In the inaugural year of the Usability subteam, we
identified a working style, settling this year on meeting biweekly to check in on our projects. This enabled the projects to maintain momentum. To avoid a burdensome time commitments, often the actual meetings were less an hour long.
established a “swimlane” to easily identify Jira tickets with a “Usability” tag. This clarified our work by avoiding inadvertently working on tickets that Dev. Pri. might also be addressing simultaneously. The approach is currently imperfect, because there isn’t an obvious workflow or routing tickets back to Dev. Pri. for approval, especially if future Usability members don’t also serve on Dev. Pri.
Our projects:
Our projects and scope have varied depending on the topic. The role of the subteam usually is to ferret out wireframes, specifications, and draw connections between disparate tickets that are functionally and conceptually intertwined. During this year, we
Met with a user from Smith College to assist in spec’ing out her ticket for a pretty-print option for printing webcontent
We “pre-vetted” usability tickets for Dev. Pri. - this can be helpful for tickets that need more information but has tended to be only an additional hurdle for other more straightforward tickets.
We developed specifications for improving the mobile interface of the public and staff interfaces
We met with a user from Yale to assist them with gathering feedback on a new approach to the public interface.
We developed a report on the Collection Overview tab, identifying common desires for evolving the view and functionality. While the project will extend beyond the term of several of our members, we hope the reconstituted team will be willing to pick up and champion the project into the future.