The objective of this study is to examine the impact of incorporating user experience study methods into library database purchase and renewal. In the summer of 2013, Purdue libraries introduced a modified standard usability concept (heuristic evaluation, or expert review) into an existing yearly electronic resource evaluation process. Every year librarians already evaluated electronic resources in the collection using a set of parameters including usage statistics but never explicitly included database usability. Introducing more user experience parameters into process allows librarians to record usability errors to be communicated back to database vendors or to be considered for database renewal and selection in the future at the libraries. In total, 70 databases were reviewed by 20 librarians. This talk will review the reported impact the internal process made on librarians’ database decisions, as well as preliminary results of the reviews.
