Abstract
The current research assesses the usability of an academic library website. This approach is based on visualization of visual attention and learnability of the website. Ten freshmen students, as novice users, and three librarians, as expert users, participated in this research. Seventeen tasks were developed; these tasks were informational searches, some completed up to two or three times in order to assess the learning curves of participants. The librarians’ task times were treated as the benchmark “golden times” that a novice user would approach with experience. An eye tracker was used to assess usability. It was of particular interest to (1) identify the areas of the library website that are not clear to novice users and (2) to measure the learning curve of various informational searches. The results of this research indicated how quickly novice users learned tasks and which areas of the library webpages attract more attention.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Rosenfeld, L., Morville, P.: Information Architecture for the World Wide Web. O’Reilly Media Inc, Sebastopol (2002)
Lee, J.-Y., Han, S.-H., Joo, S.-H.: The analysis of the information users’ needs and information seeking behavior in he field of science and technology. J. Korean Soc. Inf. Manag. 25, 127–141 (2008)
George, C.: User-Centred Library Websites: Usability Evaluation Methods. Elsevier, New York (2008)
Usabilitynet.org: ISO 9241-11: Guidance on Usability. http://www.usabilitynet.org/tools/r_international.htm#20282
Nielsen, J.: Success rate: the simplest usability metric. Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, 18 (2001)
Kortum, P.: Usability Assessment: How to Measure the Usability of Products, Services, and Systems. Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (2016)
Oulanov, A., Pajarillo, E.J.Y.: CUNY+ Web: usability study of the web-based GUI version of the bibliographic database of the City University of New York (CUNY). Electron. Libr. 20, 481–487 (2002)
Brinck, T., Gergle, D., Wood, S.D.: Usability for the Web: Designing Web Sites that Work. Elsevier, New York (2001)
Pant, A.: Usability evaluation of an academic library website: experience with the Central Science Library, University of Delhi. Electron. Libr. 33, 896–915 (2015)
Eliasen, K., McKinstry, J., Fraser, B.M., Babbitt, E.P.: Navigating online menus: a quantitative experiment. Coll. Res. Libr. 58, 509–516 (1997)
McMullen, S.: Usability testing in a library web site redesign project. Ref. Serv. Rev. 29, 7–22 (2001)
Augustine, S., Greene, C.: Discovering how students search a library web site: a usability case study. Coll. Res. Libr. 63, 354–365 (2002)
Cockrell, B.J., Jayne, E.A.: How do I find an article? Insights from a web usability study. J. Acad. Librariansh. 28, 122–132 (2002)
Cobus, L., Dent, V.F., Ondrusek, A.: How twenty-eight users helped redesign an academic library web site: a usability study. Ref. User Serv. Q. 232–246 (2005)
Tsakonas, G., Papatheodorou, C.: Analysing and evaluating usefulness and usability in electronic information services. J. Inf. Sci. 32, 400–419 (2006)
Jung, S., Herlocker, J.L., Webster, J., Mellinger, M., Frumkin, J.: LibraryFind: system design and usability testing of academic metasearch system. J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol. 59, 375–389 (2008)
Buchanan, S., Salako, A.: Evaluating the usability and usefulness of a digital library. Libr. Rev. 58, 638–651 (2009)
Joo, S.: How are usability elements-efficiency, effectiveness, and satisfaction-correlated with each other in the context of digital libraries? Proc. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol. 47, 1–2 (2010)
Joo, S., Lin, S., Lu, K.: A usability evaluation model for academic library websites: efficiency, effectiveness and learnability. J. Libr. Inf. Stud. 9, 11–26 (2011)
Iqbal, M., Warraich, N.F.: Usability evaluation of an academic library website: a case of the University of the Punjab. Pak. J. Inf. Manag. Libr. PJIML. 13 (2016)
Ford, L., Holland, J., Iakovakis, C.: “I don’t know what i’m looking at”: understanding student libguide use with eye-tracking software. In: Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) (2017)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature
About this paper
Cite this paper
Ahmadi, N., Romoser, M.R., Guarnieri, L.M., Kry, T.G., Porter-Fyke, E.I. (2019). Application of Eye Tracking Technology in Naturalistic Usability Assessment of an Academic Library Website. In: Ahram, T., Falcão, C. (eds) Advances in Usability, User Experience and Assistive Technology. AHFE 2018. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 794. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94947-5_72
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94947-5_72
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-94946-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-94947-5
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)