Introduction
Each year libraries have told us that they need to run refresher training for returning academics or faculty. This means that vital library resource is sometimes tied up delivering 1-2-1 support during a busy period. New academics or faculty have to get up to speed quickly as they have to use many new systems in order to deliver teaching and learning.
Based on three different routes of feedback, we have created in-application onboarding guides to help support academics to create and edit lists, so meeting student needs and relieving the burden of training by the library team. We looked at each of the personas that use Talis Aspire and their perspective of what 'good' looked like which were used as a basis for this project:
- Students - the student research project by Samantha Sharman from the University of Lincoln
- Academics - Extensive user testing by our User Experience designer (Ana Carrol)
- Library Teams - Library survey on what good looks like and Academic Training
Objectives of the onboarding guides:
- To help academics and faculty to self-start in Talis Aspire so they require less training, including refreshers and guidance from Library and Academic Liaison.
- Encourage best practices to improve the structure and annotations of reading lists to support students based on student feedback on what makes a good reading list.
- To help academics and faculty to self-start in
Why onboarding and not support articles or tutorials?
- User onboarding is the process of continuously guiding your users across the user journey.
- Helping users to reach that ‘Aha!’ moment quickly, by experiencing repeated value from the system.
- Getting the job done in the smoothest way possible and remove barriers.
Guides Step-by-Step
We have screenshots of each of the guides here, you are able to skip to a particular guide in this support article using the list below:
Points to note:
- The guides do not appear for Students.
- The tours are scheduled to pop up once per 30 days for a user.
- The hints should show on the Homepage and in List Edit all the time (when logged in).
Guide 1 - Homepage tour
This guide links out to the following resource:
Guide 2 - List view hints
This guide begins with two options - Adding resources or Organising your list. See below for screenshots of each of these.
Adding resources
Organising your list
Frequently asked questions
Q: How do I make these guides live in my tenancy?
A: The guides are now live in your tenancy. If you wish your university to be excluded from this release, do raise a support ticket with Talis with your reasons why to help us learn for future developments.
Q: Will we be able to add our own university guides as links?
A: We have made the onboarding guides very generic so not to contradict local guidance and simply be an alternative not like for like replacement. You can add help documentation as a link in the header or footer of your branded tenancy. Initially, we are keen to understand the impact of these onboarding guides before other changes are made. Creating and maintaining multiple versions could lead to issues for end users and create more barriers than it solves so we are not offering this customisation at this time.