il2007

Putting Evidence-based Practice to Work, Frank Cervone and Amanda Hollister

Frank:

• most librarians haven’t been trained in HCI
• defined evidence-based practice
• data provides primary evidence for decision-making
• it’s not “common sense” – different stuff generally happens than what you “think” will happen
• Ex – doing a usability test, then comparing it with other similar tests to see the larger picture
• similar to user-centered design
• SPICE – setting, population, intervention, comparison, and evaluation
• Northwestern did their first usability test in 2001
• 2002 – did a catalog usability test – they found that the greatest number of searches that failed were title searches – title search was the default search setting, students were typing keywords into the default search box and not finding anything… so they found some great info from this test
• overall, site usability has improved – and they can prove it with statistical measures
• debates about how to proceed are easier – because they have data to fall back to
• easier to develop a strategy for incremental improvements over time – no longer locked into a tight academic schedule – they can prove the change will be an improvement, so have the go-ahead to roll the change out
• remaining issues – jargon and “i can find everything in google” problems

Amanda:

• spoke on making dynamic, page-based breadcrumbs on a website
• did a study of common paths customers took to get to certain pages
• they made something that constantly tells what paths customers are taking – very cool! They can narrow down to a single day if they want to
• future directions – implement predictive track analysis – find out where people are getting lost dynamically, then have something po up that says “were you really looking for this?”

il2007

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