Usability of the National Library and Archives of Iran (NLAI) Digital Library based on User Experience

To evaluate the usability of the digital library of the National Library and Archives of Iran (NLAI) based on user experience.

A heuristic mixed method (convergent parallel approach) was used. To evaluate the usability of the digital library, a multifaceted approach was adopted and various techniques were used, including usability test, questionnaires, interview, observation, and Think-aloud protocol.  Eight tasks were defined for users to identify their path, problems and challenges, their confusion in the path, and the so-called pain points and ambiguous words of the website. SPSS software was used for quantitative data analysis and MaxQda software for qualitative interview data analysis. The systematic observation was carried out using Faststone and Ocam softwares. Two groups including novice users (clients) and advanced (librarians) participated in the study. Qualitative content analysis was used to analyze the oCam collected from interviews. In order to validate the findings, the Methodological Triangulation method and Lincoln and Cuba criteria were used.

Paying attention to the average of tasks performed by novice users (clients) and advanced (librarians) showed that registering a new user account took the most amount of time (more than 6 minutes). The overall average difficulty and ease of completing tasks without separating the two groups of users showed that Task 5 with an average of 3.45 and Task 2 with an average of 3.35 were the most difficult tasks, while Task 8 with an average of 2.25, was the easiest. Feedbacks received from novice and advanced users about the usability of evaluation criteria of the digital library (satisfaction rate, ease of operation, ease of navigation, site attractiveness, layout of information elements, etc.) showed that some components did not receive the average score of 3. For example, organizing website information with an average of 1.70, and visually attractiveness with an average of 2.10 are not desirable from the point of view of advanced users. Monitoring the level of user satisfaction with NLAI’s digital library showed that only 30% of novice users and 10% of advanced users were satisfied with their performance on the website. Numerous problems and challenges were reported during the completion of the tasks defined for the users. These challenges include complexity of processes (complex resource search process; registration process complexity; and search fields), poor understanding of site tags and concepts, arrangement of site elements, redundancy and multiplicity of options, visual appearance of the site, inappropriate retrieval, technical issues, inconsistencies, collection, and access constraints, wasted user time, variety of resource formats, and digital resource display.

Comparing the means of the two groups of novice and advanced users indicates that advanced users spend more time performing their tasks. Paying attention to the unsuccessful attempts between the two user groups and comparing them with each other showed that the rate of unsuccessful attempts was higher among advanced users than novice users. Advanced users were more unsuccessful because of the strategies and perceptions they had of the search. They naturally tended to use advanced search instead of simple search. This perception led to an increase in the number of unsuccessful attempts, as the advanced search of the digital library was very confusing.