NB: Although we worked with WorldCat.org for this class project, we were never employees and do not represent the organization.
The Problem
WorldCat.org, a public-facing database for library items, primarily books, was looking to explore the potential for community features on their website to increase engagement and retention for users. However, any additional functionalities added to the site needed to complement WorldCat’s existing database features.
Through project initiation and foundational research, we settled on the problem statement: How might we increase user participation and retention on WorldCat through the addition of community-based features to its existing library database?
Our Solution
Academics — graduate students, professors, and others working in academia — are familiar users of databases. Focusing on graduate students, our design solution integrates social features academics need, like personal pages and the ability to share their research work, with WorldCat’s database.
Quick Links: User Survey | Semi-Structured Interviews | Moderated User Testing | Heuristic Evaluation | Prototype
Foundational Research
User Survey
After formalizing our target users, we issued a survey in order to learn about the academic and social lives of graduate students. We wanted the opportunity to collect a lot of quantitative data at once from a more diverse sample of individuals than we could access for interviews. However, our sample still skewed towards our social circle and Georgia Tech students, who themselves skew towards STEM fields.
We found that graduate students on the whole were interested in sharing their research, and most were already doing so in some fashion. Graduate students also expressed preferences for websites tailored to academic and professional use cases when sharing their research material online.
Semi-Structured Interviews
During our foundational research phase, we also conducted semi-structured interviews with five graduate students. We wanted more in-depth information about their social and academic lives so we could understand what their needs were in a social site.
Our interviews revealed the hybrid nature of researching sharing in 2023 — students would share a paper they worked on in-person at a conference, and then later go on Twitter/X to post about it. They were interested in using digital platforms to network with other professionals in their field, as well as share about their personal passion subjects. Students were looking for community both online and offline, and wanted to engage with academics outside of the field they were studying.
Early Designs and Iterative Research
We began this phase of the project with ideation, and came up with three concepts to sketch: a revamp of WorldCat’s existing list feature, a page where users could see events being hosted by their local libraries, and a user profiles page. After these concepts were sketched in low fidelity, we held feedback sessions with potential users about which features they would be interested in. Graduate students were excited by the concept of user profiles, and expressed that they would be unlikely to use the other features.
We moved into creating higher fidelity wireframes for the user profiles feature. Once our wireframes were completed, we held feedback sessions with another group of potential users to get feedback. This allowed us to further adjust the prototype requirements before we developed our prototype for evaluation.
The primary feature we designed for our prototype were the user profiles themselves, which allowed users to share their reading lists, publications in academic journals, endorsements (recommendations from colleagues), awards, and areas of interest. We also redesigned the search results to be universal to be easier to navigate for novice users while preserving detailed filtering options for more advanced users. Lastly, we added an update section on the home page where users can see what publications and reading lists individuals they follow have posted recently.
Evaluation
Moderated User Testing
Our users for this test consisted of four graduate students from different domains – medicine, business, and engineering. During the test, users were asked to complete benchmark tasks and think aloud while the team took notes. After the benchmark tasks, users were given a Qualtrics survey that included a word choice list and a system usability scale (SUS). Users’ input on features was taken both in-person and via Qualtrics to reduce the social desirability bias.
We found that users generally responded well to our design, and felt positively about the website. Our average SUS score (out of 100) was a 93, and the lowest score we received was an 83.3. We were particularly happy to learn that users felt that the features felt well-integrated, as making the website feel cohesive was one of our primary concerns with adding so many new features to an existing site. From the word choice list, users felt that the site was accessible and organized. While using the site, users expressed interest in using WorldCat’s features, and they especially enjoyed that books, publications, and user profiles were all on one site, instead of having to access these in different places. However, certain aspects of the design confused users — the search filtering was a pain point for some users. A future revision of the site would highlight this feature so users didn’t miss it.
Heuristic Evaluation
We found three user experience experts to give our prototype a heuristic evaluation. Each evaluator was walked through the prototype and shown the benchmark tasks given to users. We took notes on the qualitative feedback experts gave us, and recorded the heuristic evaluation scores with a Qualtrics survey.
We were rated 80% and up for all five heuristics assessed (match between the system and the real world, user control and freedom, consistency and standards, recognition over recall, and aesthetic and minimalist design) that were relevant to the function and scope of our prototype. Our evaluators felt that the prototype was well thought out overall, and felt that the information hierarchy and universal search were particularly strong aspects of our design. However, they had suggestions to refine some of the design choices we made on our pages, but all of these were relatively minor.
