Informal Feedback on DC Usability

Oral History

Jim Voelkel:

I was looking at the oral history of Allen Debus, and I went up and down the page trying to figure out how to access it. All I could find was metadata.

Somehow the gray bar at the top with the very clear play button and progress bar melded into the header. You see, I had been looking at rare books, and with the rare books, the header RARE BOOKS is at the very top of the page, above which is just header. When I went to the oral history, I looked at the header ORAL HISTORIES and looked at everything below it. It didn't occur to me to look above it.

And even when I realized that the play bar was right there, it wasn't at all clear to me that clicking the Downloads tab was where I should look for the transcript.

Transcription/Translation Side-by-Side Viewer

Chad DiMeo

So I just showed Chad (my husband) the interface and did some impromptu testing that I wanted to share. I had the item page open and asked him to poke around and tell me what he thinks, without giving him specific prompts or actions. The first thing he did was click on the image and opened the viewer. The default I had set was all three clicked. He liked the layout and immediately clicked ahead to page through the letter, and he liked how all three windows updated as he did it. The next thing he did was try to make the image larger within the image window. It was only a 1/3 of the screen so he had some trouble doing it. He never realized that he could minimize the windows. When I showed him that he said that was unexpected – he thought those were just headings for the text below it, which made sense to him. He wondered if we might want to have the boxes on the righthand side, under the thumbnails, but he wasn’t sure. I asked if it would have been more obvious if just the image was there when he opened it, or the image and one of the text boxes. He wasn’t sure and said “maybe”. In terms of tech savviness, he also works in digital libraries, so is more of an expert user than an amateur.

Features

Fellow during orientation

asked whether users were able to mark and save records to a list

Anonymous emailer re: survey

Hi,

I found you looking for something I am wondering what you are as an entity.

I word on cookies.

The only kind I want are chocolate and made with butter.  I do not wish to be tracked and have the electronic version of being tagged so unscrupulous scum like double click follow me for eternity.

Is ther a simple way to browse on the site, an alphabetical listing would be helpful.

If I notice odd hangs or inability to get something to load I will pass that on.