Improve users' ability to find online content

[sdellis]

Success Criteria

This is a design ticket, not an implementation ticket, so success criteria for closing this ticket is to propose and agree upon an approach that would improve users' ability to navigate to online content while browsing a collection.

Problem Description

Users are confused by the digital iconography in the tree view (aka, Contents and Arrangement widget). While the green underline was intended to indicate digital content contained in one of its children, during a Usability Test conducted by PLOG the team discovered that the indicators were not intuitive or obvious to users.

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One possible solution is to try to create more intuitive indicators for "has children with digital content". Another solution would be to present a viewer at the series/parent level that bundles all digital content into a single viewer that reflects the hierarchical structure of the content in the viewer Table of Contents (TOC). Part of resolving this ticket is to brainstorm and evaluate other potential solutions.

[sdellis]

One approach that we have consensus on is to add the "digitized content" icon to the Contents List for the component (as can be seen in the Duke example below). We also have consensus that there should be an indicator (i.e, an icon, notice, etc.) in the Request Cart panel if someone is requesting physical delivery of digital items. For example, the "Ali, Muhammad" component is actually digitized, but a user would not know that from the information provided in the screen shot.

[sdellis]

Digitized content should have a thumbnail in addition to the badge in the search results. For example, the "Ali, Muhammad" component should have a thumbnail.

NYU example of a thumbnail for digitized items appearing in search results:

[Seanwarren77]

To do: Create wireframe with a brief informational note beneath the show only online toggle. The note should explain how to use the icons in the tree to browse to digitized content.
(the note should be very small one to two lines max)

[arusinko]

Fwiw, the Morrison Papers might be a tough example because they're under copyright and set to "reading room" instead of "open". I'm not sure if that would impact the ability to display thumbnails. If you need a different collection to test on, I'd recommend the Edward Livingston Papers C0280, as the first 3 series have been digitized in their entirety.

[faithc]

That's a good point to consider, Adrienne, re: the idea to potentially use thumbnails since a fair amount of digital content isn't openly accessible.