California Digital Library
Assignment 6: Interactive Prototype #1
DESCRIPTION
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California Digital Library
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Problem and Solution Overview / Tasks / Revised Interface Design / Prototype Overview / How to Use the Prototype / The Prototype
Problem and Solution Overview (top)
As we discovered in the lo-fi prototyping experiment, the major challenge to users of the CDL is understanding its structure. The CDL requires a two-level search. First, a user must locate the specific database(s) or source(s) that suit his or her purpose, then the user must search within these source(s) for the appropriate content. The CDL, as an umbrella containing multiple and highly diverse sources, does not enable direct searching of its databases' contents. However, users inevitably wish to begin with such a search. We found that users enacting our scenarios immediately attempted to do a content search without understanding the structure of the CDL, and became lost and frustrated within the complex database hierarchy.
Our interactive prototype concentrates on clarifying the need for a two-level search through multiple cues, and offering the user more immediate access to short bites of information that can help to orient them within the CDL's resources. We found that if the needed contextual information is one layer away from where the user becomes stuck, it is useless. As a response, we have moved a measured amount of such information closer to the top of the interface. Our goal is to enable the user to more easily grasp the structure of the options available.
Tasks (top)
We have chosen to use the same scenarios outlined for the lo-fi experiment:
#1. You are a UC undergraduate student. You are using the California Digital Library for the first time. Rather than looking for a specific resource, you are browsing the system to determine what resources might be available related to your major, Art History. You are interested in both general Art History resources as well as in Renaissance Italian sculpture of the 16th century.
#2. You are a UC graduate student in the Genetics Department. You are looking for a specific journal article that a professor recommended. You don't remember the exact journal, or article title, but you know that the article was published within the past couple of months, is about mitochondria DNA in sea urchins, and is by somebody named Roberti. Please see if you can find this article.
#3. You are a faculty member in the History Department studying religious minorities in the 19th-century United States. You are currently working on a research paper about Jews in the American South during the Reconstruction period. It is important for you to stay up-to-date on related developments in your field, so you are using the CDL to look for recent related scholarly journal articles.
Revised Interface Design (top)
Instead of focusing on new pages for Home, Search/Browse, and Site Map as in our lo-fi prototype, we have chosen to focus on Home, Select Sources and Browse pages. While we concentrated on these three main pages, we put placeholders in for each section of the site that we felt would be pertinent to the overall information architecture of the proposed CDL site.
On the Home page, in lieu of using the "Gateway" metaphor from our lo-fi prototype, we focused more on illustrating the Source types graphically. We completely eliminated the expanded Services section, which was ignored by all participants of our lo-fi experiment. We also avoided the original CDL delineation of the Collection instead indicating that there are only 4 types of Sources that one can expect to use in this library. Knowing that users will inevitably choose a unique path as seen in the results of our lo-fi experiment, mini-descriptions of the navigational pages (as noted above) help to provide additional cues to ascertain the most appropriate path. The Home page also uses a larger, sans serif font to help with screen reading as opposed to the small serif font on the original CDL, plus a mini-marketing message has been added to describe what the CDL "is" in a fairly succinct way. Short descriptive text added to the Select Sources & Browse navigational sidebar on the Home page also give more cues that CDL "supports" Sources. In the central section of the Home page, we have listed examples along with the Source Types so that a general understanding of these types can be gleaned before entering into the site.
During our lo-fi prototype experiment, users indicated confusion over whether the Site Map was a map of the 'resources' or the CDL website. The new site map we are proposing, but not prototyping here, will in fact be a map of the CDL website organization. For this interactive prototype, however, we have prepared a map of the sources supported by CDL and call it "Browse Sources--by Source Type" page. We have outlined the Types and indicated the breadth of the collections in each Source Type category (i.e., database, electronic journals, finding aids to special archives, and reference texts.) This offers users a visual aid, including icons, as to what is supported by the CDL and whether it is digitally included on the site or a link to a different site. A separate link is added at the top of the main Browse page to "Browse Sources--by Topic", which simply links to a results page on the real CDL that covers all topics, all formats (using their query terminology.) We are not focusing Browse by Topic for this prototype. We are more interested in better illustrating to the user what exists in the overall CDL collection.
