Citation Builder User Research

We wanted to know how easy or difficult it was for a student to use Citation Builder, the second-most popular page on our website. Were there ways we could improve the app? What was confusing, and what was useful? Here are the ways we improved Citation Builder, based on our user research.

The generated citation appears in the page body, rather than in a modal (pop-up).

This improvement makes the page more accessible for users who use a screen reader, as well as users with special Javascript configurations. Plus, a handy "copy citation to clipboard" feature ensures that the important text formatting, like italics, gets copied without including font or font size — making it easier than ever to paste the citation into a text editor.

Publication information is confusing, so we added clearer labels and help text.

When do you need to include the publisher's city? Which year should be included, the first year of publication or the year of the edition you're citing? The world of publishing is confusing, and the graduate students who participated in our user research weren't clear on these questions. In response, we clarified the information each citation type needs in field labels and through help text.

We added help text for instances where there are multiple authors.

When asked to generate a citation for an article of her choosing, one participant picked something she recently cited that had 40 authors. In many fields, it's totally normal to have a large number of authors collaborating on one article. But she was daunted by the prospect of entering 40 names one by one. We updated the author fields to include short help text for each citation style, such as "If there are more than 2 authors, the first name will be listed followed by 'et al.' You don't have to enter the rest of the authors."