Month: May 2025

Blog post author, Nathanael Brown, ’25, is from Blanchard Township, Maine. He’s an Honors History major and Honors German Studies minor. In addition to his many college commitments, he has enjoyed fencing with Swarthmore’s club team, participating on the mock trial team, and working in the Theater Department.

This past semester, I worked on a study to evaluate the current version of Tripod that the libraries were using, and prepare some suggestions on how to migrate information from the Libraries’ website over to Tripod to make the homepage more robust and useful to students.

Research Questions:

1. How might we better integrate contextual information about libraries and library services into Tripod (since that site is more frequently visited)?
2. What information is most essential to users, and how do we make the information as accessible to them as possible?
3. How do we make things intuitive while also adding the right amount of information?

To answer these questions, I drew on existing studies conducted by the UX team in the fall, such as our Libraries’ Website Usability sessions and Tripod Interviews, to gain a better understanding of how students use both sites. With this information, I drafted a list of recommended webpages for the new Tripod. I then conducted a closed card sort with the links and four categories that I had created myself.

Card Sorting

I spent a lot of time figuring out what links we were going to use and what we would name them. This went straight to research questions 2 and 3, since we couldn’t have too many links or the home page would become overwhelming, and the names needed to be intuitive. Some of the names were directly lifted from the Libraries’ website or live Tripod, while others were created.

Donna Spencer’s Card Sorting was very helpful in this process, as it taught me both the practical information of how to conduct a card-sorting session, while also clarifying the higher Information Architecture perspective on how to think about the data that I was gathering.

The data showed that for many links there was almost universal agreement about which of the four boxes it should go in, but for several there was the suggestion for a 5th category, called variously, “Talk to a Human,” “Tripod for Dummies,” etc. I termed this category Quick Links. Taking these suggestions, Mary developed a sandbox version of Tripod to conduct usability sessions with.

I had mocked up a proposal, below, which focused on symmetry and primarily utilized the original 4 proposed categories.

Eventually, we landed on this version, below, that included the fifth category as “Need Help?: Talk to a Human” which incorporated feedback about putting the opportunity for human interaction front and center.

Conducting Usability Sessions

Using the sandbox, I developed a series of tasks and scenarios to test its usability. The tasks aimed to encourage users to find pages on the website that are commonly used by students. The graphic below shows the results of the sessions, with the rows each representing one user’s responses to the 8 tasks (one task per column). Red means the user did not complete the task, Yellow indicates there was difficulty or confusion with the task, and Green indicates they successfully completed the task. White indicates facilitator error.

As the results demonstrate, there are some areas for improvement, but generally the Tripod Sandbox allowed for students to access the resources they were looking for.

Additional Feedback

The responses from open-ended conversations at the end of the usability sessions reveal important insights into what students want to see out of Tripod. Many students indicate that they liked having “Talk to a Human” on Tripod as a way to quickly connect with an actual librarian. Including the “email a librarian” function, a link to subject specialist librarians, and RIAs in this section could be helpful for allowing students to quickly find a person who can help them with a problem. Many students also indicate they would like more subheadings within the four basic  categories on the Tripod homepage, citing specifically the category “Research & Scholarship” as a little too broad. Initially, Mary and I prioritized symmetry for both the Find & Borrow and Research & Scholarship boxes and included four bullet points in each. But students indicated a preference for Asymmetry, like what Live Tripod has.

Next steps

One question that the entire process has brought up repeatedly, is how to design a Tripod that serves as many students as possible. Throughout the course of my UX Research, many STEM students indicated that they do not use Tripod very much if at all, and those who do prefer the Quick Links or things like Reserve a Space to be front and center on the Tripod homepage, whereas social science and humanities students vary wildly in their usage of Tripod, many going straight to Jstor or Google Scholar.

Future Tripod research would gain a lot from focusing specifically on how the different subject area majors interact with Tripod and trying to incorporate feedback in a way that maximizes utility across the disciplines

This post is by Anna Hansson, ’26, a double major in Computer Science and Mathematics with an emphasis in Statistics. Anna is interested in combining her passions for art and technology to explore UX Design.

This semester, I worked as a Library UX Intern on a new website design for the Special Collections page. The current page lacks adequate descriptions of the research catalogs: the Tri-College Libraries Digital Collections, Archives & Manuscripts, and Tripod. These databases are nuanced and can be difficult for novice users to navigate. Additionally, some users may have trouble distinguishing between the four special collections at Swarthmore: Friends Historical Library, College Archives, Peace Collection, and the Rare Book Room.

These problems sparked my research project, where I sought to answer: What content should go on the shared Special Collections library page, and how should it be organized for usability? My goal was to create a webpage that offers clear and intuitive access to each individual collection.

To start, I conducted research to understand the differences between the collections and the catalogs. I then designed a wireframe and developed it into a functional prototype using Drupal, Swarthmore’s content management system.

My main priority was to make the site easy to use, especially for new users. On the homepage, I created four boxes for each collection with a description and links for more information. I specifically worked on the “Search the Collections” page, which explains the different catalogs when to use them.

To evaluate the site’s design, I conducted usability sessions with two students. This research method is used to see how users interact with the site and identify design issues. I created scenarios where the site would be used to accomplish the task. Some scenarios I used were:

• “You are working on a project about the Underground Railroad and want to find online resources for your assignment. Which Special Collection would you use?” 
• “What catalog would you search in preparation for using Special Collections materials needed for a research project?”

Throughout the sessions, I asked the users what felt difficult and what was intuitive. Both participants commented that it was difficult to distinguish between the collections, specifically when to use the Friends Historical Library. Even with just two sessions, we start to see usability patterns, and further testing will help refine the site’s design.

The next steps of this project are to test more users to address usability challenges and to redesign the “Student Opportunities” page to improve layout and understanding.

Overall, this project was a valuable learning experience in web design and usability. I’m excited to apply the skills and insights I’ve gained to future work.