A Usability Study of Flash Tutorials for Library Instruction

This study presents the results of a usability test of animated library instruction tutorials developed in Flash using the software Macromedia Captivate. The tutorials demonstrated title searching, author searching, and keyword searching in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University Libraries OPAC. Five participants viewed three tutorials and completed two surveys, one with demographic questions, the other with questions about the design and function of the tutorials. The results suggest that the tutorials are usable in design and function, and all participants reported learning something about searching the OPAC. However, the participants also reported finding the tutorials boring and expressed skepticism that undergraduate students would recognize the advantages of using a search instruction tutorial