Tuesday 6 December 2011

'Users have no way of creating a citation, nor any help for saving their search': ReScript querying issue 5

Page
Source page

Heuristic
Efficiency

Description
Once users have conducted a search, there is no way for them to save either the search path or the results.

Impact severity
Medium

Recommend
Create an option for saving searches.

Examples
If users create a search and later want to re-run it either as-is, or with amendments, they have to start from scratch.
Figure 5—1: complicated queries cannot be saved when viewing

Quantitative measure
Where would you expect to click in order to save the results of this search?
Actual question
Where would you expect to click to save the results of this search?
Initial click test result ('before')
September 2011: 89 responses.

Figure 5—2: Before

Development change
Search results pages now have a Remember this search facility, which will be accompanied by a drop down list of those recently saved.
Figure 5—3: New 'My Links' section in title bar will also link to saved articles

Follow-up click test result ('after')
November 2011: 330 responses.
Figure 5—4: After

Reflections
The grid layout of the new design is no less complex compared to the previous version, but the Remember function seems to be well positioned given the clear grouping of clicks. It could have been named 'Save' but that has connotations of downloading / exporting to files which isn't what was meant. 'Remember' is a more informal word, and the function itself uses the HTML5 localStorage feature, which ought to make it compatible with mobile devices.

Bruce Tate, Project Manager
Donna Baillie, Project Officer

No comments:

Post a Comment