The project focuses on providing a smooth browsing experience across the LOC Catalog, allowing users to effortlessly access information they need while exploring its extensive collection. It targets researchers and library staff interested in obtaining metadata, checking item availability, and making item requests.
We conducted usability testing on the current catalog to identify all challenges, confusion, or inefficiencies that users may encounter while navigating the website or utilizing advanced search. We created an interactive high-fidelity prototype that includes easily switchable search options, dynamic section showcasing trending materials, captivating data visualization, modified advanced search with easy-to-apply constraints, and side filter-bar to manipulate post-search results.
The catalog is a searchable database of books, periodicals, manuscripts, music, etc with over 170 million items and global information on other libraries. The catalog enables users to search for materials using different criteria and offers detailed bibliographic information.
The Catalog serves the purpose of verifying holdings, checking item availability, and making item requests. It also enables researchers to obtain metadata that can assist them in their research.
Currently, the catalog does not provide users with easy and convenient search options to switch between according to their needs, neither does it have a flexible filter system that allows users to manipulate their post-search results without breaking their user flow. In addition, the significance of catalog has not been clearly conveyed through it's homepage leaving users confused about it's purpose and how it differs from the LOC main page.
Thus, the challenge is "how can we create a visually organized Catalog homepage that offers clear search options, allowing users to filter results without endless clicking, while clarifying the catalog's purpose."
Our research goal was to gain an understanding of the system, conduct background research, extract pain points of the current interface, and validate our findings with client needs. We decided to conduct heuristic evaluation by following Jakob Nielsen's 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design, as well as conducted 8 contextual interviews over Zoom with participants recruited by our clients. They had varying levels of expertise in research, library studies, and the LOC Catalog. Our purpose for implementing heuristic evaluation was to get enough background information on the system before proceeding with the interview script and contextual interviews.
To convey our findings to the client, we created an affinity diagram, a persona, and user flow map.
All the team members worked individually to gain inspiration in form of lighting demos, perform crazy 8's, and draw solution sketches. The team came up with 5 sketches in total, every member contributing with one sketch each. Later we voted on the ideas to be prioritized along with with client before moving forward with the storyboard.
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