En usabilityutvärdering av Umeå Universitetsbiblioteks OPAC

Sammanfattning: This is a heuristic evaluation of Umeå university library’s Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC). It makes use of four of Nielsen’s ten heuristics, flexibility and efficiency to use, match between the system and real world, visibility of system status, and aesthetic and minimalist design. The evaluation was done by having 3 evaluators inspect the interface individually, as per Nielsen’s (1990) recommendation of 3-5 evaluators. Then a list of all identified usability problems was compiled and the evaluators rated the severity of these on a scale of 0 - 4. The heuristic method is a well-established evaluation method, developed by Jakob Nielsen. It has been used in evaluations such as Yushiana and Rani’s Heuristic evaluation of interface usability for a web‐based OPAC (2007), and has been compared to other methods in studies such as Ahmed’s A comparison of usability techniques for evaluating information retrieval system interfaces (2008). 21 usability problems were identified and rated. This evaluation found that Umeå university library’s OPAC has the most usability problems relating to the heuristic flexibility and efficiency to use. The parts of the OPAC interface with the most usability problems were the advanced and regular search functions. The most pressing issues were the order in which the results of a search were presented, and the lack of information on how to use the advanced search, including how many words that go in each “box” and that Boolean operators could be used. The OPAC did not conform to the two heuristics flexibility and efficiency to use, and match between the system and the real world. It just about fails when it comes to aesthetic and minimalist design. The OPAC does comply with the heuristic visibility of system status.