Evaluation and Recommendations for University Library’s Mobile Catalog
Background: This was a course project for Evaluation of Systems and Services. The course focused on learning and practicing a series of research methods to evaluate interactive systems and services. The goal was to provide recommendations for improvement. I was put on a 4-person team and got matched with the University Library to evaluate their newly developed mobile catalog, Mirlyn Mobile.
To learn and practice different methods in a semester, I normally had 2+ weeks to execute the method and summarize the results. The schedule forced me to think more critically about what was feasible to do and what the most important questions to ask were. Executing this project also provided me an opportunity to see how various methods (e.g., interviews, heuristic evaluation, and usability testing) differed and complemented each other for identifying issues and probable causes.
My role(s): Client Liaison, Researcher
Collaborator(s): Justin Feezell, Yi-Ying Lin, Karen Stover
Motivation: With the popularization of online resources such as Wikipedia and digitization of publication (e.g., ebook and mp3) of multimedia, a library needs to make itself accessible and convenient so that people can better utilize the abundance of resources the library provides.
Problem Solving: Through interviews, survey, heuristic evaluation, and usability testing, we provided recommendations to improve the library's mobile catalog, Mirlyn Mobile.
Contextual Inquiry
Persona & Scenarioos
Heuristics Evaluation & Comparative Analysis
Survey
Usability Testing
Outcomes: The outcomes of this project include a research report that documents our process, findings, and recommendations, and the changes implemented on the mobile catalog of the University of Michigan's library.
Summary:
Client: University of Michigan Library User Experience Department
Date: 2011 Winter
