The DCAT UX Working Group FINAL report is now available
If you have any questions about this report, please contact the working group co-chairs: Erica Johns <emj73@cornell.edu> or Colin Lukens <colin_lukens@harvard.edu>
The Working Group presented on a draft version of this report at the April 2025 DCAT meeting; the group will present the final report to the DCAT community at a forthcoming open meeting (once scheduled, will be listed here)
The DCAT UX Working Group thanks the DCAT community for their input and participation in this project - thank you! - Erica, Colin, Genny, and Shannon
DCAT UX Working Group Charge
February 2024
Members:
DCAT Project Team: Erica Johns (Cornell), Colin Lukens (Harvard), Genny Jon (York), Shannon Kipphut-Smith (Rice)
UX Collaborators: Meg McMahon (Harvard), Angela Zoss (Duke), Jesi Buell (Cornell), Debra Kolah (Rice)
Project timeframe: Spring 2024 - Spring 2025
Description:
The DSpace Community Advisory Team (DCAT) has sponsored a User Experience (UX) project team to perform targeted, lightweight user testing on version 8, starting in Fall 2024. The goal of this testing will be to suggest user improvements to DSpace8+ versions. The project team is collaborating with a number of UX teams from institutions running DSpace, who will be facilitating small focus group sessions, with volunteer participants completing user-facing tests and prompts on the DSpace 8 demo site. Outcomes of these focus groups will be synthesized into recommendations for DSpace development teams on user-facing improvements for version 9+.
The project team has partnered with Cornell, Rice, Duke, and Harvard Library user research/UX staff who have developed a testing protocol. The DCAT UX project team, along with library UX staff, will scope the testing, hone general user feedback on version 8 into testing prompts, and design focus group events. Outreach to volunteer testers and the sessions themselves would happen in late summer. There will be significant effort to bring in a diverse group of participant volunteers that represent the wide variety of populations that the DSpace platform serves.
The project team wishes to systematically engage users and collect feedback on what their expectations are when using the platform and areas we may suggest to DSpace Leadership for exploration and future development. Some examples of components we are testing during this round include:
- Basic and advance searching
- Searching for and within a community
- Subject-based searching
- Searching within a journals entity architecture
- Discovering statistics
Specific project activities:
- Jan-March, 2024 - Define testing themes
- May 31, 2024 – All comments on script and pre-screener survey submitted.
- Mid-June, 2024 – All-group meeting to review comments and discuss DSpace demo site collections, components, and assets
- July 2024 – Build and load test site collections, components, and assets
- August 2024 – road test script and test durability of test site collections
- September 2024 – recruit testers at UX partner institutions
- October-November 2024 – user testing
- December 2024-January 2025 – analyze and adjudicate testing results
- January-February 2025 – present findings to DCAT and open for comment; DCAT submits final data/report to DSpace Leadership and Steering groups
- Spring 2025 – possible case study article about project
