Friends of the Libraries: Usability Study

The Friends of the Libraries is a philanthropic organization that supports NC State University Libraries. Our small study aimed to evaluate the usability of the Friends’ landing page and related parts of our website. The three participants were members of the Friends of the Libraries and were infrequent users of the Libraries’ website.

Research questions & findings

How do users who are Friends of the Libraries find pages about the organization? 

All participants used Google to locate the Friends of the Libraries page. 

For other tasks in the study, some participants also used Quicksearch (our federated search, which includes our main website) to locate other specific information, such as membership renewal steps. Because Quicksearch did not surface relevant pages for all queries in this study, we are considering suggestions some Friends-specific “best bets” that will surface some information more quickly, such as “renew membership.”

One participant preferred to find pages through our global navigation menu, and pointed out additional places where Friends-specific pages could be included to increase visibility (such as under "Our Organization").

What are their impressions of Friends of the Libraries and Giving pages? Is there any unfindable information? Is the information where the user expects it to be on our website? 

Overall, we had positive feedback, especially about the highly visual aspect of the Friends of the Libraries page. Two of the participants noted that they expected the events listing to be located higher on the page itself. 

The “Join or Renew Your Membership” button was highly visible to one participant, but nearly invisible to the two others. We hypothesized that this is because the round, blue button is not styled the same way as other buttons (red, rectangular) on our website.

We also asked participants to view the Endowments pages. Participants were impressed with the sheer number of current endowments, but one noted that the main Endowments page could be more visual (“it should be a happy page”). From participants’ descriptions of individual endowments’ pages (example), it was clear that the pages needed to have additional context, such as a caption identifying the image as a bookplate and more explanation that the “Materials” referred to books and other materials that were purchased using funds from that endowment.

Interestingly, all three participants seemed to consider the Friends of the Libraries page their homepage, returning to it even after we’d moved on to other tasks that didn’t involve that page. This may be because of study design, though one participant described their two “mental modes” to us: “search mode” (looking at the catalog or trying to find content) vs. a more exploratory mode (learning about the library and its events). This participant stuck to the Friends pages because he was in an exploratory mode, and avoided the Libraries homepage because he assumed it was designed for users who are in search mode.

Are there any usability issues with those pages or the website in general?

One additional finding was that participants in this user population were more likely to contact a staff member than other user populations, such as students. Accordingly, we should highlight staff contact information on Giving pages that aren’t already doing so.

The study coordinators also discussed improvements to the information architecture of Giving pages, including how we may use breadcrumbs and an improved menu to give users a better sense of where they are in our website.

Results

Based on our findings from this usability study, we made a big update to the Friends of the Libraries page, including highlighting staff information and upcoming events.