Primo out of the box: Making the box work for you
Stacey Van Groll, UQ

Core philosophy – maintain out-of-the-box unless there’s a strong use case, user feedback, or bug. Focus on core high-use features like basic search (rather than browse) and search refinement (rather than my account). Stable and reliable discovery interface; quick and seamless resource access.

Said yes to:

• UQ stylesheet – one search scope, oneview, one tab, their own prefilters on library homepage (a drop-down menu – includes some Primo things like newspaper search, some non-Primo things)

Said no to:

• Journals A-Z
• Citation linker
• Purchase requests
• main menu
• EBSCO API
• Featured Results
• Collection Discovery
• Tags & Reviews
• Database search (for now)
• Newspaper search (for now)
• Resource recommender (for now)

Dev work for some things – eg tweaked the log out functionality to address an issue; then Primo improved something, which broke their fix; fixed the fix; next release was okay; next release broke it again; so have reviewed and gone back to out-of-the-box. An example of the downsides to making tweaks.

But sometimes really need to make a change – consider the drivers, good use cases, who and how many people experience the problem, how much work it is to make/develop the change and how much work to maintain it? Is there existing functionality in the product or on the Roadmap? How do you measure success?

Does environmental scans – has bookmarks of other Primo NewUI sites to see what else other people do and how.

Data analysis – lots of bugs in My Account but also very low usage. So doesn’t put much work in, just submits a Salesforce case then forgets.

Evaluates new releases – likes to piggyback on these eg adding OA and peer-reviewed tags to institutional repository norm rules.

User feedback – classify by how common the complaint is and try to address most common.

Feedback:

• first goes to Knowledge Centre Feedback feature and includes email address which forces a response
• second listserv
• third Salesforce, and then escalation channels if needed

Lessons learned: A good salesforce case has a single problem, include screenshots, explain what behaviour you desire.