Future Recommendations for the ArchivesSpace Public User Interface at Yale
Background
The ArchivesSpace Public User Interface (PUI) Settings & Enhancements (S&E) Workgroup was charged with reviewing and documenting any default changes Yale might want to make to the public user interface, and collecting and maintaining a list of possible future interface changes and enhancements.
This report documents the S&E Workgroup’s recommendations for possible future interface changes and enhancements.
The Workgroup was informed by use and testing of the interface. The Workgroup has sorted their future recommendations into four tiers: High Prioritization (Tier 1), Medium Prioritization (Tier 2), Low Prioritization (Tier 3), and Very Low Prioritization (Tier 4). This prioritization is based on balancing observed user needs with feasibility of change implementation.
For each recommendation, the S&E Workgroup has provided any necessary notes; an indication of whether the recommendation is a critical change, as identified in the Usability Report; and whether implementing or exploring the recommendation would require staff and/or user testing.
Recommendations
High Prioritization (Tier 1)
Recommendation 1
**Consider A/B testing for whether Collection Organization Sidebar should be on the right or left side of the screen on resource record view **
Notes: Considerations should include both sighted user experience and the experience of users utilizing assistive technologies.
Marked critical in U&A report
Requires user testing
Recommendation 2
**Ensure searching is working collection for words with diacritics **
Notes: Cyrillic character searching is only partially working, and it’s possible that this is also the case for other languages. Yale University Library staff previously did diacritic testing for Voyager, so the PUI Implementation Team should have access to the script for that testing. Also included testing for non-Roman and right-to-left text.
Not marked critical in U&A report
Requires staff testing
Recommendation 3
**Add additional search options on the main search page **
Notes: Suggested additional search options might include limiting by repository and/or limiting by language.
Not marked critical in U&A report
Does not require staff or user testing
Recommendation 4
**Test filter selection, both with filters and with date selections, to confirm that users can select multiple filters at once **
Notes: The date range limiter is heavily used but with unsatisfactory results. This was a consistent issue across almost every search. For the usability testing American Civil War and Berkeley College scrapbook searches, the users made heavy use of the date range feature and were confused to find collections that fell well outside the date range. One user found the presence of the date range limiter on each additional row confusing and didn't know how it would interact with other search terms. In the Usability Report, it was unclear if it's not working or if patrons just don't understand how it's supposed to work. Requires staff testing to determine underlying issue. If it's truly malfunctioning, the PUI Implementation Team may wish to suppress it until remedied. The Implementation Team also found that applying the date filter was wiped out if additional filters were added.
Marked critical in U&A report
Requires staff testing
Recommendation 5
**Ensure more flexible searching via stemmer implementation **
Notes: This might already be in place by launch, depending on how Lyrasis implements search changes.
Marked critical in U&A report
Requires staff testing
Recommendation 6
**Consider asking repositories to add call number to preferred citation notes **
Notes: The S&E Workgroup believes this would be an easy way to improve consistency and user experience across special collections at Yale.
Not marked critical in U&A report
Does not require staff or user testing
Recommendation 7
**Explore possibility of having inherited scope and content notes display but not index for search **
Notes: May wish to consider user testing to see whether users find it helpful to have notes repeat and display. Inherited notes not being indexed may also help resolve some search relevancy issues.
Not marked critical in U&A report
Requires user testing
Recommendation 8
**Add option to browse Collection, Subject, and Name pages alphabetically instead of by page number **
Notes: Seems clearly desirable and should be implemented.
Marked critical in U&A report
Does not require staff or user testing
Recommendation 9
**Let users download finding aids as structured data **
Notes: Suggested formats include EAD and CSV.
Not marked critical in U&A report
Does not require staff or user testing
Recommendation 10
**Add hover text on key elements of the PUI **
Notes: Hover text would be especially beneficial on the top navigation bar, where we could add hover text to explain links. We could consider adding "what's this" linked hover text for "Subjects" and "Names" that navigates to related topics on the Help page. It would be ideal to have optional hover text that allowed users to toggle it on and off. We anticipate that this would be helpful for expert and staff users.
