Copac Developments

Well Amazon profits a bit.  Last week I busily printed off a spate of £35 Amazon certificates; these are being used as incentives for those willing to spend a few hours with the Copac interface and the CERLIM team (the Centre for Research in Library and Information Management, conveniently located just down the road at MMU).  As we start to plan some (not inconsiderable) overhauls to the service, the time seemed very much right for undertaking some serious usability testing too. As we begin to develop new features for users, including some personalisation tools, it’s more than necessary to take a reality check on how much this feature creep is going to affect users.  So, over the next few weeks we have tasked the research specialists at CERLIM to help us better understand how our users navigate (or don’t) the current interface,  and also provide us with concrete ideas on how our new interface should look as we redevelop over the next year.    They’re going to be using a mixture of search tasks, interviews and structured focus groups, and have managed to engage a good sample of ‘typical’ users (i.e. researchers and postgrads from a range of disciplines).  We know the findings are going to be invaluable (even while we brace ourselves, just a tad;-)).