[WEB4LIB] website training and review - what works?

[Jana Ronan]

I coordinated the focus groups at UF last spring Carrie, when we were
evaluating the structure of our website.  It is a very time consuming
process for the people conducting the groups.  First of all, I'd recommend
reading a book or two on the subject.  There are many excellent books out
there on how to conduct focus groups.  While most of the books are targeted
towards businesses, you can adapt them easily.  You can also hire an outside
firm to do this, if you have the budget.  

One thing about the focus groups... my faculty one failed miserably.  It's
hard to get them to attend. Making appointments with them to visit them in
their offices worked better.  During the visit, we looked at the website
together, and I asked them to respond to predetermined questions.  The
faculty response to an online survey concerning the website was much better.
But while an online survey is not the same as a focus group, I do encourage
you to add this strategy as we did get some valuable information.

I did better with the students focus groups, but you have to give them some
return for their time.  We fed them pizza and soft drinks and got a few
students.  Try to get a budget to pay the students.  The best way to get the
students, IMHO, is to enlist a couple of classes to participate, classes in
which you have a good mix of students of different types.  We found a design
class on campus that would participate.  

I also recommend that you videotape the focus groups for a irreputable
record of the comments.  Get someone who can handle a videocamera, and be
sure to set up good sound.  Have your camera man focus on the faces of the
participants when they respond to a question.  There is a lot of information
in the nonverbal responses.

Just some suggestions.  Oh, and my thanks to Jian Liu and Julie Bobay at IU,
who helped me plan our strategy here at UF.

Jana Ronan
Program Director for Undergraduate Library Services
George A. Smathers Libraries
University of Florida, Gainesville  32611-7001
jronan at ufl.edu 



-----Original Message-----
From: Carrie Phillips [mailto:phillipsc at bluffton.edu]
Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2001 9:33 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list
Subject: [WEB4LIB] website training and review - what works?


Greetings, WEB4LIB,

These questions are geared to those of you in academic library settings...

Here's our situation:

Our campus has recently overhauled its website design and architecture, and
I've had to redesign the library portion of the campus site to match
visually.  We're now hearing two-fold rumors about campus that students are
having trouble finding our library home page from the campus home page, and
that once they do find us, they are having trouble knowing where to go to
find what they need (research databases, etc.).

The first part is difficult to fix:  the new site's architecture was set up,
in the mind of the design firm, to appeal to the prospective student, and
the "meat" of the library's section of the campus site *is* hard to find.
We're not able change the architecture, so we need to educate our users.  If
any of you have been in this situation, what educational methods work??  How
do we get the word out?

The second part is easy to fix, since we have complete control of the
library portion of the website architecture (once the patron finds us on the
campus site), but we're not sure how to fix it.  We'd like to form both
student and faculty focus groups to sit down with us and tell us what they
can find on our site and what they can't.  Have any of you tried this?  Is
it a good way to work this kind of a problem out?

We have a small campus of 1100 students and several faculty members who I
think would be interested in working with us on this.  I'm hoping some of
you can tell me what your past experiences have been with this kind of
thing.

Thanks for your time.  Please reply to phillipsc at bluffton.edu.

--
Carrie Phillips
Computer Technician/ILL Assistant/O-PCIRC
Musselman Library
Bluffton College - BLC
280 W. College Ave., Ste. 4
Bluffton, OH  45817
Ph. 419.358.3275
Fx. 419.358.3384
phillipsc at bluffton.edu