From CurrentCites, Jakob Neilsen did a study of 43 students to review how they interact with websites, including university sites.

The results busted three myths of student Internet use:

(1) Students are technology wizards

(2) Students crave multi-media and fancy design

(3) Students are enraptured by social networking

The students often preferred simple design, and repeated comments that have been heard again and again in website usability studies (e.g. website text should be easy to scan). Other findings included that students were skeptical of sites that lacked depth, and they often have multiple tabs open at once and switch contexts frequently.

The summary is here, and the full 259-page report is for sale, here.

The University of Washington iSchool’s Project Information Literacy released a report covering the results and findings from the Spring 2009 survey of college students and research strategies.  The full report is available as a 42-page PDF, but here’s an overview, followed by a list of six key findings:

Whether they were conducting research for a college course or for personal reasons,
nearly all of the students in our sample had developed an information-seeking strategy
reliant on a small set of common information sources—close at hand, tried and true.

Moreover, students exhibited little inclination to vary the frequency or order of their use,
regardless of their information goals and despite the plethora of other online and inperson
information resources—including librarians—that were available to them.

Many students in our sample used a strategy for finding information and conducting
research that leveraged scholarly sources and public Internet sites and favored brevity,
consensus, and currency in the sources they sought.

Major findings from the survey are as follows:

1. Many students in the sample reported being curious, engaged, and motivated at the beginning of the course-related and everyday life research process. Respondentsʼ need for big-picture context, or background about a topic, was the trigger for beginning course-related (65%) or everyday life research (63%).

2. Almost every student in the sample turned to course readings—not Google—first for course-related research assignments. Likewise, Google and Wikipedia were the go-to sites for everyday life research for nearly every respondent.

3. Librarians were tremendously underutilized by students. Eight out of 10 of the respondents reported rarely, if ever, turning to librarians for help with course-related research assignments.

4. Nine out of 10 students in the sample turned to libraries for certain online scholarly research databases (such as those provided by EBSCO, JSTOR, or ProQuest) for conducting course-related research, valuing the resources for credible content, in-depth information, and the ability to meet instructorsʼ
expectations.

5. Even though it was librarians who initially informed students about using online scholarly research databases during freshmen training sessions, students in follow-up interviews reported turning to instructors as valued research coaches, as they advanced through the higher levels of their
education.

6. The reasons why students procrastinate are no longer driven by the same pre-Internet fears of failure and a lack of confidence that once were part of the college scene in the 1980s. Instead, we found that most of the digital natives in the sample (40%) tended to delay work on assignments as they juggled their needs to meet competing course demands from other classes.

From the current issue of Code4Lib, an article on getting quick user feedback using a new tool.

Infomaki is an open source “lightweight” usability testing tool developed by the New York Public Library to evaluate new designs for the NYPL.org web site and uncover insights about our patrons. Designed from the ground up to be as respectful of the respondents’ time as possible, it presents respondents with a single question at a time from a pool of active questions. In just over seven months of use, it has fielded over 100,000 responses from over 10,000 respondents.

OCLC has released some notes on usability tests they’d conducted on Worldcat Local.  Here’s a link to the an 8-page PDF of the comments.

One item of note is the broad dislike for ratings by graduate students (p. 7).