Collaborating for Change: Leveraging Campus Partnerships to Create a User-Centered Library Website

Abstract

This article details a series of website usability studies conducted by librarians at Fresno State in collaboration with faculty and students from the university's anthropology department. Building on an ethnographic study of the library, we sought to understand how students used the site. Collaboration with individuals outside the library allowed us to use their expertise in behavioral research, accomplish a larger series of studies, and redesign the website from a less library-centric perspective. In this article, we detail the study's genesis, methodology, results, and offer our experiences using a large-scale usability test to drive changes to an academic library website.

KEYWORDS:

• usability testing, ethnographic studies, collaboration, library websites

Acknowledgments

©Patrick A. Newell, Henry D. Delcore, Amanda Dinscore, Allison Cowgill, and Jason McClung