Library Website: Find a Study Space Evaluation

Project snapshot

After 2 years of design and research, we evaluated the final implementation of Find a Study Space with a remote, semi-structured usability study. We found a few small changes to make to the filters and validated many other design choices and updates from the last round of testing. With the overall positive results from this study, we determined that this feature was ready to launch on-schedule in August 2025.

If you’d like to learn more, please email [email protected] to request more documentation.

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Key documents

Findings from this study (Google Docs) [access restricted to U-M Library UX Team]

Findings from a 2024 usability study with a partially functional prototype (Google Slides)

The challenge

The 2024 study of the prototype of Find a Study Space (FaSS) informed us of a few main issues and desires from the U-M student population when it comes to library study spaces.

Noise levels, as they were previously described, were confusing or hard to define.
Some features, while desirable, were also hard to define or very difficult to accurately document and measure.
The most important aspect of Find a Study Space was images of the spaces. Students wanted them to accurately display many different aspects of the spaces, and used them to verify things we described in text, like seating styles.

We made changes to these aspects of the content and updated the design of both the FaSS and space details pages, and our front-end developer, Josh Salazar, implemented the design. Now that the feature was fully functional, it was time for a final evaluation.

Objectives

We wanted to evaluate how students understand the updated content and how they interacted with the updated interface to catch any changes that need to be made to the design or content before publicly launching the new study space finder in August.

Research questions

(Note: these are the high-level questions. To see more granular questions, contact us).