In 2015 the University of Liverpool's Library Service embarked upon a three-part usability study to better understand how library users were engaging with our resource discovery platform, to identify any usability issues and assess the extent to which it was currently meeting their needs. Doing so enabled us to make informed, evidence-based changes to the interface, improving its overall usability and providing a more user-friendly and intuitive resource. In this paper we will detail not only the methodologies employed, what we found out about our users, what they liked and disliked and the changes subsequently made, but also the lessons learnt about the platform, the process itself and ourselves. Discovering discovery: lessons learnt from a usability study at the University of LiverpoolIn September 2010 the University of Liverpool's Library Service implemented its version of EBSCO's resource discovery platform (EDS), branded locally as Discover, alongside the Library catalogue. After its introduction the statistics showed year-on-year increases in 'use'. In the 2013-14 academic year alone both the average number of sessions and full-text downloads per full-time equivalent (FTE) had increased by 16% on the previous 12 months, whilst the number of searches had increased by 29%. However, although inferences can be made, the figures alone can only tell us so much. What they did not tell us was exactly how or to what extent our users were engaging with Discover. Nor did they tell us how easy they actually found it to use the platform, how efficient and effective they were in locating and accessing the content sought or what features and functionality they found particularly useful. Were the figures growing because Discover was meeting their needs and increasingly becoming a 'go-to' resource in preference to the other options available? Or was the opposite in fact true? Did they find it difficult to use and/or were not utilising it to its full potential, having to perform multiple searches to locate the resources required?Indeed, according to Betz, one of the biggest problems facing libraries is 'discovery and access' and how large our collections are 'is really irrelevant if your students and faculty can't find it, or … find it impossible to use'.1 Thus, in early 2015, a cross-library project group was assembled to embark upon a large-scale usability study. The purpose of the study was to gain a better understanding of user engagement. The aim was to find out exactly what users liked and disliked about the platform and to assess the extent to which Insights -29(3),
On 1 August 2014, LSE Library went live with ExLibris' Alma as our new library management system (LMS), replacing our previous Voyager system. Although the technical implementation of the LMS was a major project, it was only part of a wider 'systems change project', and in many ways it was the most straightforward part of the process. Far more challenging -but equally important to the ultimate success of the project -was managing the other aspects of change associated with the project, including managing business process change and managing our people through change. Managing business process changeThe business case for the new LMS had set out the high-level benefits we were seeking from the system, one of which was to develop and improve our services by improving the efficiency and effectiveness of our business processes. In addition, the detailed requirements analysis created as part of the tender process had identified the specific areas where the functionality of our legacy system was no longer sufficient to meet our needs (such as e-resource management) and where the improved capabilities of a new system were necessary to improve our processes.Having selected Alma as the best fit for our requirements, we were confident that its implementation would deliver some beneficial changes. But whilst the new system could give us the capacity to improve our processes, it would not be sufficient to create that change by itself. The very flexibility of Alma meant that design of many of the workflows would be down to us, which gave us the opportunity to improve our process design, but also carried the risk that we could bring inefficient processes with us from our old system. We knew at a general level that some of our existing processes were probably not as efficient as they could be, perhaps because they had originated as complex workarounds shaped by the particular functionality of Voyager, or because they were based on assumptions that had not been re-examined for some time. But we also knew that identifying and changing these processes would be difficult -not because of a particular resistance to change from staff, but simply because our processes had become so familiar that it was difficult to spot exactly where and how they were inefficient.
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