Queens College Libraries is used by thousands of students, professors, and alumni. The website allows people to access various resources and databases. With so much information being provided to students, professors, and anyone who uses Queens College Libraries, we wanted to provide a better experience to those who use the website.

Problem

Queens College Libraries provides a vast amount of information to users. From research to collections at Queens College. However, with so much material on one website, users often encounter issues while using the website.

We sent a survey out for users to identify issues they came across while using the Queens College Libraries website. We obtained 29 responses to our survey.

Research

I conducted a heuristic evaluation to find usability issues users were facing while using the Queens College Libraries website.

*Some responses selected more than one associated heuristic.

Pain Points

The 3 main takeaways of the user pain points were:

• Links are broken, making it difficult for users to find the information they need

• Certain buttons and icons overlap or are not entirely visible to users

• Inconsistency throughout the website making the user feel confused

“…while I was looking for a topic it shows that the article regarding that topic is available online. But when I clicked the online availability it opens more links which made me confused and lost.”

“When you visit the databases tab it is not very clear how that tab differs from the one search tab…There might even be people who have never visited the QC library website and they might not know what finding databases is.”