"Big Test" usability test results

Summary

Overall, most users succeeded at most tasks. If you look only at the number of tasks completed, our sites fare quite well.

However, the interesting data is in the qualitative details. Here we found many areas that could be improved. In general, one might say that our users still have trouble with the following:

• choosing the best databases for a particular topic
• understanding the scope of a particular database or of our catalogs
• understanding citations
• when to search for article titles vs. journal titles
• composing and refining effective search queries

One could say that it points to the need for more user education. But we also feel that improving our web interfaces can go a long way toward helping users make the best choices, especially given that so many of our users never ask for help. Our goal is to create "self-teaching" interfaces.