Everyone's invited: A website usability study involving multiple library stakeholders

Abstract

This article describes a usability study of the University of Southern Mississippi Libraries website conducted in early 2016. The study involved six participants from each of four key user groups-undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty, and library employees- and consisted of six typical library search tasks, such as finding a book and an article on a topic, locating a journal by title, and looking up hours of operation. Library employees and graduate students completed the study's tasks most successfully, whereas undergraduate students performed relatively simple searches and relied on the Libraries' discovery tool, Primo. The study's results displayed several problematic features that affected each user group, including library employees. These results increased internal buy-in for usability-related changes to the library website in a later redesign.