Usability Test Report

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The list below is a summary of requirements that came out of the 2011 Usability Test. Each area lists a summary of the problems identified by users. followed by recommendation for changing the BHL-Australia site in order to address the problem.

Names

Summary Issues
Some users said that finding Names was not apparent enough on the Australian site.
On both side, many users were confused by the term “Names” and did not understand that it meant “Scientific Names” and not “Personal” “Corporate” or other.

Recommendations

BHL-Australia

• When users rollover the page image and it brings up the 5 symbols, change the rollover text to say “Scientific Names on this Page” and when they click on uBio have it also drop down with the text "Scientific names on this page" which the general public can understand.
• Use a more universal symbol that conveys the concept of Scientific Names instead of uBio

OCR

Summary Issues
Participants did not know what “OCR” was or what they could do with it.
People did not know what “View Text” meant.
There is an expectation that users should be able to do Full-text searching on both sites, based on customary behavior in other sites and software applications.
Testers observed Users trying to search on a page through the Ctrl+F key combination.

Recommendations

BHL-Australia

• Change “View Text on this Page” label to “View OCR from this Page”
• Change the existing message “This text is generated from uncorrected OCR” to “This text is generated from uncorrected OCR and as such, may contain, inconsistencies with the actual content of the original page.”

Finding Illustrations and Multiple Bound Objects

Summary Issues
Finding illustrations brought a lot of frustration for users. Users are frustrated by visibility of page metadata in BHL-Australia.
In the BHL-US/UK, page metadata, when present, should be accurate (i.e. not useful when images say “text”).
Users said they liked the thumbnails but they also found the page navigation useful as well as the slider from BHL-Australia; they wanted to have available together.
There should be a marriage of the image page preview and the page metadata.
Thumbnail view in AUS is not obvious enough.
Several users looked in the table of contents and indexes for illustrations
Searching across Multiple bound objects had the same issues as illustrations: page metadata could be greatly improved to assist with this and Thumbnail View is useful when pages aren’t articulated.

Recommendations
BHL-Australia

• BHL-Australia could provide a way for users to scroll through the page metadata as a whole instead of just page by page (for example, provide visual cues in the slider where the pages of certain type are)
• BHL-Australia should consider adding the page metadata to the hover menu of each page (particularly useful for the Thumbnail view)

EOL

Summary Issues
The BHL-Australia link to EoL is a little bit too subtle and the BHL-US logo is a little bit faint and hard to see. The connection between EOL and BHL sites is not clear.

Recommendations
BHL-Australia

• Instead of a link called "EOL" next to the species name on a page consider having a link called "More info" which when hovered over says "For more information on this species see these resources external to BHL” that then provides multiple links such as: [EOL] [Wikispecies], [Catalogue of Life] [uBio] etc.. This way, users will be more aware when they will be leaving the BHL World and the purpose of those links..

Overall

Summary Issues
“Titles” is more explicit that “Book/Journals” in the Search Results page.
The general “look and feel” of the BHL-Australia site is preferred.
The functionality of the BHL-US/UK site is desired in the BHL-Australia site.

Recommendations
BHL-Australia

• Consider giving the Book Viewer the look and field of a popup window on top of the Bibliography (for example, allow for an easy way to Escape (Esc or X)