Usability: comparison of DataONE on four university LibGuides

Purpose A usability eye-tracking study was conducted to examine how users interact with university LibGuides to find scientific data resources. During a study of DataONE’s Google Analytics, we found a high number of referrals from several university LibGuides. We wondered, “Does the high referral rate indicate that those LibGuides are more useable?” Design/methodology/approach The study was conducted at the User-eXperience Lab at the University of Tennessee. Four LibGuides were selected for the study: Two had high referral rates, and two did not but included references to DataONE. Findings With people leaning more towards images than text, the idea of people preferring scanning to reading seems to be outdated thinking. Instead, people want to look at as little text as possible. Blending website design to match people’s preference for images over text while still conveying your message is becoming increasingly important. Design features such as collapsible boxes and using images to break up text blocks could be configured to help LibGuides become more modern to match the textless Internet that people seemingly prefer. Research limitations/implications Our study does not provide recommendations for a specific LibGuide but hopes to inform the general usability of all LibGuide interfaces. Individual universities should conduct their own usability studies when redesigning their interface. One potential limitation of the study is that our participants were not representative users of any of the university libraries’ LibGuides. We did not recruit for discipline or familiarity with any of the four universities we examined. Originality/value Until recently there has not been a wide range of published studies about the usability of LibGuides; however, there is a growing body of literature on the subject.