This week I sat in on usability testing for a redesign of our homepage where I work. I was fascinated by the fact that the user sped through the ten tasks in the test in about two minutes, when I imagine that it would have taken her about 20 minutes to find the same items on the previous website. (If she hadn't given up already).
The difference in the pages is like night and day -- the designers have managed to take a page that was pretty much a static homepage a la 1993 and turn it into an actually useful portal of frequently used links and content. However, there were still issues related to terminology. The only times the user was confused was when she was looking for information that used jargon that she was unfamiliar with, or when the terminology used in the test prompts was different from, although synonymous to, terms used on the site itself.
Watching this user navigate through confusing terms reinforced my decision to use the heading "our materials" as opposed to "catalog" in the project website. "Materials" has a broader connotation than "catalog", and it's more representative of the website offerings that go beyond a mere online catalog. This is especially important since all the library's items have only been minimally cataloged, and do not have strong subject cataloging or other descriptors that help make catalog searching powerful. That is why the featured materials highlights and subject guides are so necessary for the collection; it's in desperate need of curation to make up for the bare-bones cataloging that often renders many of the items inaccessible in catalog searches.
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