A Simple Approach to a Complicated Problem—Open Folklore Portal UX Improvements

Notes: View the community notes Google doc for this session.

Session Type: Presentation

Session Description Open Folklore, a partnership of the American Folklore Society and the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries, is a scholarly communications effort to make a greater number and variety of useful resources available to folklorists.

The Open Folklore portal http://openfolklore.org provides a search of open access Folklore repositories and journals. The portal also serves as a primary outlet for the group’s educational and advocacy mission. Last year, as part of an upgrade to the website portal software, the Open Folklore team took the opportunity to make improvements to the portal’s user experience.

Some of the methods used to improve user experience were: moving beyond a text based approach to a more graphics-based approach; breaking down larger ideas into smaller parts; changing the tone from academic to semi-academic; and emphasizing important concepts to accommodate different levels of engagement.

The presentation reports on lessons learned from the process and results of user testing and surveys of members of the American Folklore Society.

Session Leader Garett Montanez, Indiana University