Well it doesn’t have to be that way, especially if you are fortunate enough to have a physical location & therefore your primary audience all around you. Here are two methods for gathering quick and dirty user input:

5 Minute Intercept Usability Testing
Spend 20 minutes coming up with your key tasks you want to test and scenarios in order to test them (I recommend Steve Krug’s Rocket Surgery Made Easy for a quick read on this). Grab a laptop and some candy bars, and preferably a colleague to take notes, and then go out in the world to solicit volunteers. If you are on a university campus, it’s super easy to find students willing to trade 5 minutes of their time for a candy bar (king sized, of course). The student union after lunch won’t ever fail. I’ve been able to conduct 8 tests in the course of an hour or two. And learned so much in the process.

10 Minute Card Sorting
This method is often used to guide an entire website’s navigation, but it can also be used to test sections of your website. It’s a great method for testing your own assumptions about how your audience thinks about your content; you can use this technique to come up with an organizational structure that makes sense and labels that are more meaningful. Don’t get bogged down coming up with perfect descriptions of content or the ideal labels you want to test. Treat it as an iterative process. This week we’ve been testing all of our “help” content. We began the first round with open card sorting using 28 cards; more were added when we realized not every type of content was captured, and others were taken away when we realized they were confusing. We then added labels and now do a blended version of “open” and “closed” sorting where we show them the labels after they’ve established an organizational structure to see if any labels make the most sense given their structure. Similar to usability testing, you can find users willing to trade minutes of their time for a candy bar. We’ve actually found that students enjoy the activity, as well. They like the library and like knowing they are contributing to improving our website.  

I’d like to hear if others are conducting similar sorts of user testing on a dime. Intercept usability and card sorting are the two I’ve had success with. We have also managed to recruit faculty members to conduct some more formal testing later this month (we offered them lunch). I hope to continue to conduct testing on a regular, systematic basis. In an ideal world, all of our serious website decisions should be based on user input.

Special thanks to Emily Hardy, who is in graduate school right now studying for her MLS. She was great at coming up with the pre- and post- conference Libby characters!

The students are given a situation and are presented with a website – they must decide whether or not they would use the website. I also included some examples where they need to compare websites on similar topics and select the better resource. This is my first try at using branching in Captivate (very simple branching, but branching nonetheless).

SEE WEB RESOURCES TUTORIAL HERE

I’d appreciate any feedback!

http://intranet.library.arizona.edu/learn/tutorials/plgskillshare/player.html

I’d love to hear anyone’s feedback!

Banned Books Week Exhibit, University of Arizona Main Library

As most librarians know, last week was Banned Books Week, and I was involved in a number of events in the library and in collaboration with the Progressive Librarians Guild – UA Chapter. See our library news story on how we celebrated.

First, we installed an exhibit in Research West. Almost all of the books were lent by library staff and students, leaving our own collection available for circulation during this important week. We covered the four glass exhibit cubes in black cardboard, caution tape, and warning signs, with small peep-holes for those daring to view the challenged literature. Already, we have had a great response from students. In fact, several people have said that they have never seen the exhibit so busy with people stopping to take a look! We certainly got their attention.

Banned Books Week Exhibit, University of Arizona Main Library

UA News decided to publish a story on our events, and then we even got the university’s UATV and Daily Wildcat interested, who interviewed me and did a story on the week’s events:

As mentioned in the video, we had an event (held last Wednesday night) which included a film screening, a “Read Out!” and a panel discussion. It was well attended with participants ranging from students to professors to community members. About a dozen participants went to the podium to read from challenged books as part of the Read Out, and following I performed a Pecha Kucha titled, “Challenging Censorship: Libraries as advocates for freedom and democracy.” Concluding the program was the panel which included two librarians and one English professor, who discussed issues ranging from dangerous publications about bomb-making to historically challenged classics to LGBT literature being banned in college classrooms. Audience members engaged in Q&A with the speakers, and everyone seemed to enjoy the evening which wrapped up soon after 8pm.

