| Usability Testing at the University of Arizona Library: How to Let the Users in on the Design Ruth Dickstein and Vicki Mills While the business world has made great strides in focusing on customer service by studying customers, needs and behaviors, libraries have tended to structure their holdings and services around what they believed was good for their customers. It is the "librarians know best" syndrome, and it is pervasive throughout our profession. At the University of Arizona Library, we have been trying to change that model. All the staff are actively working to transform our institution to a user-focused library. We are doing this by asking our users what they need and by listening carefully to what they say. We are continuously monitoring what we are doing and asking what we could be doing better. One important change we are making in our behavior is to evaluate our activities through our customers' eyes and ask ourselves what effect our actions will have on customer service and satisfaction. A combination of factors came together in 1997 to prompt us to work on redesigning SABIO, the library's information gateway (see figure 1). In addition to our library's increased emphasis on user needs assessment, we were concerned about the rapid expansion of Web-based indexes and full-text databases and the obvious frustration of our customers with using the current gateway. A project team, Access 2000, was created to redesign SABIO. The team was charged with including our customers in the redesign process in order to create an end product that would increase their satisfaction with, and success in, finding the information sources they needed via the gateway. | |
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