Appointment Booking Page UX Study Continued

In March 2019, the UX Team conducted usability and click tests with users to gather feedback on a prototype of the library’s new appointment booking page. The design and content of the prototype were based on findings from our Appointment Booking Card Sort with Users UX Study (Oct 2018).

Research questions

• Can users find the appointments they are looking for?
• Does the language make sense to users?

Methods

• We conducted usability tests with 12 participants using Morae software to record screen interactions and audio. Participants were given a series of tasks to accomplish on the prototype appointment booking page. For example, you need to create a podcast for one of your assignments, where would you click to get help? We asked users to talk aloud as they completed tasks.
• We conducted a remote online click test with 37 users. The click test was created using Chalkmark. Users were asked preliminary demographic and library usage questions, then presented with a series of tasks (similar to the tasks used in the usability test). They were then asked to click where they would go on the appointment bookings page to accomplish the task.

What did we learn?

• The usability test and click test produced very similar results
• Most participants did not click on the “More” links that provided additional information about a given service. Rather, they would quickly skim the short 2 - 3 sentence blurbs provided above the “More” links
• Users had difficulty completing the Media Studio task. We organized the Media Studio under “Writing, Research & English Language Support” and this was not intuitive for users
• The term “Research” continues to be problematic for users. Does it mean doing your own research or finding research to write a research paper?
• “Coursework” is vague and can be misconstrued as a tutoring service for specific course concepts and assignments
• Users expected services under “Working with Data” to be organized according to the research process
• Users were not expecting to be able to book Group Study Rooms on this page

Recommendations

• Use one “Book...Appointment” button for all services that go to the same web form. For instance, all of the services under “Working with Data” go to the same web form, so create a single button for all of these services rather than individual buttons for each service
• Allow users to expand or collapse all categories
• Make this page keyword searchable
• Provide a short blurb at the beginning of the page to help orient users to the content
• Add a fillable form for those users who know they need help, but are not sure which appointment type to choose
• Change the “Writing, Research & English Language Support” category to “Writing, Research Help & English Language Support” to add clarity to the term “Research”
• Change the “Coursework & Time Management” category to “Studying, Time Management & Presentation Skills”
• Create a new category for “Media Studio”; our findings revealed that it does not intuitively fit into any of the broad categories
• Do not include Group Study Room bookings on the page