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.
>>
>