Usability Study of an Online Tutorial for Volunteers at a Hospital Resource Library

An online tutorial for training volunteers at the Women's Health Information Center (WHIC) at the Women's Hospital at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was created. It was intended to be understood by all adult age groups from any walk of life for such complex topics as the reference interview, ethics, and evaluating online health information. Usability testing was conducted using "think aloud" protocols and a questionnaire. This study identified specific aspects of the WHIC tutorial that can be improved, such as creating consistent links, clarifying terms and phrases, and adding more sample conversation dialogs. This study has implications for tutorial design generally, because certain aspects of this tutorial worked very well for learning, such as the sample conversation dialogs, and the lesson opening statements, summaries and exercise reviews

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