691 research outputs found
Assessment of an enterprise employee portal using dashboard monitoring system: a case study
A portal is a browser-based application that provides a web platform for users to improve inter-department collaboration and customer service. Portals are classified either as internal facing portals or external public facing portals. This study addresses the problems facing an internal portal related to its contents, functions and usability and provides a list of essential contents and functions that it should include through integrating theories and industry best practices. The theory framework is based on literature review and the industry best practices are based on the analysis of a number of internal portals of companies used as case studies. These two were compared to develop an information mapping grid to identify gaps between theories and practices. A case company was used to uncover additional insights on employee portal content and functionalities through the analysis of actual and perceived user portal usage. The results were then compared using an information mapping grid to derive a set of content and functionalities to improve usability of an internal employee portal. Results of this study indicate that customization and personalization is an important feature of an employee portal, however, features pertaining to communication and collaboration support, search support, help system and employee self-services appear to be more important in practice. The information mapping grid derived, the data warehouse architecture developed and the Dashboard Monitoring systems created to assess usability of an employee portal are applicable to similar enterprises --Abstract, page iii
A usability approach to improving the user experience in web directories
PhDWeb directories are hierarchically organised website collections that offer users subjectbased
access to the Web. They played a significant part in navigating the Web in the past
but their role has been weakened in recent years due to their cumbersome expanding
collections. This thesis presents a unified framework combining the advantages of
personalisation and redefined directory search for improving the usability of Web
directories.
The thesis begins with an examination of classification schemes that identifies the
rigidity of hierarchical classifications and their suitability for Web directories in contrast
to faceted classifications. This leads on to an Ontological Sketch Modelling (OSM) case
study which identifies the misfits affecting user navigation in Web directories from
known rigidity issues. The thesis continues with a review of personalisation techniques
and a discussion of the user search model of Web directories following the suggested
directions of improvement from the case study. A proposed user-centred framework to
improve the usability of Web directories which consists of an individual content-based
personalisation model and a redefined search model is then implemented as D-Persona
and D-Search respectively. The remainder of the thesis is concerned with a usability test
of D-Persona and D-Search aimed at discovering the efficiency, effectiveness and user
satisfaction of the solution. This involves an experimental design, test results and
discussions for the comparative user study.
This thesis extracts a formal definition of the rigidity of hierarchies from their
characteristics and justifies why hierarchies are still better suited than facets in
organising Web directories. Second, it identifies misfits causing poor usability in Web
directories based on the discovered rigidity of hierarchies. Third, it proposes a solution
to tackle the misfits and improve the usability of Web directories which has been
experimentally proved to be successful
The Role of E-Vocabularies in the Description and Retrieval of Digital Educational Resources
Vocabularies are linguistic resources that make it possible to access knowledge through words. They can constitute a mechanism to identify, describe, explore, and access all the digital resources with informational content pertaining to a specific knowledge domain. In this regard, they play a key role as systems for the representation and organization of knowledge in environments in which content is created and used in a collaborative and free manner, as is the case of social wikis and blogs on the Internet or educational content in e-learning environments. In e-learning environments, electronic vocabularies (e-vocabularies) constitute a mechanism for conceptual representation of digital educational resources. They enable human and software agents either to locate and interpret resource content in large digital repositories, including the web, or to use them (vocabularies) as an educational resource by itself to learn a discipline terminology.
This review article describes what e-vocabularies are, what they are like, how they are used, how they work, and what they contribute to the retrieval of digital educational resources. The goal is to contribute to a clearer view of the concepts which we regard as crucial to understand e-vocabularies and their use in the field of e-learning to describe and retrieve digital educational resources
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