This recommendation is related to an Aeon Users Group recommendation to add hover text for the grayed-out request button.
Not marked critical in U&A report
Requires user testing to determine where to add hover text and how to manage it (e.g. making it optional, whether to include links within the hover text).
Recommendation 11
**Add automatic capture of screenshots in Feedback/Questions forms **
Notes: Would be very helpful for Public Services staff. If this is relatively straightforward to implement, it should be a top priority.
See ? button on SNAC website for an example: http://snaccooperative.org/
Not marked critical in U&A report
Does not require staff or user testing
Recommendation 12
**Update Yale PUI plugin to change what displays on the single-scroll view from "Identifier: I" to "Series I" **
Notes: N/A
Not marked critical in U&A report
Does not require staff or user testing
Medium Prioritization (Tier 2)
Recommendation 13
**Add search bar at top of search results page **
Notes: It would be useful to have a search bar at the top of the search results page, perhaps embedded as a pop-up when you hover over or click on the magnifying glass within the navigation bar.
Not marked critical in U&A report
Requires user testing
Recommendation 14
**Consider adding images or other visual interest elements **
Notes: Consider adding images to repository pages or elsewhere on the site (but not to the home page).
Not marked critical in U&A report
Does not require staff or user testing
Recommendation 15
**Consider adding additional facets **
Notes: After launch, conduct user interviews to determine what other facets users would use. Facets to consider might include faceting by "available online," language, or collections with the most results (as in the Princeton finding aid database). If we add many more facets, we may wish to collapse facet menus for less crucial facet options, to reduce clutter.
Not marked critical in U&A report
Requires user testing
Recommendation 16
**Consider having accordions open automatically when a user employs control+F **
Notes: We suggest implementing this, but we encourage considering how this will work on a
screen reader and on mobile. At a minimum, consider highlighting where terms are found, if menus are not expanded. This might be one option to use: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14613949/find-string-on-page-ctrlf-when-jquery-accordion -in-use
Not marked critical in U&A report
Does not require staff or user testing
Recommendation 17
**Add box request button to Container List view **
Notes: N/A
Not marked critical in U&A report
Does not require staff or user testing but may be informed by other testing activities
Recommendation 18
**Integrate location information from Aeon into location info in the PUI **
Notes: This would be a very useful feature to have, but the S&E Workgroup has ranked this as Prioritization Tier 2 because given the perceived difficulty of achieving this, it might not be worth the resources.
Not marked critical in U&A report
Does not require staff or user testing
Recommendation 19
**Eliminate Scope and Contents note display from Container List view in resource record **
Notes: The S&E Workgroup feels that including the scope and content notes in the Container List view clutters the container list and makes it more difficult to successfully browse box contents.
When considering whether to make this change, we might also want to consider how inherited scope and contents notes affect this display -- if every folder has the same inherited note, displaying is definitely cluttered and unnecessary, but in the link given here, it could be useful. We may wish to sample container lists to determine how useful this is.
See example at: http://puidevarchivesspace.library.yale.edu/repositories/2/top_containers/304260
Not marked critical in U&A report
Does not require staff or user testing but may be informed by other testing activities
Low Prioritization (Tier 3)
Recommendation 20
**Review structure of repository landing pages **
Notes: The S&E Workgroup thinks it would be useful to add physical addresses for repositories, as well as optional links to local "Planning a Research Visit" sites, as well as information about making appointments, if necessary. YAMS should determine how much customization of these page is possible, and repositories should review their pages to determine what that would like to add, based on YAMS’s findings.
