Matching the System and User Activities
Make your website search clear and offer it on your homepage
Finding information is a library website user’s primary goal, so it makes sense to offer a search function on your homepage. Harpel-Burke (2005) reported that only 65 % of medium-sized library homepages offered a search function.
Be sure users can easily see and understand what materials or content your search facility searches. Most users expect a library website search box to search library content (e.g., books and journals). If your search facility searches only your library’s website and does not search your library’s catalog, explicitly indicate this is the case.
Do not use librarian terminology
Try to use terms meaningful to users and clearly distinguishable from other terms. For example, you might want to use the terms “Books” or “Find a Book” rather than “online catalog,” “OPAC” or an invented name like “PremiereCat.” Another strategy is to offer a short description of a term, e.g., “Journals - fulltext journal articles.”
Usability studies have shown many users do not understand simple library terms and concepts like catalog, resources, online database, citation, reserves, reference or special collections (Crowley, et al., 2002; Dickstein & Mills, 2000). Users also have difficulty differentiating between “electronic journals” and “databases and indexes” (Cockrell & Jayne, 2002). Your users might not really understand that “electronic journals” offer the fulltext of journal articles online and “databases and indexes” provide searching across abstracts of journal article.
Perhaps the best way to ensure you are using meaningful terminology is to do some usability testing with your own users. This means you need to see what happens when researchers use your library website.
“The average user success rate for finding journal articles or article databases is 53% (in 19 tests at 13 libraries reporting this information). Narrative descriptions suggest that terminology is a major factor.”
— John Kupersmith (2007), “Library Terms That Users Understand”
www.jkup.net/terms.html
Ensure good performance
To increase the likelihood your library website won’t suffer from poor performance, regardless of the power or reliability of your hardware, optimize your page design for download speed.
Don't place too much content on pages. Too much content can make them excessively large and slow to download. For example, you might steer clear of listing your whole e-journals collection on one page, because it might contain hundreds or thousands of journals.
Over 90% of users access library websites remotely (OCLC, 2002). Most are using DSL connections or faster connections, but some users still rely on slow dial-up connections. Designing for download speed will give your remote users a better overall experience.
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