Feb 2024 testing of user interface

Oral histories used in the test

In case we wipe staging by mistake, here are the changes to access I made in staging.

With these changes made, this link will take you to search results in which the first three entries are respectively open, immediate access, and manual review.

Problems found:

• https://github.com/sciencehistory/scihist_digicoll/pull/2537 Solved

• https://github.com/sciencehistory/scihist_digicoll/issues/2543 Solved

Other notes

The notes below were brought up by showing the OH interface to various users. They may not be bugs, but they seemed worth writing down for subsequent discussion.

a) Problems connected to the proposed UI changes

1. User assumed the icons below were download links, and didn’t understand why clicking on the icons produced no results.

Open

2. The flash message confirmation reading The files you have requested are immediately available. We've sent an email to [...] with a sign-in link. was invisible to one user because of the muted font and colors and the prominent titles underneath it.

3. On the /oral_history_requests/OH_HISTORY_NUMBER/ page, the list of oral histories was below the fold on one user’s screen. User had trouble finding the actual requests on account of the header and search bar at the top of the page.

b) Broader problems

These observations are just byproducts. They come from watching the users interact with the digital collections and the SHI website in general.

• On the OH downloads page for a garden-variety OH (such as https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/nk322f29d#tab=ohDownloads ), the Complete Interview Audio File and 5 separate Interview Segmentseach have headings, but the transcript does not. Because of this one user was unable to find it.

• In the download menu:

  • One user was confused by the “rights” menu item and what it was doing in a download menu. “What does rights mean?” Was distracted from the actual download link because of this.

  • On clicking on the rights link, the same user was taken to the CC page. User could not interpret the glyphs at the top, and found the all-caps CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED forbidding and incomprehensible. User assumed this was an error page.

• User wandered off the digital collections via the "STORIES" link and got lost.

• On the search results page, for full text works, we display full text matches instead of description. User found this confusing and didn’t really understand what the full text matches were; was expecting description instead.

• User drifted out of the digital collections, ended up on the main site, and started searching in this search box. Did not notice the three toggle switches underneath, and when prompted did not understand the relationship between sciencehistory.org, library catalog or digital collections or where they were most likely to find an oral history interview.

  Open