Unsolved User Needs, Key Implications from Past Studies

The study yielded the following priorities for the Libraries’ online tools:

• Make discovery easier and more effective
• Incorporate trusted networks in finding tools
• Continue to put links to the Libraries’ services and resources where the users are

As a qualitative approach, a cultural probe tends to generate creative thinking and insight related to a user group’s behavior, rather than statistically significant data results. Nevertheless, results can be coded and analyzed to suggest trends and to move beyond impressions and anecdotes, bringing a larger pattern of behavior into sharper focus.

Key implication: The Libraries could meet the vast majority of user needs by focusing on services that support four core areas: research, publication/presentation, coursework, and current awareness.

Even so, many students mentioned that they automatically went to certain resources because they had used them before or because someone they trusted recommended them.

• User need for trusted networks, trusted resources, trusted people, etc., is a user need that we have not met

in the interviews, several graduate students voiced discomfort and a lack of confidence about knowing where to start for finding information about unfamiliar topics. Sometimes, even if they discovered an appropriate resource to search, the poor usability of the interface impeded their ability to locate useful information even though what they sought did exist in the tool.

• User need for paths ? or trusted methods for unfamiliar topics; anything we can do to improve interfaces
• "Key implication: It appears that the more complex and ill-defined the information task, the more the graduate students in the study relied on familiar resources and contacts to guide them to answers, yet the final result was a lower rate of success. The data suggests that graduate students could benefit from having tools and information that would allow them to expand their network of trusted resources rapidly when confronted with difficult information seeking tasks." (my itals)

Key implication: Undergraduate topical searches often required overview, or high-level, treatments of topics, which are difficult to locate with current library systems.

• User need for overview, high-level treatment of topics, and easier way to locate

Key implication: Resources which are quick and easy to access from the students’ locations are more likely to be used.

Fast access to any material was definitely a value for many participants in the study. Relevant anecdotes abounded in the interviews: students preferred links on a web site to “FAST stats” and were impatient that a faculty member hadn’t scanned and posted all his/her publications back to the 1970’s on their web site.

Key implication: Quick and effective services for print material could make it as valued as digital content.

Importance of browsing, also valued by several participants, both physical and online

Key implication: Serendipity in discovery needs to be built into online systems as well as preserved with physical items on shelves.

Very obvious lack of awareness of Libraries' resources, can very negatively impact users

Key implication: Enabling obvious, easy access to discovery and searching of tools could positively impact user efficiency.

Importance of using trusted colleagues, professors, tools.

Key implications: Students preference for and reliance on trusted personal networks could be leveraged to expand their resource toolkits.

Key implication: Barriers to self-help may be lower for online tools than for in-person tools. Indirect access to staff, such as access via Google search result, could spur more use of staff.

Broad key findings from 2006 user study:

A. Make discovery and search easier and more effective.

Improving topical searching could be facilitated in a variety of ways:

1. Reduce the number of starting points for discovery. Allow users to search many tools at once. (New web site design began this process.)
2. Provide more guidance in the selection of tools to use for discovery. (New web site design improved this.)
3. Provide user-friendly access to metadata in results sets for further search strategy refinement and discovery.

B. Incorporate trusted networks in finding tools.

Incorporation of trusted network data into library tools could happen in several ways:

1. Add links within library tools that facilitate linking to sources of trusted network data, such as Amazon, book review sites, Google Print, citation databases, etc.
2. Incorporate social networking and reviewing capabilities into our tools for input from users.
3. Expose our own circulation and use data to help people understand what is heavily used. (We have begun to do this more regularly, but it is not automated nor within the tools themselves.)
4. Incorporate relevancy rankings into results lists in our tools.

C. Continue to put links to the Libraries where the users are.

Since the students often started their information seeking outside of the Libraries’ web space, it would make sense to continue to find ways to put links, tools and MIT Libraries metadata in widely popular web sites, search engines, and databases that lead our community back to resources available to them in the Libraries, as has been done with Google Scholar.

1. Continue to partner with outside web sites, as we have already with Google Scholar and Windows Live Academic, to provide deep linking to our resources.
2. Take advantage of browser extensions and toolbars that enable integration of our links on sites often used by our students, (such as those that make direct links from a title on Amazon to a title in our catalog). Extensions like these make it possible to incorporate and integrate our services and links without needing the cooperation of the outside web site. These are becoming more and more popular as users in the outside world are finding useful ways to link libraries and bookstores, as well as other creative combinations. (Have we done more than just encourage use of LibX?)
3. Tools like browser extensions and toolbars are part of a larger culture of "hacks" and "betas" that have become popular in recent months. We should invite our own students to contribute to the project of modifying and improving some of these hacks and submitting them for possible use by others. It would be simple to create a web page on our site for listing some of these tools and inviting our students to hack and improve them. As we saw in the study a small number of students were interested in hacking library data themselves, but almost everyone knew a fellow student who would be interested. It would only take a few students like this to create interesting, productive tools that could benefit many others.