CD-ROOM Booking System
at the University of Calgary Library

In this assignment, you will pretend that you are part of a product evaluation team for the company that developed the University of Calgary CD-booking system for the library. The system allows students and researchers doing literature searches to reserve the CD workstations in the library. The CDs themselves contain bibliographic databases; each has their own interface, but we wonít be getting into that part of it. It also has features for librarians to do advanced work.

Your job is to find major flaws with the current system.

You will do a usability study of the CD booking system. You will then write a report to the VP of Development in your company that describes how you went about looking for design problems, what you saw, and what you recommend. Depending upon how convincing you are, the VP will authorize changes in the upcoming version.

Usability studies requires an observer to watch someone go through the paces with ìtypicalî tasks. But how do you discover what those typical tasks are?

The first way is to solicit subjects who are using the system for some real need. In your case, you may want to ask someone who is using the booking system if you can observe them (using the methods described above).

The second way is to ask a random sample of people who are using the system what they are doing on it, and then generalize those as tasks to give to subjects. In your case, you may want to ask CD users the kinds of things they can recall doing with the booking system. Then create a task scenario to give to your own subjects.

To get you started, the tasks described below are to be given to each subject. The experimenter should come up with at least two other tasks to give to subjects.

Example Tasks for DOBIS CD-ROM Workstation Bookings.

1. Signing on to the system

• locate the CD-ROM booking system from the DOBIS main menu
• enter the bardcode number on your library card and your surname
  

2. Viewing current bookings

• check to see if you have any bookings at MacKimmie Library
  

3. Entering a new booking

• select a one hour booking
• select Inspec database {will have to search for it in the list...}
• book the CD-ROM for one week from today {cannot book more than 7 days in advance}

4. Booking another CD-ROM

• select the Dissertation Abstracts CD-ROM
• book it for 1/2 hour two days from now

at this point I still seemed to be in "one hour" mode so it automatically booked the CD-ROM for one hour; selecting "new product" implies the previous selection of time interval

4. Deleting your bookings

• delete all of the bookings you have made during this session

will have to "view" their bookings, and then select 'x' to delete each one separately

Problems Seen

• main booking screen identifies valid user actions twice; text is all in uppercase
• 1, 2, 3, and C are not useful mneumonics for the menu choices they represent
• have to type a 10 digit number to get access to the system; does not echo the number nor the surname as entered by the user
• CD-ROMS are referred to as "products
• can only delete bookings in half hour increments, though they may have been entered as a full hour
• 'x' to delete a booking
• when confirming a half hour booking, it gives the start but not the end time; both are provided for a one hour booking
• navigation could be improved
• didn't let me select the Management Library location; treated my entry as a "view" command

Good points

• does give examples for proper entry of surname when signing-on
• does give an example of a valid time entry e.g. 14:30
• can access various menus from other menus
• enforces the "no more than 4 bookings" rule (but a booking is implied as
• one half hour in duration, though you can make a one hour booking and a half hour booking; thus error msg. not as descriptive as it could be)