Assessing the user experience of e-books
This is a comprehensive assessment of e-book user experience (search and information seeking) from transaction logs, e-book usage data, and user tests.
Background
E-books have emerged as a new format of scholarly resources in academic libraries. Understanding how users search for and retrieve information from e-books is critical for libraries that want to assess their impact and develop a user-centered strategy for improving e-book collections.
Research goals
- Explore how users search for e-books in the library’s discovery tool.
- Understand how users use e-books.
- Understand how users find information in e-books.
Search log analysis
The log analysis measured the initial query distribution among the tabs of the discovery tool interface, query length and facet (filter) selection, as well as the number of queries and actions in search sessions.
Initial query distribution
Most searches started from the default “Search All” tab.
Query length
Book search queries were slightly shorter compared to the queries submitted in the “Search All” tab.
Facet usage
Searches with just one facet applied were the most common search sessions. Publication Date, Peer Review, and Subject were the top 3 facets in all search sessions.
Queries and actions in search sessions
Book searches tended to be shorter but with more actions than searches submitted in the “Search All” tab.
E-book usage log analysis
We collected EBL e-book usage logs from January to November 2014. The logs contained 29,495 individual reading sessions. The data fields included date and time, user ID, e-book title and ID, publisher, subject category, and pages browsed.
Reading session duration
Sixty-nine percent of reading sessions lasted less than 10 minutes, and 92% lasted less than 30 minutes. A total of 2,261 sessions, or 8%, included a download action.
Pages browsed
80% of sessions involved no more than 30 pages browsed by users.
I created a Tableau visualization of the page numbers browsed by users across e-books and grouped by publishers and subjects.
In summary, e-books were not typically read from beginning to end. Most reading sessions were short and involved a relatively small number of pages. In the library context, users mainly used e-books to find specific information or sections rather than read linearly.
User test
I conducted user tests with 12 participants (faculty, undergraduate and graduate students) of different experience levels. The test tasks included both exploratory search and information finding tasks.
The search tasks showed similar user behavior patterns as the search log analysis. Participants started from the default “Search All” tab. They did simple keyword search and browsed the first page of results. Participants’ difficulties were:
- scan large number of results.
- identify material type (e-book).
- identify format (online access).
- determine relevance from only book title, author, and publication year from the search results list.
For the information finding tasks, participants tended to interact with e-books as if they were websites. They relied on the in-book search which was actually inferior to web search engines. Participants expected to see keyword highlights and cross-references when clicking on highlighted keywords.
Overall, current e-books are designed for linear reading rather than information finding. As more e-books are adopted in academia, future e-books should offer flexible page views, better full-text search, more interactive navigation features, and fewer restrictions on copying, annotation, printing, and downloading.
Publications
- This project won the 2015 ER&L + EBSCO Library Fellowship. Final Report.
- Zhang, T., Niu, X., & Promann, M. (2017). Assessing the user experience of e-books in academic libraries. College & Research Libraries, 78(5), 578.