Usability Testing of a Customizable Library Web Portal

Abstract

The popularity of customizable Web sites in libraries has increased librarians’ interest in supplementing user services with portal technology. The open source-software MyLibrary gives the librarian control over the resources directed to users based on their interests. University of Illinois at Chicago librarians developed My Chicago Library as a way to streamline user access to library resources. A usability study designed around common task categories tested the participants’ abilities to customize a personal library Web page, understand the resource categories as defined by librarians, and manage the discipline-specific content available in the portal.

Exploring the usability of web portals: A Croatian case study

“…Tourist-service portal evaluation based on the sample of 172 users and usability questionnaires identified differences between user groups (Klausegger, 2005). In assessment of customizable library portal small group of participants (less then ten) conducted nineteen tasks (Brantley, Armstrong, & Lewis, 2006). Approach included task-based user testing with thinking aloud method.…”

Leveraging student course enrollment data to infuse personalization in a library website

“…This investment has led to a great deal of research focusing on the assessment and improvement of academic library web sites (Brantley et al, 2006;Kim, 2011). A number of these studies show that users continue to find academic library web sites complex and difficult to use.…”

Experience With Usability Testing of Web Portals

“…Concerning web portal usability, it should be noted that the current studies are mostly concerned with domain specific portals. Namely, in the context of the global trend of web portal specialization, recent research related to usability evaluation is mostly concerned with the focused portals (somewhere called "vertical" or "domain specific" ones) such as enterprise or corporate portals (Boye, 2006), travel portals (Shelat and Stewart, 2004;Carstens and Patterson, 2005), news portals (Tsui and Paynter, 2004), library web portals (Brantley et al, 2006), tourist portals (Klausegger, 2006), healthcare web portals (Theng and Soh, 2005) and similar.…”