webinar to discuss co-design identity management usability project aims and objectives: discuss...

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Usability Project Aims and Objectives: Discuss usability survey findings to help shape and define the directions of the usability project and to agree on next steps 9:00-9:05 Brief introduction to Blackboard Collaborate -Audio Set up wizard -Microphones need to be switched on to talk -If unable to talk use chat facility -We’re assuming everyone can see the slides – please let us know if not -If you’d like to speak use ‘hands up facility’ -If anything is not working or you’re confused – let us know and we’ll manage it as best we can 9:05-9:20 Overview of usability survey findings 9:20-9:50 Discussion and next steps 9:50-10:00 Site visits Logistics

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Webinar to discuss co-design Identity Management Usability Project

Aims and Objectives:Discuss usability survey findings to help shape and define the directions

of the usability project and to agree on next steps

9:00-9:05 Brief introduction to Blackboard Collaborate

-Audio Set up wizard -Microphones need to be switched on to talk -If unable to talk use chat facility-We’re assuming everyone can see the slides – please let us know if not-If you’d like to speak use ‘hands up facility’-If anything is not working or you’re confused – let us know and we’ll manage it as best we can

9:05-9:20 Overview of usability survey findings

9:20-9:50 Discussion and next steps

9:50-10:00 Site visits Logistics

JiscIdentity Management User Experience

Stuart Church November 2013

Background

• Pure Usability will be carrying out research into the usability of current IdM systems for staff and students in HE (on behalf of Jisc).

• This research will involve an online survey and field visits to institutions to carry out contextual interviews and user testing with staff and students.

• Prior to this, though, we are undertaking a short process of ‘Internal Discovery’ with project stakeholders (i.e. the IdM Task Force) to better understand the strategic, cultural and political landscape within which IdM is implemented.

• This presentation outlines the key findings from a short survey sent to the IdM Task Force, and summarised the views of the 8 respondents.

What are the benefits of IdM?

• Allows staff & students to access specific services & resources they need

• Opportunity to provide appropriate resources and services to users as their roles change

• Risk management

• Clarity about relationships/policies between people, institutions and entitlements

• Good IdM is robust and scalable. It allows quick response to new opportunities and puts library resources into a wider strategic context

• Compliance with licenses & contracts

• Efficiency & streamlining across institutions

• Generating data & stats about usage

What are the challenges of IdM?• Complex license variations for services & resources

• Increasingly diverse relationships between staff/students and universities

• Hard to define

• Undocumented

• Shift between groups

• On- v off-campus

• Assumption that this is an IT issue, rather than an organisational one (it’s a much bigger job than senior managers assume, so they don’t have the will)

• Different/fragmented IT approaches in different parts of the institution e.g. Open Source v Microsoft, Google v current IdM systems.

• Getting key stakeholders to work together (libraries & IT sometimes seen as creating barriers)

Will IdM change in the next 2 years?• Perhaps (!) (Pretty even split of Yes/No)

• Institutional change is relatively slow BUT there may be a cultural change in understanding the importance of IdM for institutions

• Potential changes could be:

• More granularity

• New initiatives (e.g HEAR, increasing use of Google in education, more international students) driving the need for better and more robust IdM

• Better UX

• More sophisticated analysis tools

What is ‘success’ in terms of IdM?• Students and staff getting easy access to resources to

which they are entitled (and stop complaining!)

• Low cost (in admin and system maintenance)

• Successful integration with other systems (e.g. SAP, Blackboard) and able to integrate with new systems easily

• Clear definitions of roles and entitlements

• Meet licensing obligations to publishers

Who has the institutional power to change things?• Senior University Managers (e.g. Registrar, PVCs, Dean)

ultimately responsible for strategy BUT may not be aware of implications and importance of IdM and may choose to fund more visible activities

• Middle Managers (e.g. heads, directors) responsible for implementation, and for proposing policies to Senior Managers.

• Culture is important - often find an ad hoc approach to IT systems implementation. This is hard to change.

Who benefits most?

Average rank (lowest = most benefit)

• There was no clear consensus as to who benefits most from IdM, although institutions were marginally the highest ranked group.

What’s the current UX like?

• The current user-friendliness of IdM systems was considered to be mostly ‘poor’.

• Possible reasons for this were:

• Designed by techies

• Lots of variation in terminology across providers

• SSO often difficult to implement, so can have to log in frequently

• Differences between on- and off-campus access, or publishers platforms

Barriers to better IdM

• Complex licensing arrangements with publishers and service providers

• Interoperability preventing SSO

• Institutional culture and fragmented IT landscape

• Lack of time for IT staff to implement better solutions

• Publishers approach to logins and lack of clarity about entitlement

Do users get any training & support?• Usually, no.

• IdM should be intuitive!

• Inductions are used to point some students and staff in the right direction,though.

Institutional insights

• Users do not like being frequently asked for their authentication credentials too often (even once a session may be too much)

• Users don’t have a feel for what they are entitled to access

• Multiple IDs are confusing (e.g. Athens & Shibboleth)

• Google Scholar can disrupt flow as it takes users to publishers sites instead of Uni portals.

Questions & hypotheses

• What do users do when they fail to get access to a resource?

• How do users think about search?

• How can local interfaces be adapted to make discovery easier?

Next steps

• Plan research activities

• Visits to 4 institutions to carry out contextual user research with:

• Information gatekeepers

• Students & staff

• Online survey about IdM

Further information

Dr Stuart Church, Pure Usability Ltd

Email: [email protected]: +44 (0)117 2309864Skype: stuartc