A long time ago in a library far, far away… The chat buttons and boxes peppered across the library website have become an integral part of the library’s reference services. Our chat service was created by a former UNC librarian, … Read more
Google Scholar is an amazing search tool. Until it breaks. Google harvested an incredible amount of article metadata & abstracts to power Scholar, and it does an impressive job of linking to freely available copies of articles whenever possible. Unfortunately, … Read more
Google Scholar provides options to associate your account with a library’s access to full text articles. After you set the option, every search result will include a proxied link to the full text when available: Configuring this option has to … Read more
Back in March, the UX Department had the pleasure of attending an ASERL webinar about on-the-fly usability testing lead by our Duke University Libraries colleague, Emily Daly. In her talk, Emily describes a method for doing quick usability testing on … Read more
We’re in the middle of rebuilding our implementation of Google Analytics from the ground up. We’re working with Search Discovery as our consultants, diving heavily into Google Tag Manager, and I’m quite happy with what we’ve accomplished together so far. … Read more
On May 12, the UX department had the pleasure of attending Epic Games’s inaugural Game UX Summit in Durham. It was a day-long event with speakers from academia to international video game companies to mobile gaming. Chad and I were … Read more
The UNC Libraries provide access to an overwhelming number and variety of resources. These can be anything from hefty books to databases holding decades of newspaper archives. With all this variety, it’s no wonder that students find research to … Read more
Building a navigation structure for librarians is some of the most intimidating work I’ve ever done. The new UNC Libraries staff Intranet will roll out this summer. We’re calling it LOUIS, named after Louis Round Wilson – early 20th century … Read more
In January of this year we deployed changes to our navigation labels and information architecture, which we covered in detail in a previous blog post. In April we re-visited the project with a remote online tree test to test the … Read more
This semester saw an inter-department collaboration project between the UX department and the team behind UNC Libraries’ digital scholarly depository, known as the Carolina Digital Repository (CDR). The CDR team manages cdr.lib.unc.edu, where UNC affiliates may deposit scholarly work in … Read more