We have renamed "Search" as Select Sources to indicate to the user that you are not searching for content, but rather sources in which to find content. Furthermore, we have also separated out the "search" functions from Browse having recognized from our lo-fi experiment that there is, indeed, a need to look through the Sources in various ways. The Select Sources results link into actual search results on the CDL site. As such, our preference to use check boxes as in our lo-fi prototype for multiple Source Type or Topic searches could not be implemented in this prototype[more on this in Prototype Overview.]
Each page includes a navigational sidebar that links to the main sections of the site. We have eliminated the multiple ways in which to begin a "search" (Quick Search, Go To, Search) from our lo-fi prototype instead funneling the users into the Browse or Select Sources pages directly. The word Source is used to imply that one is not going to find the information item right away, but search or browse for a Source in which that item can be found.
In addition, we have chosen to enhance some of the Source Type terminology with more natural language and less librarian jargon, e.g., "Format" is changed to "Source Type", "Archival Finding Aids" changed to "Finding Aids to Special Archives", and "Electronic Journals" changed to "Electronic Journals on the Web" (to differentiate this from the many abstract journal databases that the UC system accesses.)
Prototype Overview (top)
The interactive prototype is a working website of 10 pages as noted in the previous section. The main pages that we have filled with significant workable content are Home, Select Sources, and Browse by Format. The Select Sources and Browse pages function directly with the live CDL website to retrieve Sources or source lists (i.e., search results.) The use of color was used for showing some general differentiation between sections. Icons were created in the Browse page to indicate whether there were more sources and where they would be located (on CDL or linked elsewhere.)
What Was Left Out and Why
The limits on our time have required us to make choices in constructing our implementation. For example, in the Browse by Format list, we have not linked to some CDL sources if they are not relevant to our scenarios. Many of the links on the left sidebar (such as User Guides, Site Map, What's New, and so on) are mere information architecture placeholders. We are focusing our attention on clarity in the main source selection process rather than on these other aspects of the site, although we believe that the integration of the entire site architecture would be the most optimal way in which to enhance the functionality of the CDL site.
We have linked the Select Source form directly to the live CDL site, and therefore have had to make some concessions to our preferred UI design. For instance, as in our lo-fi prototype, we would have preferred to implement multiple choice selections for both Source Type and Topic, but the live CDL site only allows for radio button single selection at this time. Also, we would like to combine these two selection choices with a Keyword textbox to allow for a more focused search of a Source Type on a particular Topic AND a keyword, for instance, journal title (e.g., JAMA). However, again, the live CDL site does not allow for this, so we have put this in our prototype but have explained that it is not functional at this time. Had we had the opportunity to build databases on our own (for a more robust "Wizard of Oz" backend) we might have been able to implement this UI design without the crutch of the live CDL site. Overall, we felt there was more of a need for the user to understand the breadth of the Sources supported by CDL, and therefore, have chosen to focus more on building the Browsing and general source selection page than this "search" page.
"Wizard of Oz" Techniques That are Required To Make it Work
Essentially the interface works without divine intervention. There are three caveats to this:
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Tools Used
Dreamweaver was the main tool to create functional webpages. We also used PhotoShop for icons and a GIF creator for part of the navigational sidebar. Each page was created by hand, which proved to be tedious. Had we had more time to become more productive in using an application like Cold Fusion to link a database to the HTML, we might have been able to generate the multiple Browse pages with a database backend, rather than building each by hand. Overall, though, using these simple applications proved to be easier to implement our vision of the website to optimize the screen real estate than the paper sketches were for the lo-fi prototype.
How to Use the Prototype describes to the heuristic evaluators how to use our prototype. (top)