Emma Bayne

Discovery: Enhancing search experience through interface design

The National Archives

Why we are changing our online catalogue?

ChallengesVolume of Catalogue and digitised data increasing

• 11 Million Catalogue Entries = 500,000,000 “facts” (about 45 facts per entry)• Another 7.7 Million documents in Documents Online (digitised content)• Plus other sources• Ever increasing digitisation of our collection

Increasing prevalence of born-digital records

• Currently hold 1TB of born digital records; estimate total will be13.5TB by 2016• Specific large collections like Olympics 2012, estimate at 20TB on it's own Cultural change

• Moving from paper model to digital model• Still taking paper records for many years• Increasing capability to present large volumes of digital content• New challenges around search, find and browse

ChallengesVolume and location of Users

• Over 50,000 unique visits online a day • Users from all around the world• For every physical document produced onsite (totalling over 600,000) over 220 documents were downloaded

Juggling priorities

• Champion and follow archival standards• Excellent user experience• Enabling user generated content

Quality data is key!

• Highly varied data gathered over hundreds of years• Lack of continuity; many exceptions

• Gloucester – glos; glouc; gloster; gloucs…

What is our aim?• Simple - focus on the users and on the Record

• Create effective and enjoyable user interface through understanding who are customers areo Taskso Expectationso Capabilitieso Limitationso Preferenceso Context of use

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How?• Involve users from the outset and throughout the development process

• Use of range of methodso Interviewso Diary studieso Workshopso Focus groupso Log analysiso User testing

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How?• Customers have widely differing needs with varied levels of expertise and

motivation, such as:o Seasoned archivist who can navigate expertly through our archival holdingso Retired grandmother who has no archival or subject knowledge

• No average customer so doesn’t make sense to design for one

Persona based design

• Design for a small group of user types who represent a wider audience• Fictional characters based on actual observed behaviour• Composite of qualitative research

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Personas

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Margaret

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Tessa

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Search

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Search

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Taxonomy

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And more…

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New features

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The FutureContinue to add to Discovery, improving as we go keeping users as the core focus as we move forward…

Continued iterative development and enhancements:

• Responsive design• Data enhancements• More user generated content• Integrating further datasets• Improving search logic