NYPL Labs

The Digital Library Program, with the assistance of University of Michigan intern Cathie Toshach, engaged in a round of usability testing on the Digital Gallery interface in July, 2007. Users were randomly solicited at NYPL’s Humanities and Social Sciences Library and at the Science Industry and Business Library to be participants. The results were eye-opening on several fronts, and one of the big takeaways was how much non-library interfaces, such as Google and Flickr, have transformed our users’ expectations.

Watching a broad range of users in the sample stumble on some of the same problems is extremely useful for prioritizing interface hurdles which need to be addressed. Some of the issues that were uncovered were caused by relatively easy things to address; for the more problematic areas, NYPL now has data to support the further work which needs to be done in improving the Digital Gallery.

Read the full report (PDF).