Usability Testing as a Method to Refine a Health Sciences Library Website

Abstract

User testing, a method of assessing website usability, can be a cost-effective and easily administered process to collect information about a website's effectiveness. A user experience (UX) team at an academic health sciences library has employed user testing for over three years to help refine the library's home page. Test methodology used in-person testers using the "think aloud" method to complete tasks on the home page. Review of test results revealed problem areas of the design and redesign; further testing was effective in refining the page. User testing has proved to be a valuable method to engage users and provide feedback to continually improve the library's home page.

Testing, testing: a usability case study at University of Toronto Scarborough Library

“…Likewise, Swanson et al (2017) noted that too many links on a page can be problematic. As a result, removing low usage links and pages is recommended (Mitchell et al, 2015;Denton et al, 2016). This parallels the findings of our study and subsequent removal of lowuse links, pages, and sub-menus.…”

“…A total of 20 undergraduate students were recruited to participate in usability testing: five participants to carry out task scenarios on the library website and 15 participants to carry out individual and group card sorting activities. These numbers are in compliance with user experience research best practices (Becker and Yannotta, 2013;Denton et al, 2016;Nielsen, 2012a).…”

“…Website user experience studies gathered during our literature review fell into five main categories, based on methodology: card sort, task scenarios, heuristic studies, focus groups, and surveys. Several studies (Mitchell et al, 2015;Denton et al, 2016) have used the open-or closed-card sort methodology. Common key findings were that card sorting was valuable for identifying low-use links and unnecessary descriptive text.…”

Impact of University Website Usability on Satisfaction: A Structural Equation Modelling Approach

“…It took into account 300 students and 86 university websites (26 from Canada, 30 from the USA and 30 from Europe) and it was found that 88% of the students were satisfied with their proposed usability criteria. Swanson et al (2017) argued that too many links on the webpage can create problems for users and Denton et al (2016) argued that low-usage links and pages should be removed to make a website more interactive and user friendly. Adepoju et al (2019) explained the research trends in evaluation of academic website usability from the year 2000 to 2018 and found that automated tools, heuristic evaluation and multi-criteria decision-making were used.…”