Redesigning the Open Access Institutional Repository
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The document discusses the redesign of an open access institutional repository using a user experience approach, detailing user research methods and findings regarding information architecture. It highlights common usability issues faced by users, such as poor search functionality and complex interfaces, and outlines future directions for improving the repository's design and user engagement. Recommendations include enhancing visual identity, navigation, and terminology to better meet user needs and promote broader participation in open access initiatives.
Redesigning the Open Access Institutional Repository
- 1. @edwardluca Redesigning the Open Access Institutional Repository - A User Experience Approach
- 2. Agenda - Literature Review Open Access & OPUS Environmental Scan Implementation Future Directions
- 3. What you’ve looked at so far: • As Information Architects, we do user research to find out what our users need and how they think • We use a range of research methods: card sorting, interviews, focus groups, personas, surveys, etc. • A combination of approaches is the best way to uncover user needs
- 4. An encouraging start: “Search is the worst usability problem on the Web. It’s held that title for many years. We find too many results or too few, and most regular folks don’t know where to search, or how. From enterprise to e-commerce, user needs and business goals are obstructed by failures in findability.” - Peter Morville & Jeffrey Callender (2010)
- 5. Literature Review - Institutional Repositories User Studies Usability of Digital Libraries
- 6. OPEN ACCESS (OA) OA removes price barriers subscriptions, licensing fees, pay-per-view fees and permission barriers most copyright and licensing restrictions - Peter Suber (2015)
- 8. What does the IR actually store? • Journal Articles • Book Chapters • Books • Conferences • Reports • Datasets • Digital Theses • Grey Literature
- 10. User Groups • Authors • Data Creators/Maintainers • Information Seekers - (McKay 2007)
- 11. Authors (Academics) • Copyright concerns, including confusion around publishers’ policies • The extra time and effort is difficult to justify unless authors understand the benefits of OA repositories • Administrative task? • At UTS, understanding the difference between the Accepted Manuscript and the Publisher’s Version - (Kim 2011)
- 12. Data Creators (Librarians) • IRs are time-consuming, complicated to install and configure (Bell, Foster & Gibbons 2005) • Not trained in data storage, discoverability, workflow of researchers (MacMillan 2014) • View research outputs as an organisational resource • Unaware of the issues affecting academic participation (Armstrong 2014)
- 13. Information Seekers • Could be researchers, members of the public, maybe they don’t even exist – we don’t know! • We don’t really know whether IR end users are primarily from UTS, or outside the university
- 14. Information Seekers Research into user behaviour in open access collections tells us: • Users typically download 1-3 articles • Users do not change default search settings • Visits are short and sporadic • Most queries are 1-3 words long - (McKay 2007)
- 15. Environmental Scan - Competitor Analysis User Experience Report User Interviews
- 19. • Little effort made to brand the repository with its own identity • Interfaces are centred around searching (known-items) rather than browsing • Jargon or terminology is never obvious or explained, users are expected know • Interfaces are often complex, many displaying metadata and statistics not relevant to the average user
- 25. Symplectic
- 27. Tools of the Trade • Usability/IA Review Checklist Report (Tognazzini 2014; Garrett 2011; W3C 2008) • WAVE Accessibility Tool • Heuristic Evaluation (Nielsen 1995) • User Journey and Workflow Analysis
- 28. User Studies • Usability studies are essential in identifying issues “such as labelling, size of source, buttons nomenclature, lack of system feedback” (Koshiyama et al. 2015) • User studies inform our decision-making, help to support our design decisions, and limit our goals around what users actually need (Aljohani & Blustein 2015) • Key finding: most users enter the repository at the article level, coming from sources such as Google, Google Scholar, and the UTS Library website
- 29. User Studies • Our own Google Analytics data confirmed that 43% of users have arrived from Google Scholar or the staff page of the author on the UTS website • Consequently, visually communicating ’where’ the user has arrived at the article-level was essential • Most IRs are tailored to known-search over discovery, so this was also an opportunity to prompt users to discover new materials
- 30. Implementation - Visual Identity User Studies Navigation System Terminology
- 31. Things we Needed • Designer • Web developer • UX person
- 33. Visual Identity • From the marketing literature • Visual brand identity represents a set of associations that an organisation aspires to create and maintain (Philips, McQuarrie & Griffin 2014) • Includes logos, colours, shapes, typefaces, characters, styles and other brand-image elements
