(Re) Introducing the UX Caucus Issues Tracker!

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The UX Caucus, formally known as "Features & Flaws", launched a Google form Issues Tracker in early 2019 to help information professionals report and communicate usability problems with electronic resources. Our goals for the tracker included improving communication between information professionals and vendors; better-informed licensing decisions; and ultimately, better interfaces for all searchers. The initial version of this tracker also included an automatically generated analytics view that displayed aggregated form submission data. 

In order to expand the tracker's audience, the MLA launched a pilot in early 2020, where users were encouraged to not only submit UX issues, but also provide any feedback or suggestions to improve the tracking tool. After a period of about 6 months, we received nearly 40 issue submissions and some fantastic feedback to make the tool easier to use.

Based on the pilot feedback, the UX Caucus team launched a revamped Issues Tracker in December 2020. The first significant change was moving the form from Google to Qualtrics. This platform change allowed users, primarily hospital librarians, who were previously blocked from using various Google tools to be able to access the form. After the relaunch, we received 16 more submissions. We then ran into our next major obstacle: how to best share this information back out to the community without having an automatically generated analytics page.


While in theory the Google form analytics page was nice, it was difficult for anyone but the submitter or the UX Caucus (with back-end access to the form) to determine which problem was connected to which database. In Google, the display pages for content and formatting were very limited. Qualtrics fixed this issue for us with the ability to run regular and customized reports on the submissions, but we couldn't figure out the best way to disseminate this information....until we started this blog!

Shortly after we started the UX Database Tips blog in January 2022, we had the idea of using blog posts to help overcome the last remaining barrier to re-relaunching the Issues Tracker. Our plan was to reintroduce the tracker in a blog post (this is the post that you are reading right now!) and we would also share anonymized submissions (with permission of the submitter) either as individual blog posts or as a summary blog post. The blog post format allows for easy sharing, and more importantly, easy commenting with any potential workarounds developed prior to vendor-supplied solutions.

Without further ado, we would like (re)introduce you to the UX Caucus Issues Tracker! Please submit any issues you experience with electronic resources and databases here:

https://umich.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_djad4KrI1tRwfQN

 Keep an eye out for upcoming Issues Tracker posts. They will all be tagged with #issues.

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