There hasn't been any full-fledged usability testing done. We've made some
incremental changes prior to the large rewrite based on feedback and
research, but this is a good candidate for usability testing.

FWIW, the three issues reported by the more general audience have been:

   - Users looking for people results. "Why did you take away the people
   radio button?" This resulted in the ugly pointer to the people
   results/search area.
   - Problems with the people search not finding people by nickname, which
   were resolved a while back.
   - The inability to narrow results by campus, as you could in the old
   search. We'll likely be adding tabs to the search off the home page and
   secondary pages to include campus groupings, or at least a TC tab. Since the
   TC homepage is often considered the systemwide home page, we might go with
   all of them, but are still looking at options.

As it grows a bit more and we come up with some better cases, that might
help us to get a more useful usability evaluation, but we may want to do
usability of search at the U as a whole, rather than this one component.

On Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 9:06 AM, Tonu Mikk <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Peter, thanks for making this available.
>
> Has the tabbed search been tested for usability?  If so, what were some of
> the findings?
>
> Thanks,
> Tonu
>
> On 6/14/2010 8:42 AM, Peter Wiringa wrote:
>>
>> For anyone interested in tabbed search, we made some significant
>> changes about the time of the last meeting. These are now documented
>> and available at http://webdepot.umn.edu/tabbed-search.php.
>>
>