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2025-2026 Usability Retrospective

2025-2026 Usability Retrospective

Date

June 2026

Roster

  • Susannah Broyles

  • Kelly Kress (Vice Lead)

  • Nick Pavlik

  • Noah Lasley (Lead)

Charge

The charge of the Usability Subteam is to develop functional and practical recommendations to the program that streamline navigation, clarify the visual layout, identify accessibility improvements, and enhance the ease of use of the existing program for both the staff and public interface of the ArchivesSpace software application.

Accomplishments

  • Met monthly during the 2025-2026 term.

  • Continued efforts to develop recommendations and specifications for configuring the ArchivesSpace application from within the staff user interface (SUI).

    • Using feedback from last year’s subteam Community Discussion (April 23, 2025), created priority list of desired config settings.

    • Consulted with ArchivesSpace Front End Developer and Technical Lead to determine feasibility of and parameters for desired config settings (October 8, 2025).

    • Created technical specifications for each setting which led to a mockup of a SUI configuration settings for PUI menu created by Front End Developer.

    • Presented work at 2026 Virtual Member Forum (March 25, 2026).

    • Submitted 7 connected tickets related to configuration settings.

  • Reviewed tickets assigned by the Development Prioritization Subteam.

Future Priorities

  • Develop specifications for surfacing additional back-end configuration settings related to the staff user interface to a menu in the staff user interface:

    • Define basic technical specifications for configuration settings so that ArchivesSpace Developers can create a mockup of how the settings options might appear in the staff user interface.

    • Subteam presentation at Virtual member Forum to gather feedback from ArchivesSpace community.

    • Author tickets related to desired setting changes.

  • Potentially partner with Member Engagement subteam to participate in a quarterly mixer event.

  • Potentially host a Community Discussion to solicit additional usability issues / improvements for ArchivesSpace.

  • Assist the Multi-lingual Description Task Force with usability concerns.

  • Review Jira tickets related to usability issues as assigned by the Development Prioritization Subteam.

2026-2027 Leadership

  • Lead: Kelly Kress

  • Vice Lead: Nick Pavlik