Introduction

This is a summary of the usability report of our DSpace based Institutional Repository made by a student from Universitat de Lleida for her master's dissertation.

At the time the usability study was done, our repository was set up with a customised JSPUI. As XMLUI is the interface were more development effort has seen recently and, therefore more polished, I decided to deliberatively omit problems found in JPSUI not applicable to XMLUI while writing this summary. Problems specific to our customisations are omitted too.

Participants

Fifteen participants were recruited, five from each group in the university: Research and Teaching Staff, students and Administrative Staff.

All of them had a minimum knowledge of the search utilities the Library Service provides to search through the different resources it has. They also were used to search information in the Internet. However, most of them hadn't never used the repository or didn't even know about it.

Methodology

The participants were asked to perform the following five tasks while thinking aloud:

The tasks were essentially the same for all participants but each group had them adapted. For example, the search terms were different to make them more suitable for each group.

The test was run with our repository, which at the time, was set up with a customised JSPUI over a DSpace 1.5.2 as seen in the screen shot bellow:

The main structural changes were:

Findings

Searching

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:

Opening documents

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 finally go to the files section.

Browsing Communities and Collections

Participants expected a list in the centre of the page with items from the current community or collection, like the one shown when clicking on the brows by title link. They were confused and thought there were no items in the collection.

Recommendations:

Registering as a new user

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:

Terminology

Participants didn't know what some terms like "community" or "collections" were referring to. They commented they were 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.

They also didn't understand the meaning of terms like URL, URI, RSS, DSpace, etc.

Communities and Collections Structure

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. However, participants didn't find it very useful. They commented they would rather structure it in subjects/areas of knowledge, from more general to more specific.