LocateME Project Summary - Recap

What did the LocateME project set out to achieve? Our goal, and related objectives, was two-fold with comments on our achievements set our below;

1. Product Development: To enhance our resource discovery environment (LOCATE) enabling it to operate across a range of devices.

a. Assessing usability of current desktop version of LOCATE
b. Developing a device independent mobile view of LOCATE
c. Evaluation to determine if experience has improved

This was an ambitious goal and we realised at an early stage of development that a full production version of a mobile environment for LOCATE would be beyond the timescale or resources of the project. In order to produce a mobile ‘App’ or device specific web view, significant developer time and skill would need to be input. We focussed instead on creating mock-ups for development purposes with the intention of implementing the improvements across a wider timescale. We were able to carry out live baseline testing on the desktop version of LOCATE across a wide range of devices, however.

This assessment of the current usability of the desktop version of LOCATE has been extremely useful and provided very good qualitative data for us to draw upon in development. Developing a mock-up device independent view was important in testing out development issues extracted from the baseline review. We were also able to activate and explore a live mobile version of Locate that was in the early stages of development. Our summative evaluation with selected stakeholders was of mixed success, with some comments and feedback being outside of the control and design of the interface. In general, the stakeholders we questioned thought that the interface had improved however a working live version would be required to test this further.

2. Usability: To provide a usability case study of benefit to the wider community

Again this was to be achieved by;
a. Trial usability testing approaches applied to mobile device interface development
b. Provide an evaluative case study of approaches used.

This blog and related documents provide evidence of our efforts to achieve this objective. We have utilised a range of recognised usability methods and have evidenced and documented our approach in order to inform the wider community. We believe we have fully achieved the key objectives for this goal.