Creating User Guides for Primo VE

• Who are your different user groups? What are their needs?
• How different from your previous system is Primo VE?
• What specific functionalities were most asked about with Voyager? Are those functionalities present in your instance of Primo VE?
• What aspects of Primo VE might be hardest for patrons to learn? What part might new jargon/terminology play in those difficulties?

• Performing basic searches
• Performing advanced searches
• Filtering results
• How to find items (Location)
• Signing-in / Using "My Library Card"
• "My Library Card" / account (You may want to provide a glossary.)
• What is a discovery layer? (Possibly include: Searching many sources of different information at once.)
• What is being searched? (May be useful to include a Venn diagram.)
• How to request materials from home library or I-Share
• How to request and check status of interlibrary loans
• Articles and more (from different vendors such as Proquest, EBSCO)
• How to find materials on course reserves

• Personalizing search results in Primo VE
• Fetching specific items in Primo VE
• Creating an RSS feed in Primo VE
• Saving and managing alerts in Primo VE
• Saving and managing records in Primo VE
• Saving and managing search queries in Primo VE
• Exporting records from Primo VE
• Tagging search results in Primo VE
• Using citation trails
• Using "My Favorites" in Primo VE

• Each format of user guide comes with its own strengths and weaknesses. Consider these carefully when deciding the format of user guides, and think about using a mixture of formats.
• Consider also the frequent updates to Primo VE and the changes to user guides and tutorials that these updates may necessitate. Ask yourself: which method(s) of creating user guides will be most sustainable for you and your staff?
• LibGuides & Web Guides
  • This will be the default option for many libraries, since these user guides are easy to create and amend—an important factor to consider, since monthly updates to Alma & Primo VE could require frequent revisions to keep information current.
  • These can be as simple as plain text and still images.
  • User guides also allow for shared creation and editing.
• Video Tutorials
  • These can be incredibly useful, since animations, screencasts, and other types of tutorials are used to clearly demonstrate how to carry out tasks in Primo VE; however, the monthly updates mean that video tutorials may quickly become obsolete.
  • Be prepared to revise and refresh tutorials more often.
  • Consider creating tutorials in small discrete "chunks," to make it easier to remove or replace individual slides or screen grabs.
• Pages within Primo VE
  • Consider who will have training for/access to Alma to update pages within Primo VE.
  • Changing a landing page could change the look of Primo VE considerably, so consider how often/how much you want to make modifications.

• Tutorials may call for graphics in order to clarify a concept (conceptual graphics) or demonstrate a process (procedural graphics).
• Conceptual graphics convey a concept visually
  • The most effective graphics are simple. It's better to convey the gist of something rather than overwhelm with details.
  • If you need to include a significant amount of text, consider doing so in plain text outside the graphic. This is easier to read at different screen sizes and easier to update if information changes.
  • A mock-up of a good conceptual graphic, with simple shapes and minimal text inside the graphic itself:

Graphic is courtesy of Christina Norton based upon an image originally created by SUNY Geneseo.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

• Procedural graphics show with step-by-step instructions how to achieve a specific task, usually through the use of screenshots.
  • An effective screenshot is one that has an appropriate amount of visual information.
    • Show as much of the screen as needed to provide context.
    • If they don't need to see the whole screen, don't show the whole screen.
  • When annotating screenshots (for example: with arrows or circles) make sure the annotations have contrast.
    • Consider both contrast of color (e.g. blue on white) and value (e.g. dark on light). This is good for those with low vision, limited color vision, or those using a small screen.
  • If an interface or process changes, you will need to update the screenshots as well. Keep track of which tutorials you have screenshots in to make it easier to keep up.
  • This page features many good examples of screenshots from the University of Tennessee Knoxville.