Aeon Keep in Review feature
As we work toward the next release of Aeon, we have been lucky to have a great intern who has spent the summer working on a redesign of the webpages. We need some feedback and I’m hoping you’ll comment below with your thoughts and experience.
How do you instruct patrons to use the Keep in Review feature?
- do patrons find it confusing?
- have you added text to help make it more clear?
- do patrons arrive thinking they’ve scheduled a request but it’s still in review?
What other feedback do you have about this feature?
Thanks!
Katie
Comments
Here at NYU, while we see the value of Keep in Review, we have encountered a lot of user confusion over this feature. Often users think that they have submitted a request, and then reach out to us when no one has contacted them about said request, not realizing that the requests are in Keep in Review. Sometimes users see that no requests have been submitted, and are confused as to why - often the case is that users have not chosen an appointment date, so they press 'submit' and think that the requests have gone into the system.
If we see that users have placed requests in review, we try to each out to them to see if they are truly saving them or if they think they have been submitted - if it's the latter, we tell them how to submit the requests properly. We generally do not see users arriving with requests still in review, since the matter is usually resolved prior to that via email with the user.
We are currently putting together language for our How to Place New Requests section of the menu to instruct users about how to use the feature, so hopefully this will help.
We have found that the character limitation in the message that appears post-submission is a challenge - we ended up eliminating the 'red' message because it was causing a lot of confusion - users would see '2 messages in review, 0 requests submitted' and not understand what that meant or how to resolve it.
Laura Leone, NYU Special Collections
I think we at Harvard find value in it too, but our users are sometimes confused by it as well.
We have a few specific suggestions for improving the Keep in Review page:
We also discussed the possibility that it might be less confusing to patrons if outstanding requests that have been submitted for processing and saved requests are not commingled on the main menu page. One idea we had would be to not display saved requests on the main menu at all, but instead to have a status line on the main menu page showing how many saved (i.e. not submitted) requests the user had with a link to the Keep in Review page.
The character limitation in the post-submission status line is a challenge for us as well, but our user testing suggests that patrons often don't read that message anyway, so a more permanent reminder that there are unsubmitted requests might be more helpful.
Out of curiosity, I queried our database to see how often the Keep in Review feature had been used. Approximately 600 distinct users had kept roughly 5500 requests in review. That's less than I expected, but still not a small number.
Thank you both for your feedback! Some of what you both mentioned are on our radar for enhancements, including allowing more characters in the status lines and adding additional information into the request display. We have also been discussing a smarter validation message that more clearly explains what data is missing (whether its Scheduled Date or something else).
Part of this post was spurred by a discussion about whether the saved requests should display in the Outstanding Requests table. I think if they only appeared in Saved Requests, we'd have to include some messaging to better explain what that means and how patrons should manage those requests. Marilyn I like your suggestion for this with the status line and link.
Thanks again and we'll keep you posted as we have further discussion. In the meantime, if you have any other thoughts, please let us know!
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