On September 9th, the Quicksearch Implementation team sucessfully hosted our first testing session.
Overall reception of the interface was good!
The primary goal of the testing session was to test searching and faceting in Quicksearch. Participating were 3 Public Services staff, 2 Rare book catalogers, 2 language specialists, 2 staff from Enterprise Systems, and 6 members of the Discovery Metadata group. We asked testers to evaluate the Quicksearch test interface using the Quicksearch Test Script as a guide, in addition to their favorite searches.
Results from our test clearly showed that Keyword searches in Quicksearch work much better than Keyword searches in Orbis. Relevant results are more likely to rise the top of the result list, and results in a result set are more likely to be relevant. This is good news moving forward as we begin now to focus on fine-tuning metadata display issues and on developing Patron Services like Booksmarks, Requesting, etc.
The testing session also revealed a number of bugs, from minor display problems to two major software bugs, for which we sincerely thank the testers! In addition, they requested some interesting new features, like the incorporation of the BMEC (Bass Media Equipment Catalog) in Quicksearch. Their careful testing has been invaluable in helping us identify and prioritize the issues we need to work on next.
After testing, the Discovery Metadata group engaged in an intensive 3-day sprint to go through the 65 responses, categorize them, and make recommendations for the metadata-related issues. (What is a Sprint? A sprint, or scrum, is a concept adapted from the software development world. The team identifies a list of goals, and meets for designated period of time to work on that goal. The team works on that goal and that goal only during the period of the sprint, and meets daily to report on progress and make plans for the next day’s work). The results of the testing and the three-day metadata sprint that followed are summarized in two publicly-available spreadsheets, Reported Issues, and Requested Features.
The Quicksearch Implementation team is currently hard at work resolving issues identified in testing, and doing a full extract and re-load of Orbis and Morris. The Reported Issues and Requested Features spreadsheets will be updated once a week on Friday so you can follow these issues as they are resolved. We expect to continue working on these issues through the remainder of the semester.
Next up: Our goal for this week is to release a Beta version of Quicksearch to all Yale Library Staff for review.