图书馆网站的可用性设计

本文作者介绍了网站可用性的概念,介绍了良好可用性的标准和用户体验概念。然后,作者分析了图书馆网站用户的需求,并以这些需求为基础,结合软件可用性设计标准,提出了若干图书馆网站可用性设计准则。     

An Exploration of a Website Design Process and Results of a Usability Study

A transition of content management systems provided Kornhauser Health Sciences Library with an opportunity to redesign the library’s website to be more user-friendly, efficient, and visually appealing. A multistage approach was taken: (1) informal interviews of various stakeholders from the library, (2) a redesign using information gained from those stakeholders, and (3) a retrospective comparative usability study. This study was conducted with the goal to inform library staff whether the redesigned website improved accuracy and efficiency of information retrieval through the completion of timed tasks. In addition, user satisfaction was measured through guided interview questions.     

Evaluating a digital library self-archiving service: The BDBComp user case study

In this article, we present an overview of a self-archiving service for the Brazilian Digital Library of Computing (BDBComp) and describe a user experiment conducted to evaluate it. This experiment involved several potential real users, including computer science graduate students and professors, and archivists/librarians. The results of this study and their implications for similar services are described and analyzed, following sound statistical principles, which can serve as a basis for other similar studies. These results and their analysis indicate that we have successed in building a usable, efficient and learnable self-archiving service, properties which are essential to bring users to the system.     

数字图书馆门户可用性评估指标体系

文章分析了数字图书馆门户及可用性的含义,在此基础上,从有效性、效率和用户满意度三个方面构建了一个数字图书馆门户可用性评估指标体系。     

公共图书馆网站信息构建可用性评价研究

在信息构建和可用性定义和关系的基础上，结合调查的16所国内较大的公共图书馆网站信息构建中存在的可用性问题，尝试性地建立一套适用于公共图书馆网站可用性评价的指标体系，并对上海图书馆网站信息构建的可用性进行实证分析和评价。     

网络教学平台的可用性评价研究综述

可用性评价是指从用户的角度出发,评价软件或产品是否易用、好用、令用户满意。网络教学平台的主要用户为教师和学习者,较之其它软件平台,对其可用性的评价在传统可用性评价维度,如可学习性、高效性、可记忆性、容错性、适意性等因素之外,需考虑师生教学相关的可用性因素。本文通过对网络教学平台可用性评价的文献梳理,归纳分析了国内外网络教学平台可用性评价的研究进展及相关实践现状。     

Explicitly integrating MeSH thesaurus help into health information retrieval systems: An empirical user study

When consumers search for health information, a major obstacle is their unfamiliarity with the medical terminology. Even though medical thesauri such as the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) and related tools (e.g., the MeSH Browser) were created to help consumers find medical term definitions, the lack of direct and explicit integration of these help tools into a health retrieval system prevented them from effectively achieving their objectives. To explore this issue, we conducted an empirical study with two systems: One is a simple interface system supporting query-based searching; the other is an augmented system with two new components supporting MeSH term searching and MeSH tree browsing. A total of 45 subjects were recruited to participate in the study. The results indicated that the augmented system is more effective than the simple system in terms of improving user-perceived topic familiarity and question–answer performance, even though we did not find users spend more time on the augmented system. The two new MeSH help components played a critical role in participants’ health information retrieval and were found to allow them to develop new search strategies. The findings of the study enhanced our understanding of consumers’ search behaviors and shed light on the design of future health information retrieval systems.     

Exploiting ability for human adaptation to facilitate improved human-robot interaction and acceptance

This article reports findings from a usability and user experience evaluations conducted in the last 2 years of a 4-year assistive robotics research project using the Kompai robot. It focuses on the evaluations that were conducted with older adults in an assisted living studio in the United Kingdom (which was arranged as an open plan studio apartment), a UK residential care home, and an older couple's own home in the Netherlands over 2 days. It examines emergent adaptive human behaviour in human-robot interaction (HRI) to consider whether we are approaching the embodiment and functionality of service robots correctly. It discusses possible improvements that could be made at the systems level that better exploit people's natural ability to adapt and find workarounds to technologies and their limitations.     

Up in the air: Are airlines following the new DOT rules on equal pricing for people with disabilities when websites are inaccessible?

This paper details the findings from a study of airline compliance with Department of Transportation (DOT) regulations requiring that persons with disabilities not be discriminated against in the pricing of airline travel. These regulations mandate that if an airline website is inaccessible for persons with disabilities, the airline must charge the same price that is available on the website and may not charge a fee for purchasing tickets over the phone. To evaluate compliance, the websites of leading airlines were examined for accessibility in terms of the ability to check flight schedules and order tickets. Among the four airlines with barriers to accessibility on their websites, a series of phone calls were made by researchers to assess whether the DOT regulations would be followed. Two of the airlines, USAirways and United, practiced discriminatory pricing, even after being made aware of the regulations, in over one-third of the phone calls. This paper details the findings from the study and analyzes the data in terms of website accessibility, civil rights for travelers with disabilities, and policy implications.