Not marked critical in U&A report
Does not require staff or user testing
Recommendation 21
**Clarify storage location for archival components with multiple instances **
Notes: See example here: http://puitestarchivesspace.library.yale.edu/repositories/12/archival_objects/1476780
Not marked critical in U&A report
Does not require staff or user testing
Recommendation 22
**Do user testing on navigating search results within a collection (i.e. highlighting versus control+F) **
Notes: Possibilities include: highlighting search terms in resource record view when coming from a search results list; highlighting search terms on search results page and/or showing how many times search terms appear in each result; and determining whether users prefer contextual highlighting or using browser-based control+F search.
Marked critical in U&A report
Requires user testing
Recommendation 23
**Consider A/B testing for whether the repository name should be on a separate line in the search results **
Notes: The S&E Workgroup notes that this may or may not be useful, but it could be folded into other user testing. It might also be an option to decrease the amount of padding the above result_context rows, perhaps to .5em instead of 1em.
Not marked critical in U&A report
Requires user testing
Very Low Prioritization (Tier 4)
Recommendation 24
**Explore contextual results **
Notes: This would require a good deal of exploration that hasn't been done at Yale yet.
This functionality is in the Smithsonian platform and the Cherry Hill mockup -- we could explore having it as a toggle so that users can choose whether they'd like their searches grouped by collection. http://cherryhill.github.io/aspace_pui/02searchresultstree.html
Note that there is likely an underlying issue here: users expect to get collection-level records for papers/collections that include subcomponents, and they're not going to get those results unless the thing they're searching for is described at the collection-level (e.g. searching for the title of an individual Langston Hughes poem in the PUI is not going to return the collection's record, unless the title of the poem was noted somewhere in one of the collection-level notes)
Not marked critical in U&A report
Does not require staff or user testing but may be informed by other testing activities
Recommendation 25
**Add a "show collections first" tickbox on the main search page and/or on the search results page **
Notes: This might be useful to include for users who prefer to see collections listed first in the search results, but the S&E Workgroup believes the team must first review how the improved search functionality performs.We also note that being able to limit searches to collections on the main search page using record type might eliminate the need to meet this recommendation.
Not marked critical in U&A report
May require staff or user testing
Recommendation 26
**Consider adding a discovery feature to the PUI **
Notes: Based on user interviews about search preferences, it might be useful to created a discovery feature for the PUI, similar to the front page of the New York Public Library Archives (http://archives.nypl.org/). However, creating this requires further exploration and buy-in from the Yale special collections community. The team might also consider adding an "Explore" tab on the main navigation bar, rather than adding discovery features on the front landing page.
Not marked critical in U&A report
Does not require staff or user testing
Recommendation 27
**Consider language of "archival records" in filtering for component records at the series level and below **
Notes: The S&E Workgroup believes that it is unlikely that users will know what "archival records" means. However, the Workgroup is not confident that it would be possible to successfully untangle these categories and filter by series vs. files vs. items, etc. in a way that is understandable to users. Another consideration might be to change the terminology to match the staff side of ArchivesSpace (i.e. label this as “component records” rather than “archival records”), but the Workgroup thinks it unlikely that users would understand this language, either. The Workgroup therefore recommends that this issue be referred to another group for further exploration.
Not marked critical in U&A report
Does not require staff or user testing but may be informed by other testing activities
Recommendation 28
**Build ways to use links from a record to find related items **
Notes: The S&E Workgroup notes that this (similar to Recommendation 16) could be longer-term goal, but this recommendation requires thorough exploration.
Not marked critical in U&A report
Does not require staff or user testing but may be informed by other testing activities
Recommendation 29
**Explore adding type-ahead search box text **
Notes: This recommendation might be helpful when people are searching by names or other controlled vocabularies, but this would require additional exploration and user testing. In particular, the S&E Workgroup recommends ensuring that this would this be more useful than it would be distracting or resource-intensive. We would also want to be sure that there wouldn't be duplicate results (e.g. with different controlled vocabularies). If this is implemented, the S&E Workgroup recommends making it togglable on/off.
Not marked critical in U&A report
Would require user testing