Dismay and disappointment: Perspectives of inexperienced adult learners on becoming webpage readers

Practitioners teaching new Internet users often report that adult learners are disappointed by their first experiences of the World Wide Web. This article focuses on problematic experiences of developing new web-based literacy practices, particularly for adult learners, and how they can be addressed without attributing difficulties to learners’ own deficiencies or attitudes.The perspectives of inexperienced learners in a variety of settings are discussed in relation to the constructs of usability and affordance. Concepts of multimodal affordances and hypermodality, developed within textual studies, foreground potential readings while usability studies foreground technological design. Within literacy studies meanwhile there has been a strong turn towards social context. This paper aims to connect these models of reading, rooted variously in studies of human–computer interaction, theoretical approaches to multimodal texts, and socially situated literacy practices. It concludes that for practitioners, an interdisciplinary approach can be most effective.     

电子商务网站的可用性

分析网站可用性是电子商务网站成功的一个最重要因素,也是研究电子商务网站及网页可用性设计的原则和方法.     

高校网络精品课程可用性的调查研究——基于用户（学习者）体验及需求的视角

从用户（学习者）体验及需求的角度开展网络课程可用性研究,为网络课程评价研究提供了新的方向。本研究从用户（学习者）的视角出发,将2007至2010年的国家网络精品课程作为一种产品进行调查评价和实证分析．全面梳理并深入分析了这些课程在可用性方面存在的问题及其原因,为提高网络课程的建设质量,特别是提高网络课程的可用性方面提供借鉴与指导。     

Toward a User-Centered Academic Library Home Page

ABSTRACT

In the past decade, academic libraries have struggled with the design of an effective library home page. Since librarians' mental models of information architecture differ from those of their patrons, usability assessments are necessary in designing a user-centered home page. This study details a usability sequence of card sort and paper and online survey methods conducted at the Auraria Library, which serves the University of Colorado Denver, the Metropolitan State College of Denver, and the Community College of Denver. The three top complaints about the existing Web page included information overload, lack of visual cues and guidance, and difficulty getting to what students knew was the heart of the library's Web page: online resources. Using qualitative and quantitative data from the card sorting sessions, the Web librarian, under the direction of the Web Advisory Committee, was able to create a more user-centered home page. Unique to this study are the use of undergraduate students in creating test instruments and a means of gathering information about what students value most in their library's home page.     

Usable guidelines for usable websites? An analysis of five e-government heuristics

Many government organizations use web heuristics for the quality assurance of their websites. Heuristics may be used by web designers to guide the decisions about a website in development, or by web evaluators to optimize or assess the quality of an existing website. Despite their popularity, very little is known about the usefulness of heuristics for web designers and evaluators. In this study, five government heuristics are examined with special attention to their presumed use, content, validity, and presentation format. Our findings raise questions about the usability of heuristics for web design and web evaluation purposes. More research into the actual use and effects of web heuristics is needed.     

基于可用性工程的网站分析框架研究

本文在研究国内外大量的网站分析文章的基础上,以可用性工程原理为基础,结合信息构建理论、质量管理理论,全面阐述了网站分析框架,并以网站对应分析法为例说明该框架的具体应用。     

The assessment of usability of electronic shopping: A heuristic evaluation

Today there are thousands of electronic shops accessible via the Web. Some provide user-friendly features whilst others seem not to consider usability factors at all. Yet, it is critical that the electronic shopping interface is user-friendly so as to help users to obtain their desired results. This study applied heuristic evaluation to examine the usability of current electronic shopping. In particular, it focused on four UK-based supermarkets offering electronic services: including ASDA, Iceland, Sainsbury, and Tesco. The evaluation consists of two stages: a free-flow inspection and a task-based inspection. The results indicate that the most significant and common usability problems have been found to lie within the areas of ‘User Control and Freedom’ and ‘Help and Documentation’. The findings of this study are applied to develop a set of usability guidelines to support the future design of effective interfaces for electronic shopping.     

The effective combination of hybrid usability methods in evaluating educational applications of ICT: Issues and challenges

This paper focuses on usability evaluation of information and communication technologies applications in education (ICTE applications). Various classes of teaching and learning systems are discussed in terms of technologies used and pedagogical approaches. Their usability is analyzed according to various dimensions and the impact of system usability on the learning effectiveness is studied. We argue that various classes of ICTE applications such as multimedia/hypermedia applications, open educational environments and CSCL environments, based on different theoretical perspectives, require fundamentally different approaches in evaluating their usability. The paper is structured as follows: an overview of different usability evaluation approaches is presented first, followed by a discussion on applicability of these techniques in various categories of teaching and learning computer systems. Typical case studies that engage both usability experts and users themselves (students and teachers) are also discussed. The objective is to describe both the methods, and the way to apply them effectively in order to certify the usability of an ICTE application with respect to its teaching and learning objectives.     

网络课程的可用性测试初探

随着网络教育的蓬勃发展,如何更有效地建设网络资源成为重要而迫切的问题。阐述了网络课程设计的可用性测试方法,并将视线追踪技术引入到网络课程的可用性测试中,获取学习者客观的眼动数据,分析人在网页浏览中的视觉特性,为网络课程设计者提供人的视觉参数。目的是使网络课程的设计更符合学习者的生理与心理方面的需要,使学习者的学习效率更高。     

Exploring the usability of web portals: A Croatian case study

Web portals act as a single point of access to information and services relevant to person's work or personal interests. Market research findings related to Croatian web context report that nowadays horizontal information portals are the most visited sites. Whether they reach their aim of facilitating users’ access to diverse resources and to which extent, remains an open question. In this paper, this issue is addressed by two case studies conducted for summative assessment of Croatian horizontal information portals. Approach assembled expert inspection and user assessment that integrated a number of empirical methods into laboratory-based testing. We report that the results of inspection method were not in agreement with the ones obtained from user test methods. Although differences of this kind have been reported elsewhere, these were not as evident as in these studies. What is very interesting and represents a main contribution of the research is that in both rounds of evaluations this outcome is very sharp and clear. This suggests that we should conduct both kinds of assessments as they seem to be complementary. Evaluation provided some general findings and know-how from the experience and we believe that many readers, both practitioners and researchers, can learn from it.