The second edition of Erika Hall’s Just Enough Research dropped October 2019; although this excellent volume was previously unknown to me I am taking the opportunity now to consume, embody, and evangelize Hall’s approach to user research. Or, as Hall might put it, I’m a willing convert to the gospel of “Enoughening”. Hall is a seasoned design consultant and co-founder of Mule Design Studio but her commercial approach is tempered by a no-nonsense attitude that makes her solutions and suggestions palatable to a small UX team such as my own at Indiana University Bloomington Libraries. Rather than conduct a formulaic book review of Just Enough Research, I want to highlight some specific things Hall tells the reader not to do in their UX research. This list of five “don’ts” summarize Hall’s tone, style, and approach. It will also highlight the thesis of the second edition’s brand new chapter on surveys….
Tag: “user research”
PALNI Investigates the Usability of WorldCAT Discovery
OCLC’s WorldCat Discovery is widely used in academic libraries as a discovery layer, a search tool that attempts to offer the user a comprehensive picture of the library resources available for any given keyword(s). As more and more of the library seems to exist online, a sometimes loosely connected congeries of third-party databases and tools, many with very different interfaces, librarians are growing more concerned with the quality of the user experience when their patrons encounter these tools. Thus it is noteworthy when a sizeable consortium such as the Private Academic Library Network of Indiana (PALNI) decides to carefully investigate and report on the usability of WorldCat Discovery. PALNI has been doing user research on WorldCat Discovery since 2015 and their most recent report appeared in April. Here we’ll take a look at a few of the more significant findings from their research and give some general tips about how…