling for graduate classes. After meeting with the research team we created a strategy for recruiting the five graduate students we needed to complete the study. The first plan of action was to design a flyer to be distributed to graduate students in their upper division library instruction sessions and to be posted in the graduate commons. Next, Susie Skarl sent an email to her graduate students she frequently works on research projects with. This ended up resulting in great word of mouth between several graduate students and I was contacted by several to set up session appointments with each of the participants.
Session Coordination
Darcy Del Bosque used a Springshare calendaring product, the same product that the librarians use to set up research appointments with students, to create a usability testing calendar. This calendar syncs with my Google Calendar and allows potential participants to choose an appointment slot that fits their needs and my available times. This made scheduling with the graduate students a clean process because I could send them the link to the appointment scheduler and we did not have to email back and forth regarding availability. Once I received the email alert that an appointment had been scheduled, I emailed the participant to confirm the time and inform them how to get to my office.
For the graduate student sessions I set up the Dell laptop with a webcam, mouse and Camtasia screen recording software in my office. For the undergraduate students I used the same set up in an empty group study room located on the first floor of the library. Because the undergraduate students were recruited in the moment and completed the usability session immediately, I wanted a space that was close to where I could find the students and then send them on their way, without a lot of time wasted moving to my office.
Because I already had the graduate students' emails from the appointment setting software I sent "thank you" emails after the session was complete.
Testing Sessions
I allowed 60 minutes for each session to ensure I had enough time to test with participants who needed more time or happened to show up for the appointment late (students have hectic schedules and I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt!). Each session lasted approximately 20-40 minutes. The graduate student sessions tended to run longer as they typically had more experience using the LibGuides and provided more feedback at the end of each session.
At the beginning of each session I warmly greeting each student and asked them a little about themselves:
In my user experience design courses at Kent State we were trained to make the participant feel welcome and try and open them up to sharing more once the session begins. I also used the tips I had learned in class including:
I explained the LibGuides project to each participant, what would be recorded and how many tasks they would be asked to complete. Next, I asked for their approval to video record the session and gave the participant the informed consent form, along with a pen. I allowed each participant time to review the document and sign before I began recording.
I then began the usability test using the script the team had created. I read each task word for word from the script to ensure I was asking each participant to complete the tasks the same way. I wanted to make sure the end data would be usable and tried to avoid bias when asking the participant to complete the task.
I informed the participant of which task we were on for each one to make sure they knew their progress and to make it easier for other staff viewing the videos to be able to see where a task began and stopped. I allowed participants as much time as they needed to complete the task or to attempt to complete the task. Many times the information we received from the participant attempting the task was more informative than the successful completion of tasks. When the participant was struggling with a task I would ask them where they expected the information or link to be, this gave insight on where or how the student thought the information should look or be organized on the LibGuide.
Once the ten tasks were completed, I asked four follow up questions to try and gain more general feedback regarding the participant's thoughts about the design and content of the LibGuide. The graduate students gave a lot of helpful feedback and helped inform some of the design recommendations I have created. Many of the undergraduate students were so unfamiliar with the LibGuides, they did not have much feedback for what should or shouldn't be on the guide.
During the wrap up of the session I asked if the participant had any questions or comments for me. I then turned off the recording function and let the student know the session was complete. I thanked the participant for their time and then offered a basket of library branded "swag" and explained that they could choose one item. I then showed the participant the options:
The most popular item was the power bank and the coffee traveler. I again thanked the participant for their time and asked them to see if their friends or classmates would like to participate in the study.
Once the session was complete I kept the research team up to date on the number of sessions completed. We also had several in person meetings during the course of the project to update the group on the usability session progress.