Card Sorting and User Scenarios: Usability Testing of SFU's Scholarly Publishing and Open Access Webpages

Academic libraries are leading changes in the scholarly publishing ecosystem, and librarians are responsible for clearly communicating with researchers about this developing area. The purpose of this research project was to update SFU’s Scholarly Publishing and Open Access webpages to make the structure, language and content accessible and discoverable for a wide-range of users. We were investigating the question: Can users find what they need on the Scholarly Publishing and Open Access webpages? Our research was based on commonly adopted usability and information architecture principles, such as those described by usability.gov, Rosenfeld, Morville, & Arango (2015), and Nielsen (2012). We conducted two phases of qualitative data collection: An open, moderated, paper card sorting activity to collect initial data about the structure of the pages; and a usability-lab study with scenarios to test the resulting content. Data was manually coded into thematic groups, and webpage edits were prioritized based on respondent feedback. We anticipate conducting similar usability testing on an iterative basis to keep the webpages current, and our experience will inform our approach for future studies.