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- Summary: This study followed students through the library with a call number to identify the fail points, with the goal to understand conceptual frameworks for first year UGs and glean ideas to building layout to aid in navigation to known items. They recruited through flyers in res halls, offered gift cards to library cafe.
- Wayfinding parameters include: stacks arrangement, service points, furniture, computers, other tech placement, study rooms, lighting. Wayfinding has links to cognitive psychology.
- "User experience literature points to need to understand touch points" (pg 28 - good we did that exercise in LEAD :)
- The article includes a nice literature review section mentioning the ERIAL project, Project information literacy report, and Foster's UG Research Project at U of Rochester. Previous studies of wayfinding assert successful navigation to: simple arrangements of building, visual access and open lines of sight, and lack of visual clutter.
- Their research questions: "what exactly helps student find items in the library and what are the fail points in navigating to location for know items?" Authors walk through their process of how they did the study and have nice charts of fail points and successful navigation (charts are worth viewing!). Basically students got 3 call #s and were told to "use any tools in the library they would normally use when looking for books" (aka could be catalog, a librarian, signs...) The author/researchers followed the student on their trek, had the students verbalize their process aloud, made observations (these logs note how many times users had trouble with certain areas) and did a debrief afterwards ("what would have helped you find the items? what was the most challenging part of finding items? what helped you locate the items?") The debrief helped to determine where the issues lie. From their study the library made some changes.
- Interesting comments:
- students often used other books as context for their search in the stacks - explains why research is often more difficult for students in a digital age
- the majority used library staff for help and found them helpful but some noted that having them more identifiable in the stacks would be helpful, or way to ask for assistance from withing the stacks
- The students desired more better maps with a you are here would help in confusing/odd shelf areas - perhaps instead of more maps, provide maps to a users mobile device; specially include fail points
- they did not like the call #s system for DVDs especially - but several mentioned if would help to understand what the call #s meant (subject).
- Three conclusions for general patron wayfinding in stacks:
- easily identifiable sources of help - staff members where students will encounter fail points and/or wearing something identifiable to users; signs that identify sources in an inviting way
- logical starting point - though we need/use our classification system to organize and find materials, users do not want this navigation and will find it confusing. They want a bookstore model. Find ways to add these concept in your library system
- uniformity in signage - all end caps should be uniform in size and font (end caps though not mentioned by the students in the study, observations actually showed they were used the majority of times) and consider increasing the size; visual consistency across all signs and help will benefit users.
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