Findings
1. Search is the main function of WorldCat and many of the other functions of the website are based on the search function.
2. Information is not clearly and efficiently displayed in the item-detail page (the most visited page on the website)
3. The list feature is the only existing community-relevant feature on Worldcat and the functions to create new lists or add items to existing lists are unintuitive.
Worldcat.org
Addressing user retention and engagement for Worldcat.org
My Role
User Research
Ideation
UX Design
Team
2 User Researchers
2 Developers
1 UX Designer
Timeline
August 2023 - December 2023 (16 weeks)
Tools
Figma
Procreate
Survey Monkey
Qualtrics
Miro
Notion
This project was the outcome of a class named 'Psychological Research Methods for HCI by Dr. Carrie Bruce' at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Background
About Worldcat.org
Worldcat.org is one of the world's largest global digital archive and bibliographic database, providing libraries with a highly efficient means to centralize and catalog their collections.
It serves as an invaluable resource for researchers, students, authors, scholars, and librarians alike, offering a global network of library records to aid in the discovery of unique materials and to support their educational and scholarly endeavors.
The Problem Space
Most users come to the platform for its primary function - to search and locate materials. Once their immediate need is met, a significant percentage drop off. According to SimilarWeb, 48.67% of users view only one page before leaving Worldcat.org (SimilarWeb, 2023).
Our Prompt
Worldcat.org approached us with a challenge: enhance user retention and drive engagement.
They hypothesized that fostering a stronger sense of community could achieve this goal.
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This hypothesis guides our research question:
"How can WorldCat.org cultivate a sense of community among users to retain them and drive engagement?"
Understanding the current pattern of use
Our goals for this phase of research were to:
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To get acquainted with Worldcat.org.
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Gain insight into users' current perceptions of worldcat.org.
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Assess worldcat.org's competitors to understand their standing in comparison.
Methods
To meet these goals, we employed the following research methods:
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Drawing a site map
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General user perceptions on Worldcat.org
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Competitive analysis
Site Map
The goal for drawing the site map was to understand the information architecture of WorldCat and evaluate the existing content that the users interact with.
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We explored the main features of WorldCat.org through a walkthrough of the website, identified its navigation, features, and information architecture, and created a chart that represents its structure.
FINDINGS
1. Search is the main function of WorldCat and many of the other functions of the website are based on the search function.
2. Information is not clearly and efficiently displayed in the item-detail page (the most visited page on the website)
3. The list feature is the only existing community-relevant feature on Worldcat and the functions to create new lists or add items to existing lists are unintuitive.
General User Preceptions
The goal for this method was to assess the overall perception of Worldcat.org among various user categories, exploring both their preferences and criticisms.
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We analyzed discussions, reviews, and user feedback on Reddit, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter) to gain insight into the strengths and concerns of WorldCat users.
FINDINGS
1. A mix of positive and negative comments from users and occasional inquiries.
2. Limited user engagement, with few posts that include WorldCat tags.
3. Suggestions for improvement on various features and preferences for competing tools.
4. Frustration with WorldCat's redesign, navigation difficulties, and missing features.
Competitive Analysis
Our goal while conducting competitive analysis was to analyze competitors and determine both successful and unsuccessful aspects of Worldcat.org from a user perspective, while also identifying potential opportunities that can be fruitfully implemented on Worldcat.org.
Direct competitor analysis - Jstor, Library.link, Open Library, DP.LA,
Walked-through and evaluated the offerings of every competitor to assess their strengths, drawbacks, and opportunity gaps.
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Indirect competitor analysis - Reddit, Spotify, Twitter, Goodreads, Facebook groups
Studied the collaborative features of established tools (that are not direct competitors) to draw inspiration and apply similar principles to WorldCat.
FINDINGS
1. The primary emphasis on most platforms is efficient search functionality, prioritizing quick and user-friendly resource access.
2. Apart from a list sharing feature, users often find themselves lacking tools for meaningful interaction with others.
3. Across diverse social platforms, the most valuable asset for fostering public discourse is their subcommunity or topics feature.
4. Social media platforms frequently provide users with the option to subscribe to multiple specific news feeds, enabling them to tailor their experience to their preferences.
