Dspace/DWELL Usability Results

This page is maintained by Nicole Hennig, Web Manager & Usability Specialist of the MIT Libraries. The User Interface Group plans and conducts usability tests for the libraries' web sites and other interfaces.

Dec. 2007
For complete documentation, see the wiki pages:
Usability observer notes (MIT Libraries staff only)
(Click on each student's name, then look for the section about DSpace/DWELL results... this was tested after with Vera Multi-Search during the same session).

Summary

Overall this test showed that the DWELL interface in its current form is not ready for prime time as an interface for DSpace. Several problems make it confusing for users and until those are solved, it's not more useful than the current interface for DSpace.

Top problems observed:

1. Users assume search box will AND terms by default as most search interfaces do.

2. The design and layout of facets (attribute filters) on the results screen is confusing. (people don't notice at first they are clickable, when they do, the sort order is confusing, the names of the different attributes are confusing and seem to be overlapping... such as communities, collections, contributors, etc.)

3. The box for filtering search results was almost always interpreted to be a "new search" box. Almost no one in the test used it successfully.

4. The many variant forms of author names was not always noticed and led to people not finding things that were there because they didn't use the correct form of the author's name.

5. People often want to search by author and that's difficult to do for several reasons: there is no field to search by author only, the terms get "OR'd" in the search box, people don't understand the term "creator" and they are confused by the thesis advisors being so prominent in the data.

6. The list of communities on the home page is difficult to scan because it's so long and not alphabetical. People wondered why communities and media types are featured, but not other facets.

7. Use of non-standard design, such as serif fonts, small font size, rounded search box with faint corners, small non-bold labels, etc. makes the site difficult to read and navigate according to standards that most users are familiar with.

Detailed list of problems - and possible solutions