"The User is always right": a word from the team dedicated to making WorldCat.org more user-centered

By WorldCat Guest Bloggers Christie Heitkamp and Arnold Arcolio

Behind the WorldCat.org curtain, a team of individuals is dedicated to ensuring our site is meeting users' expectations, needs, and wants. Our team is comprised of several people from various parts of the organization who are responsible for discovering, analyzing, and advocating user perspectives during the development of new features and functionality on WorldCat.org.

Defining the user experience on WorldCat.org and WorldCat Local has been an interesting challenge because of the evolution of WorldCat from a librarian's tool into a site that can be searched by anyone on the web. When OCLC took the innovative step to give everyone on the internet access to some of the WorldCat data, we had to reconsider our target users. Now our site is being used by librarians, library patrons, students, teachers, authors, editors, and pretty much anyone else who happen upon our site from other search engines, like Google.

So, what does this mean exactly to the user interface and the user experience?
It means we have new users to account for during our design and development of new features and functionality. While our site may have been great for librarians to search and find items, we have to evaluate whether it is meeting our other users' needs and expectations as well. This, of course, means understanding who exactly is our target user.

We use several different methods to gather information about our users. One method is to actually visit the user and interview them while they are in their own environment. This helps us to understand the conditions and limitations they are typically facing while using WorldCat.org and helps us create a persona for that target user group. It also helps to understand the terminology that the user is familiar with. You may find us hanging out at your library looking for people willing to let us hover over them while they use the computer to find stuff in their library. If you do, don't be scared! We're not CIA or anything, we're just OCLC user experience people looking to learn more about our user to make our website easier to use.

We also conduct usability evaluations, where we observe users completing tasks and listen to them explain their experience and their expectations while trying to complete the tasks given to them. The usability evaluations are typically done in our in-house usability lab or often times we conduct them remotely. We use usability evaluations to help us understand the user's behavior on our site, and it also helps uncover any obvious usability problems in our interface. More detailed information about OCLC usability evaluations can be found at our usability site, which is created and maintained by our usability guru, Mike Prasse. Or, if you are interested in reading more about user experience and usability in general, check out some of our recommended books on the topic.