Key Findings about current usage
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The list feature, representing the sole community-focused aspect, is present but has unintuitive processes for creation and addition
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Opportunities to boost engagement:
1. Building a sharable features
2. Provide more a personalized experience with specific topics and recommendations
3. Enhancing the information architecture and interface
Understanding our users and their needs
Upon gaining a comprehensive understanding of the platform, we proceeded to identify and acknowledge our primary users along with their specific needs.
This research phase also aimed to validate our hypothesis regarding the introduction of the community feature as a means to enhance user retention.
The goals for this phase of research were:
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To narrow down our target user group.
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Gain insight into users' motivations and pain points.
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To investigate the need for a community-driven solution for WorldCat.org.
Methods
To meet the above-mentioned goals, we used the following research methods:
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Survey
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Semi-structured Interviews
Survey
The goal behind conducting the survey was as follows:
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To gather quantitative data on user preferences, needs, and pain points related to WorldCat, enabling statistical analysis to identify common trends and patterns.
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To assess the effectiveness of the current community tool on WorldCat (the list feature).
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To investigate the need for a Community-driven solution for WorldCat.org
A survey was put up on the Worldcat.org website, to which we got over 2000 responses.
ANALYSIS AND FINDINGS
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48.5% of participants primarily visit WorldCat for educational purposes, focusing on resource searching and exploring educational materials.
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Less than half of the participants are aware of the list feature, with only 8.32% of participants having used it.
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Participants conveyed dissatisfaction with the recently launched WorldCat.org interface and found the search feature to be unintuitive.
Semi-structured interviews
Through conducting semi-structured interviews, our aim was to meet these goals:
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To get in-depth insights from users and understand their processes and challenges.
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To validate the data and understand the reasons behind the responses received on the survey.
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To investigate any features that would make their work smoother and more efficient.
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We conducted 9 interviews with researchers, librarians, and archivists to identify their pain points and understand their workflows. We prepared separate scripts for each of these groups and conducted 30-minute interviews with the participants over Zoom.
Affinity Map
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We then used affinity maps to efficiently distill our notes and identify common themes.
Empathy Map
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Next, we identified prevalent and frequently recurring sentiments, creating an empathy map. This map also serves to spotlight key areas for our focus, aiding in the refinement of our project scope.
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Key Findings about user needs
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Using the information condensed through affinity mapping and the empathy map, combined with our findings from the survey, we recognised recurring patterns and documented our findings.
Utilization for Research
WorldCat currently functions as an essential research instrument, where users predominantly employ it for conducting searches, discovering artifacts, and augmenting their research, citation, and knowledge acquisition processes.
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Enhanced Research Support
Users are looking for comprehensive tools and resources to bolster their research endeavors.
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Collaborative Features
Users appreciate opportunities for networking and exchanging knowledge.​
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Improved Search Capabilities
Users expressed a desire for a more streamlined, intuitive and robust search experience.
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These findings led us to refine our focus and concentrate on two key aspects:
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We determined that our primary emphasis should be on developing a solution catering to researchers, given that they constitute the majority of intentional WorldCat.org users.
The validity of our hypothesis regarding the creation of a collaborative feature was affirmed through survey responses and interviews with participants. They expressed that such a feature would significantly enhance their workflows.
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With this information, we then moved on to defining our design recommendations.
Design Implications
We leveraged our primary insights to formulate design recommendations for our project. These suggestions stemmed from the user research we conducted and will serve as guiding principles for our solution.
The Design Process
Following the identification of our design implications, we as a group began brainstorming ideas. This process led us to multiple creative solutions. Out of these, we picked out best three ideas and created story boards for each.
CONCEPT 1
The Research Workspace​
The collaborative research workspace within WorldCat empowers users in their exploration of new materials to enhance their research endeavors. Here, users can seamlessly create topics, pose questions, and navigate through a wealth of resources. The interactive platform allows for the upvoting and downvoting of products, facilitating a dynamic assessment of their relevance to specific topics. Furthermore, users can seamlessly export these valuable resources for citation in their research work, enhancing the efficiency and convenience of their scholarly pursuits.
AskCAT (Community Assistive Tool)
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CONCEPT 2
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The WorldCat AI chatbot is designed for users to input their research topics, receiving personalized book recommendations sourced from WorldCat's extensive library database. This innovative tool aims to elevate research efficiency by delivering tailored suggestions aligned with users' specific areas of interest.
CONCEPT 3
Worldcat Widget (browser extension)
The Worldcat Widget is a browser extension that notifies users when books they are considering purchasing online, from platforms such as Amazon, are actually available for borrowing at their local library. This tool contributes in streamlining searches and promoting the utilization of WorldCat's extensive resources.