Banned Books Week Panel Discussion

I created this version when another librarian asked me if we had something we could provide a faculty member who wanted to just play something as students were walking in and getting settled into the class. This just happens to be one of the Centennial Hall classes this semester – one that has 1,200 students enrolled.

I want to add music to this, but in the meantime it’s a nice silent presentation. I created it using the flash-editor program, FlyPaper. Take a look!

To help draw them in, and give them something to watch while they’re waiting for the session to start, I play this video, “Did You Know?”:

It’s a great illustration of information overload. Once the video ends, I explain that it seems appropriate since libraries are all about information, and helping you navigate through the incredibly vast world of information…

We had a good turnout, and the audience actively participated by asking questions and sharing their own experiences. It seemed like a very timely topic, as many other instruction librarians are going towards both online teaching and credit-bearing courses.

Here is our powerpoint to give you an idea of what we talked about, I hope others find this helpful and share any comments:

We also had a handout with a list of things to Try and to Avoid in online instruction, which I’ll share here:

It was absolutely enlightening! There is a whole world of E-Learning professionals out there that I didn’t even know existed. Primarily those that attended the conference were instructional designers (IDs) that either work for a corporation or non-profit or are consultants. They receive content from subject matter experts (SMEs) that they are then to make into an online learning object, and distributed across the country (or world) to the company’s employees. It’s for training purposes, mostly.

These E-Learning professionals have been doing this sort of thing for years, becoming experts in the fields of displaying online content, designing for online learners, and assessment through online mechanisms.

I can’t possibly share everything that I learned, but I will share some key points that are important to us as librarians.

1. Rapid e-learning tools are fantastic, and there are plenty of them out there. You don’t need to learn Flash or XML. At my library we already have Articulate, which is a big one, but I learned about other options such as Adobe Presenter, FlyPaper, Raptivity, and Lectora. There’ s also programs like CodeBaby where you can create animated characters who speak to each other. Very cool. They can be expensive, but these companies often offer academic discounts, and you can usually get a trial to test it out and see if it’s worth the money. Why is this a big deal? By taking advantage of these tools, librarians will no longer have to go to their software programmers or try to learn programming skills to create this stuff. These tools can usually be self-taught and require little technology-savviness. And they have great help forums.
2. Designing instruction for online learning is far different than designing it for face-to-face sessions. But fortunately, there is a lot of research and a ton of books out there on how to design effective online instruction. Check out Empowering Online Learning, Making Sense of Online Learning, the Online Learning Idea Book, and the E-Learning Handbook (which are all now on my Goodreads “to read” list). Here are some tips I picked up:

• Don’t make them read. Construct your use of text very carefully. Use tables and graphics and images where appropriate. Always set a context for the learner. Always make the experience a conversation between teacher (or computer) and learner. Read Letting Go of the Words (the author, Ginny Redish, was a conference speaker on this topic and was fantastic).
• Take a lesson or two from infomercials. Find ways to draw your student in by telling them what this will do for them, and why it’s worth their time. Keep it simple, but incorporate stories, and use testimonials and quotes from experts to further convince them that this instructional tutorial is worth their time.
• Aesthetics matter, so remember a few simple rules. Use just one font type in one section, reserving any alternate font for important messages you want to get the students attention. Use different font sizes to distinguish headers from main points from supporting points. Don’t use decorative fonts, ever. And be consistent. Use good color schemes – Adobe Kuler is a great resource for selecting attractive color schemes.

I believe as instructional librarians are getting more pressure to produce online tutorials, classes, and other content – we should reach out to those that are experts in exactly that.

If you are involved in building online instruction or tutorials, I highly recommend attending a conference geared towards e-learning professionals. In addition to the E-Learning Guild conference, there is DevCon and DevLearn both happening this year. I have to say it’s possibly the most worthwhile and practical conference I’ve been to since becoming a librarian!