"Big Test" usability test results

Some general observations

1. They successfully used Barton to find journals we own in print, but they didn't always find the electronic version from the Barton record.
   
   
2. They successfully used Barton to find relevant books for a topic, and particular books from a bibliography.
   
   
3. They found and used the Interlibrary Borrowing form and the RSC form from Barton and SFX screens. (though many people didn't understand what RSC was at first, is it a collection? Which library is it in?)
   
   
4. They could use Vera to find databases, but they didn't always choose the most relevant databases for their topic.
   
   
5. People successfully used the SFX menu to get full text or to connect to ILB if we didn't have full text. They found and clicked on the SFX text link and not the SFX button. (in FirstSearch, which has both text link and button).
   
   
6. Some people use Vera first and some people use Barton first to look for journal articles. There are Barton people and Vera people. Some people don't know you can get e-versions in Barton. They do know to use Vera for e-versions.
   
   
7. They weren't familiar with our Subject Guides. They preferred links to web sites rather than books on the Subject Guides. Some people didn't realize the sidebar contained the primary navigation for the guide, assumed those links would leave the site.
   
   
8. They had no trouble finding our guides, such as the Patents Guide and the Topographic Maps guide, but they didn't know we had such guides and wouldn't normally come looking for them.
   
   
9. They thought Ask Us Live was "cool" once they understood about pages being pushed to them. They used it with difficulty because of confusion about frames, pushed pages, and who should type when, who should push pages to who.
   
   
10. Frequent library users and non-frequent library users had the same problems. Some users have more trouble than others and it didn't seem to match up with whether they were frequent users or not.