Concept Validation
After forming these storyboards, we introduced our concepts to fellow students who are involved (or have been involved in the past) in research. By leveraging the insights they provided regarding the utility of each concept and their opinions on them, we were able to refine and narrow down to one final idea.
These are the insights we received from this exercise:
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Worldcat Chrome Extension
The idea of a Chrome extension generated mixed reactions, with some finding it distracting and others liking it but questioning its fit for academic researchers. Participants suggested using it to improve WorldCat site revisits rather than on-site retention. Feedback covered physical book availability, annoyance with browser extensions, digital format preferences, browser compatibility, and managing multiple accounts for WorldCat and affiliated libraries.
Ask Cat
Participants raised concerns regarding the effective use of LLM functionality, comprehending content relevance, the quality of AI-generated content, search engine optimization, technical complexity, the need for user guidance in query formulation, and a desire for improved transparency and feature integration. Additionally, potential accessibility issues were noted for novice users and older adults.
Research Workspace
The feedback underscored alignment with the problem at hand, raised concerns about relevance across different research questions, confusion regarding the upvote/downvote mechanism, accessibility challenges for novice users and older adults, the potential for offensive comments, and the need for official moderation to maintain quality.
This feedback led us to believe that pursuing the Research Workspace concept while incorporating certain features from the Ask CAT idea was the right way to go. We decided to exclude the widget idea, as it did not contribute to the research process as effectively as the other two concepts did.
Wireframes
Using the feedback we recieved from our storyboards, we created wireframes to showcase our solutions.
Search
Users can explore a topic for resources and past questions to build their research off of.
Share a Resource
Users with specific / expert knowledge can share WorldCat items to other users to facilitate community learning.
Post
Users can ask their own questions to receive direct support.
Invite an Expert
Users can request for help from subject matter experts to expedite their work.
Cognitive walkthroughs and usability tests
To validate our designs and get feedback on the designs, we conducted two validation sessions.
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Cognitive walkthroughs - Experts​
In our first round of validation, we engaged in cognitive walkthroughs with four experts (two UX Designers and two UX Researchers) through Zoom. The objective was to gather feedback on our designs, specifically focusing on assessing the understandability, usability, and learnability of the proposed design.
FINDINGS
Our sessions with the experts were very insightful and drew our attention to areas that we hadn't considered.
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These are the broad pieces of feedback we received from the experts:
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There is a need to address many outstanding issues with the information architecture.
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The design had too many factors overcomplicating it.
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There is a need to incentivize users to engage and contribute to the research workspace.
We then re-visited our designs to incorporate their feedback before our next stage of testing.
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We cleaned up our designs and made them simpler and got rid of the features complicating our design. We also introduced badges to incentivize our users to share and contribute to the topic workspace.
Usability Testing - Users​
Next, we moved on to our real users - researchers. We conducted four usability tests with PhD students who are engaged in rigorous research.
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The feedback from our users was positive, affirming that our designs indeed constituted a valuable addition. All four users acknowledged that the introduction of this research workspace would significantly improve their workflow.
FINDINGS
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Overall very positive reception, though lingering concerns for functionality of prototype as it exists
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A need for onboarding
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Concerns around clarity
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Need a way to ensuring your question is addressed
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Curiosity around how exactly experts are identified
Next Steps
If given more time, we would like to expand on these designs and work on the following:
Onboarding/Tutorial
Create a seamless onboarding experience integrated with user profiles for personalized recommendations and progress tracking.
Information Hierarchy
Revisit the information architecture and restructure content for improved user navigation and alignment with the OCLC design system.
Reward System
Explore a comprehensive reward system to recognize user engagement and incentivize participation (prioritize in future phases).
Consolidated Posting
Investigate merging "resource sharing" and "question asking" into a "general post" format for greater flexibility (prioritize in future phases).
Overall Findings
Through all this work, our most fruitful insights were garnered through our research on WorldCat.org’s current users and the landscape that surrounds them.
Particularly, our survey provided great insight into current demographics, and the desires of current users for a more robust and accommodating research tool.
Through our ideation and refinement into a specific solution we also learned that the expectations for such a tool.
- Mainly that it be non invasive, and context agnostic though topically relevant.
We also throughout this process have learned the great desire for professional networking and leveraging community knowledge among researchers.