Looking for Answers, winner of the 2017 Theodore Calvin Pease Award, attempts to address the dearth of attention paid to the user experience of navigational features in online finding aids. Walton focuses her study on Princeton University’s finding aid website, noting its broad range of possible user interactions and Web 2.0 features. She recruited 10 undergraduate students to participate in a robust user-testing process that measured the finding aid website’s usability across a series of representative tasks, including questionnaires, think-aloud interviews and a Likert-scale user satisfaction survey. Suggesting that the study results may be generalized to inform usability guidelines within a broader archival context, she makes ten recommendations to improve the user experience in navigating online finding aids. Of particular relevance to a project archival interfaces in virtual reality are the recommendations that concern wayfinding – that is, the ability for users to visually explore collection contents without losing their place and to be aware of their position within the hierarchy of the collection – and that advise keeping the interface uncluttered. An immediate challenge that comes to mind is how to best use the space within the virtual reality environment to convey large quantities of information while still maintaining a minimalist aesthetic.

Walton’s article is useful on multiple levels: if the design of VR archival interface is modeled after a finding aid – and, at the current moment, it is one way that I am conceptualizing the project – her thorough review of existing literature on finding aids provides a convenient point of departure to engage with. But the most astute insights lie in the implications of her findings; for example, the screenshots she provides are a cogent reminder of the logocentric nature of (online) finding aids and the challenges of presenting the same information in virtual reality – how to ‘spatialize’ text by representing it metaphorically. Walton’s observation about the confusion surrounding the “Comments” section of the finding aid cautions against the indiscriminate use of Web 2.0 features – a lesson equally applicable in virtual reality. And while VR offers new avenues for organizing navigational elements – the crux of Walton’s article – within a finding aid, it also entails the risk of exacerbating the user’s sense of being ‘lost’ if the user experience is poorly designed.