Tag Archives: user needs

LIS Website Team Update: UNA

This is an update on the LIS Website Team’s progress toward the User Needs Analysis (UNA) piece of our charge. Right now we’re sharing the results and suggested changes that emerged from the UNA with the LIS Content Managers for the 4 primary LIS Homepages (Curricular Technology, Helpdesk, Library, & LIS).

The UNA results were based on a handful of participants in focus groups and a relatively small number of responses to webpage pop-up surveys (particularly for certain web pages). We are now turning our focus to designing Usability testing (likely based on the format used by the original Website Team). We hope to achieve better participation for this phase of our assessment. We’ll wait to share the results of our UNA until Usability testing is complete and summarized, effectively sharing all the new LIS Website assessment data at once.

Help us make the LIS website better!

We’re temporarily adding pop-up surveys to four of our main web pages. Not everyone will see a survey, but if you are one of the lucky chosen ones, we urge you please to say “yes” and share your feedback. If you do, at the end of your use of the selected page, you’ll be asked 5 short questions – really basic stuff like “What were looking for?”, “Did you find it?” with a chance to tell us what you hoped to find if you didn’t!

The pages we’re checking are go/lis  go/lib  go/helpdesk and go/ct

Thank you for your help. The results of this and other user needs analysis activities (UNA) will be shared with LIS in a future posting.

The LIS Website Team.

Creating effective surveys

Summarizing Markless on surveys:
A major pitfall of surveys is that they “often project designers’ preconceptions out to potential respondents” and thereby dilute the value of the responses. General tips: Give clear instructions for answering the questions! Don’t use library/technology jargon! Some types of questions we can use:

Closed questions: Questions with several answer choices (with check boxes), and with a catch-all at the end.
e.g. I will use the LIS website to:
Find resources X
Get technology help X (etc….)
Anything else? Please say what! X (with space for answer)
Open questions: May best follow closed questions, i.e. “Why is this?”
Simple checklists (with check boxes), and a catch-all at the end:
e.g. Why did you use the website today? Check all that apply
Find resources X
Look for information X
Get help from a librarian X (etc…)
Other, please say what! (with space for reply) X
Likert scales: Highly likely/highly desired with boxes to highly unlikely/highly undesired
e.g. I will return to use the website in the future to do X
select one box
Highly likely  X  X  X  X  X  X  Highly unlikely
Thurlstone scale: tracks agreement or disagreement with the question
e.g. I found what I needed on the website today X yes X no
Semantic differential: quantitative measures of topics usually addressed through qualitative means
e.g. The library website is
select one box
Good  X  X  X  X  X  Bad
Guttman scales: statements arranged in sequence to gauge strength of respondents’ view
e.g. Shifting LIS communications to web based tools:
select one box
Web based commun. will catch on quickly/completely replace current tools X
Web based commun. will require some adjustment, but will mostly work X
Web based commun. will be hard to sell, may or may not work X
Web based commun. will never work for our organization X