Connecting Library Instruction to Web Usability: Improve User Experience

Abstract

The digital user experience librarian conducted an experiment with one of the instructional librarians at IUPUI in order to investigate the intersection between user's web behavior and library instruction. They thought that library instruction plays a key role in web usability and affects the ways students behave on the library website, yet very little research has combined these two realms.

During instructional sessions, freshman students were asked to perform a series of information seeking tasks on the library website both prior to, and immediately after, instruction. A usability tool - Verify - recorded individual student use of the website during the completion of each of these tasks. We'd like to share the results we found. The results allowed us to investigate how students behaved on the library website to complete the tasks and how the steps demonstrated by the librarian during instruction strongly influenced how students completed the tasks afterward.