California Digital Library Jonathan Henke * Kathryn Kada Steve Lussier * Mary Beth Ray.

California Digital Library

Jonathan Henke * Kathryn Kada

Steve Lussier * Mary Beth Ray

Goals

• Give people a clear mental model of CDL

• Increase awareness of available resources

The Evolution….From sketch & lo-fi prototype...

Hi-Fi Prototype 1

Hi-Fi Prototype 2

User Pilot Study Tested

Our Original Goals:

• Time to complete tasks

• Ability to identify the optimal path through CDL resources

User Testing: Findings• Trouble identifying valuable source from

long browse list – rarely select the appropriate database.

• People still don’t understand different types of resources (especially databases vs. Electronic Journals)

• Minor improvement on understanding need for two-level search – still some attempt to search contents directly

Conclusions from the Evolution

• Important tension between being able to browse - see actual list of available stuff - and being funneled to best resources

• Important to know position within site

• Certain thorny problems persisted throughout the semester:

Outstanding Problems

• Choosing among obscure or unfamiliar source types

• Browsing long lists • seeing scope is important but length can be

overwhelming

• Clarity of two-level search

• Differentiating between Citation Indexes and Full-Text Resources

Lesson Learned...

• For doing UI design, we really need to have a truly cross-functional team including technical expertise.

… have the ideas but can’t sufficiently implement them into the design for testing...

Realization….

Although we do not agree with the choices made for the existing CDL... with the complexity of the given problems, we give CDL our full respect...