Making Library Web Sites Usable: A LITA Guide (review)

In Making Library Web Sites Usable: A LITA Guide, the editors, Tom Lehman and Terry Nikkel, have created a practical guide on Web site usability for the library practitioner. They note that libraries face specific challenges with their Web sites. Search engines like Google have created high user expectations for clean and simple interfaces. Library Web sites are complex, providing access to services offered by the library and external information resources. Librarians also employ their own professional jargon and mental models of the information world that are not shared by their users. These factors combine to make the design of library Web sites a complex technical and organizational endeavor.

Although the book is written for an audience of librarians with a wide range of usability experience, it is, at first glance, more useful for the novice. Each chapter, written by librarians with experience in a variety of usability techniques, provides definitions, basic overviews of various usability techniques, and practical advice on broader topics, such as how to effectively recruit test participants. The book concludes with several case studies from a wide range of institutions, including academic, public, and special libraries. Most of the contributors are academic librarians, and most of the examples come from the academic setting.

The book begins by outlining several common usability techniques, including heuristic evaluation, card sorting, paper prototyping, user tests, and Web log analysis. There are two chapters on survey and focus groups, but these provide only basic information on how to implement a survey or focus group. It would have been more useful for the authors to include the application of survey and focus group methods to usability problems specifically. The other chapters on methods provide succinct guidance. They distill the broader usability literature, including Jakob Nielsen's alert-box columns (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/) and his book, Usability Engineering (San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 1994), Jeffrey Rubin's Handbook of Usability Testing (New York: Wiley, 1994), and Jared Spool's Website Usability: A Designer's Guide (San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 1999). The application of this more voluminous literature to library Web sites provides a useful reference source for librarians interested in, but unfamiliar with, usability.

For librarians with more usability experience, the book offers important advice about larger institutional and cultural issues. The editors rightly note that one-time usability projects are less effective than building and sustaining an ongoing usability program. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to library usability problems, and Web sites, electronic resources, and library users are constantly changing. A few of the contributors also note that usability techniques serve more than a technical purpose. In chapter 6, Nora Dimmock describes how the process of paper prototyping enhances communication between design team members. Several authors also note the importance of getting buy-in from a wide range of stakeholders, especially library administration. When usability skeptics actually observe users stumbling through common library tasks during a user test, they are more likely to be convinced about problems in an existing library Web site.

Brenda Reeb's chapter, "Communicating Usability Results Effectively," is especially useful in highlighting the importance of communicating test results with stakeholders. Much of the usability literature focuses on specific techniques (as do many chapters in this book), but Reeb notes that usability work will not lead to change unless librarians have an effective and appropriate communication plan. She outlines several options for reporting, including oral reports, which are often overlooked as a possibility for quick, efficient reporting in a library culture dominated by formal written documents. She also argues that the usability communication strategy needs to match the organization's culture and communication preferences.

The organizational component is often missing from the usability literature. Making Library Web Sites Usable, in the strongest sections of the book, highlights how buy-in and participation by stakeholders, communicating test results effectively, and explaining the value of a usability approach are essential elements to building a...