- 34. COMPETENCE (reliable, intelligent, successful ) SINCERITY (down-to-earth, honest, wholesome, cheerful) SOPHISTICATION (upper class, charming) EXCITEMENT (daring, spirited, imaginative, up-to-date)
- 35. SCHOLARLY HIGH QUALITY OPENNESS ACCESSIBLE AND VISIBLE AUTHORITATIVE RELIABLE & TRUSTED ACTIVE FORWARD FACING
- 39. Navigation Systems • Developing a more usable visual navigation system can increase the usefulness of digital libraries • The size and nature of the collection (35,000+ items), of which 1/3 are open access, makes visualising information a challenge • We implemented a ‘sunburst’ design to represent the hierarchy radially – and also provided a standard navigation menu on the right
- 44. Terminology • Natural language, and elaborating or explaining confusing terms, is essential in reducing the cognitive barriers of libraries (Kupersmith 2012) • Often there’s a disconnect between the vocabulary of users and the terminology of digital libraries (Thong, Ham & Tam 2002) • We developed a Copyright Clearance Process diagram to inform users of an otherwise hidden process
- 52. Future Directions • Further user testing is required – particularly gathering information about how users outside UTS use OPUS • We should examine one year of Google Analytics data (November) to evaluate the success of our design decisions • New features: ability to export citations, and for digital theses, the ability to navigate to the supervisor’s profile, and greater statistics available including download rates
- 53. Final Thoughts • A well-designed website is not a solution by itself • We still need promotional or marketing materials, direct outreach to individual academics, and significant staff involvement (Betz & Hall 2015) • Convincing organisations of the value of user testing is still a challenge, but getting easier
- 54. References Aljohani, M. & Blustein, J. 2015, 'Personas Help Understand Users ’ Needs , Goals and Desires in an Online Institutional Repository', International Journal of Computer, Electrical, Automation, Control and Information Engineering, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 629–36. Armstrong, M. 2014, 'Institutional repository management models that support faculty research dissemination', OCLC Systems & Services, vol. 30, no. 1, pp. 43–51. Bell, S., Foster, N.F. & Gibbons, S. 2005, 'Reference librarians and the success of institutional repositories', Reference Services Review, vol. 33, no. 3, pp. 283–90. Betz, S. & Hall, R. 2015, 'Self-Archiving with Ease in an Institutional Repository: Microinteractions and the User Experience', Information Technology and Libraries, vol. 34, no. 3, pp. 43–58. Garrett, J.J. 2011, The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web and Beyond, 2nd edn, New Riders, San Francisco, CA. Kim, J. 2011, 'Motivations of Faculty Self-Archiving in Institutional Repositories', Journal of Academic Librarianship, vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 246–54. Koshiyama, D., de Pinho, A.L.S. & Santa Rosa, J.G. 2015, 'Analysis of Usability and Information Architecture of the UFRN Institutional Repository', in A. Marcus (ed.),Design, User Experience, and Usability: Interactive Experience Design: 4th International Conference, DUXU 2015, Held as Part of HCI International 2015, Los Angeles, CA, USA, August 2-7, 2015, Proceedings, Part III, Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp. 197– 207.
- 55. Kupersmith, J. 2012, 'Library Terms That Users Understand', UC Berkeley Library, pp. 1–36. MacMillan, D. 2014, 'Data sharing and discovery: What librarians need to know', Journal of Academic Librarianship, vol. 40, no. 5, pp. 541–9. Mckay, D. 2007, 'A brief literature review on the usability of institutional repositories', Swinburne University of Technology, pp. 1–9. Morville, P. & Callender, J. 2010, Search Patterns: Design for Discovery, O’Reilly Media, Sebastopol, CA. Nielsen, J. 1995, 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design, Nielsen Norman Group, Fremont, CA, viewed 19 August, < https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-heuristics/>. Phillips, B.J., McQuarrie, E.F. & Griffin, W.G. 2014, 'How Visual Brand Identity Shapes Consumer Response', Psychology & Marketing, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 225–36. Suber, P. 2015, Open Access Overview, Earlham College, Richmond, IN, viewed 26 August 2016, < http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm>. Thong, J., Hong, W. & Tam, K.-Y. 2002, 'Understanding user acceptance of digital libraries: what are the roles of interface characteristics, organisational context, and individual differences', International Journal of Human- Computer Studies, vol. 57, pp. 215–42. Tognazzini, B. 2014, First Principles of Interaction Design, askTog, Fremont, CA, viewed 26 August, < http://asktog.com/atc/principles-of-interaction-design/>. W3C 2008, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Cambridge, MA, viewed 19 August, < https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/>.