Participants found it confusing to have two search boxes in the home page. They also complained the boxes were too small. One participant was not sure whether he could type in multiple words or only one. Another participant did not know he could type into the search box.
When the search results are presented they would like to know the kind of document (e.g. article, conference, thesis, etc.). They also complained about the quality of the search results. Although they tried refining the search adding more terms, the items they were looking for didn't appear at the top of the list.
Recommendations:
Participants were asked to search for a document and open it. Most of them, after arriving at the item visualization page, go directly to the link of the URI field. After several attempts, they realise their mistake and then they go to files section.
When participants received the e-mail to complete the registration they found it weird that the sender was a person (they saw my e-mail address, which is the one we have set as the admin mail), they would rather expect it from the repository.
Recommendations:
Participants didn't understand the meaning of some terms like: community, URL, URI, RSS, DSpace, etc. They comment they are too general.
The term community is not specific enough and it is not clear to me whether it refers to a subject, academic departments, etc.
Although it is not directly related to usability of DSpace, I think people working on repositories will find it useful when they face the task of building an structure of Communities and collections for their repository.
Our repository's communities and collections are more or less structured in the way of thinking of the librarians and the way the university is structured. For example, we have a top level community "Research" broken into departments and finally on the type of document.