| Summary: | The aim of this essay is to examine three separate Swedish public libraries and their respective websites on the grounds of the usability sciences. I firstly had to summarize the main properties of the usability-field in order to gain an extended knowledge of its purposes and possible usage for today’s library systems. I was then able to apply the extended knowledge in the examination of the three library websites and the purpose of determining whether or not they were designed according to the standards set by the usability-sciences. Usability is a rather new science that deals with the dissection and examination of computer-based systems, in order to find the key components that make systems user-friendlier. With user needs being the main focus of its research, usability tries to meet all the different needs of the modern user and construct systems that are less system-centered and more user-centered. As a result, the field of usability has been forced to rely on other scientific fields that have long dealt with human behaviour, such as the fields of Sociology and Psychology to be able to grasp the complexities of human information behaviour. For the field of Library- and Information Science (LIS), the introduction of usability has been fairly recent and may therefore take a while to fully implement into the practice. However as this essay will show, several Swedish public libraries have already made the daring leap and are well on the road to evolving more user-friendly websites and systems. Hopefully, this new transition will also give them an edge in the highly competitive information-sphere of today.
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