Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Pages: 148
•
Trim: 8½ x 11
978-1-4422-2899-3 • Paperback • September 2014 • $89.00 • (£68.00)
978-1-4422-2900-6 • eBook • September 2014 • $84.50 • (£65.00)
Rebecca Blakiston has been a librarian at the University of Arizona Libraries since 2008, and the website product manager since 2010. She provides oversight, management, and strategic planning for the library website, specializing in guerilla usability testing, writing for the web, and content strategy. She chairs a website steering group and meets regularly with staff from across the library to facilitate communication, training, and collaboration. She developed a process for in-house usability testing, which has been implemented successfully both within website projects and in an ongoing, systematic way.
Preface
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1: Why Usability Testing Matters
Chapter 2: Conducting Your Own Usability Testing
Chapter 3: Identifying Your Audience and Their Tasks
Chapter 4: Selecting a Method
Chapter 5: Planning a Usability Test
Chapter 6: Conducting a Usability Test
Chapter 7: Analyzing Your Findings and Making Improvements
Chapter 8: Ongoing Usability Testing
Chapter 9: Keeping Up the Momentum
Appendix
Index
About the Author
Usability Testing: A Practical Guide for Librarians is precisely what it sets out to be and exactly what library staff need in an age when strong user experience design is not only lauded but expected – a practical guide for librarians who realize aspects of their web interfaces aren’t working as well as they would like but aren’t sure what to do about it. Blakiston details the process of usability testing clearly, thoroughly and, most importantly, with librarians’ specialized needs and often limited resources in mind. A must-read for anyone committed to making library interfaces and websites more usable.
— Emily Daly, Librarian for Education and Head of Assessment & User Experience, Duke University Libraries
Blakiston translates the usability testing literature into the language of library world, a world where sometimes the usability budget can only afford few candy bars and the most practical recruitment pool for test subjects is the traffic in your lobby. Her book lives up the promise of offering ‘a practical guide,’ walking you through the roles you need to fill, pitfalls to avoid, and showing ways to document data and reports. It helps you understand why it’s important to get started — or keep going — and not to worry too much about your lack of budget, staffing, and expertise. But it also challenges you to aim higher, beyond a few usability tests and toward a sustainable usability program.
— Josh Boyer, Head, User Experience, North Carolina State University Libraries