The user experience of an institutional repository

Abstract

User experience (UX) is gaining significant traction in academic libraries as it is important and useful to assess library services from a user-centred perspective. Academic libraries play a vital role in meeting the information needs of their users by ensuring, among other things, that scholarly research outputs produced within their institutions are available and accessible through institutional repositories (IRs). This paper will report on a study which evaluated an IR from an end-user perspective through the application of UX. The qualitative study sampled a small group of postgraduate students at a university to explore the extent to which they are aware of the IR, their expectations of and attitudes towards the IR, their utilisation of the IR, as well as challenges they encounter in relation to the use of the IR. UX studies use various ethnographic research methods to collect qualitative data. Data was collected through semi- structured interviews, which comprised open-ended questions which allowed participants to share their opinions and experiences of the IR, and structured observations, which applied the ‘think-aloud protocol’ which allowed participants to verbally express their thoughts and feelings while interacting with the IR on certain tasks. Findings which will be presented include the following: while some participants knew about the IR and were utilising it, others were not aware of its existence; the IR meets most, but not all, of the group’s expectations; participants generally had positive attitudes towards the IR but there were various usability challenges associated with the search functionality which were barriers to navigating the resource effectively. Recommendations to improve the user experience of the IR will be shared.