# Improving Institutional Repositories through User-Centered Design: Indicators from a Focus Group
## 1 Introduction: Institutional Repositories  
Confinement and social distancing brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic have necessitated incorporating technologies to continue professional, educational, and social activities. Thus, university information systems must urgently evolve to the next generation to support the digital transformation of society. In 2016, The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) [1] released the best practice framework for the next generation of repositories. It includes functionalities to create web-friendly architecture, repositories embedded in researchers' workflow, open peer review, and content quality assessment. It proscribes better impact and usage measures for discovery, access, reuse, integrity, and authenticity. According to COAR, the specific vision for Next Generation Repositories is \"to position repositories as the foundation for a distributed, globally-networked infrastructure for scholarly communication, on top of which layers of value-added services will be deployed, thereby transforming the system, making it more research-centric, open to and supportive of innovation, while also collectively managed by the scholarly community\" [2]. The development of open access and open science policies requires solid technological infrastructures that allow free access to scientific information, serve as a means of communicating research results, and allow their impact to be measured. Institutional repositories and journals are vital elements needed to execute open access mandates and implementopen science policies. Institutional research repositories are assessed primarily through internal audits to improve their quality per best practices. They are guided by the Trust Principles for Digital Repositories, the requirements for next-generation COAR repositories, and Plan S. Certifiers of repositories include Core Trust Seal, Go-FAIR, and PLOS [3].  
Institutional repositories need technological platforms to store and publish scientific information in an open format and knowing the experience of researchers in using the repository will confirm whether they are not aware of the benefits of open access practices or why they do not find the institutional repository system attractive and usable. Initially, institutional repositories were platforms to provide access to scientific information and digital documentation for the public, whether to read, download, copy, print, or distribute [4]. These repositories were designed from the perspective of librarians, catalogs, or systems engineers. However, if the academic community intends to use them, a good practice would be to know and understand the end-user experience and create a design that allows them to effectively utilize the functionalities of the repository's website. In the human and computer interaction study, system usability is related to how a system can work well when used maximally by users so that all system capabilities can be brought to bear [5]. It would also be ideal to measure the repositories' user satisfaction and acceptance and improve their interfaces [6] and utilization rates by providing greater satisfaction. In addition, the support of technologists, managers, and interface designers who make these types of sites that support open science \"user-friendly\" is necessary. Through three focus groups, this study investigated the repository users' experience when performing tasks such as searching and entering information into the repository or to perform the manual process of self-archiving open access scientific papers. The paper begins with a theoretical framework that outlines the crucial points of four user experience categories when interacting with institutional repositories: (1) perceived usefulness, (2) perceived ease of search, (3) management of digital identity 2.0, and (4) user interface design. Next, the context where the study was applied is described with the methodology of the focus groups, and finally the results, discussion, conclusions, and future research are presented.