Discover: Survey, Usability Testing and Focus Group Report

In September 2010 the University of Liverpool Library Service implemented its version of EBSCO’s resource discovery platform, branded locally as 'Discover’. Since then, the platform has recorded year on year increases in use. In 2013-14 alone, the average number of sessions and searches per FTE showed real term increases of 16% and 29% respectively to the previous 12 months. However, the statistics alone can only tell us so much - they don’t tell us exactly how and to what extent our users are engaging with Discover. Nor do they tell us how easy they find using it or how efficient and effective they are in locating and accessing the content they need. The purpose of this study then was to help gain a better understanding of how our users actually engage with Discover. To find out exactly what they like and dislike about the platform and to assess to what extent it currently meets their information needs. Doing so will enable us to make informed, evidence-based changes to the interface, improving its overall usability and helping to make it a more user-friendly, intuitive, effective and efficient resource. This in turn will ultimately result in an improved Library service and enhanced student experience in line with a number of objectives identified in the Library Strategic Plan

Usability evaluation of digital libraries: a tutorial

This one-day tutorial is an introduction to usability evaluation for Digital Libraries. In particular, we will introduce Claims Analysis. This approach focuses on the designers’ motivations and reasons for making particular design decisions and examines the effect on the user’s interaction with the system. The general approach, as presented by Carroll and Rosson(1992), has been tailored specifically to the design of digital libraries. Digital libraries are notoriously difficult to design well in terms of their eventual usability. In this tutorial, we will present an overview of usability issues and techniques for digital libraries, and a more detailed account of claims analysis, including two supporting techniques – simple cognitive analysis based on Norman’s ‘action cycle’ and Scenarios and personas. Through a graduated series of worked examples, participants will get hands-on experience of applying this approach to developing more usable digital libraries. This tutorial assumes no prior knowledge of usability evaluation, and is aimed at all those involved in the development and deployment of digital libraries

What Are We Doing with the Website: Transition, Templates, and User Experience in One Special Collections Library

[Excerpt] At the Eberly Family Special Collections Library (SCL), we have found that our website is often the first place a researcher will look to learn about our repository. Our online web presence is a business card, our chance to make a positive first impression. While our library, among others, has devoted time and resources to the development of new access tools and discovery layers, we have learned that our online presence also needs updates, revisions, and improvements. New tools and access points are valuable, but we can also improve existing tools even as we look forward to new developments in access and discovery. Through conscious efforts to include end users’ feedback in our website design decisions, we create more effective online tools. Our website is a crucial component of our efforts to direct users to our collections, and to publicize our services and programs. In this same vein, our end users can contribute to this design partnership through dedicated user experience testing. The SCL experimented with collaborative decision-making with its website committee, as well as with user experience testing in order to support our requests for additional web development work from the Libraries’ Information Technology department (I-Tech). Through this process, our library gained a more holistic understanding of the needs of online special collections and archives users; we also learned how to communicate more effectively between the department who worked with end users (SCL) and the department performing the actual web development work (I-Tech). While development work was limited to working within the mandatory web template, our user experience testing and the efforts of our internal website committee resulted in a better online experience for our stakeholders, based on the feedback we received from usability testing. Although our website is always a work in progress, we feel that we were able to develop practical ways to adjust to a website migration within in a dispersed and hierarchical information technology environment

Social Navigation of Food Recipes

The term Social Navigation captures every-day behaviour used to find information, people, and places – namely through watching, following, and talking to people. We discuss how to design information spaces to allow for social navigation. We applied our ideas in a recipe recommendation system. In a follow-up user study, subjects state that social navigation adds value to the service: it provides for social affordance, and it helps turning a space into a social place. The study also reveals some unresolved design issues, such as the snowball effect where more and more users follow each other down the wrong path, and privacy issues

Correcting menu usability problems with sound

Future human-computer interfaces will use more than just graphical output to display information. In this paper we suggest that sound and graphics together can be used to improve interaction. We describe an experiment to improve the usability of standard graphical menus by the addition of sound. One common difficulty is slipping off a menu item by mistake when trying to select it. One of the causes of this is insufficient feedback. We designed and experimentally evaluated a new set of menus with much more salient audio feedback to solve this problem. The results from the experiment showed a significant reduction in the subjective effort required to use the new sonically-enhanced menus along with significantly reduced error recovery times. A significantly larger number of errors were also corrected with sound

Social Navigation in a Location-Based Information System

Much of contextaware application research has dealt with the technical aspects of context capturing and how to interpret the context of a user. Little effort has been spent on the experience and usage of these systems. This thesis will present the general aspects of social awareness and present an example on how these concepts can be implemented into a location-based information system to help users navigate a potential information overload. This thesis also states that giving the users an experience of not being alone in the system increases the pleasure of using such a system. However this implies a decrease in privacy. To demonstrate these ideas I will describe a locationbased information system, GeoNotes, built by a group of researchers at SICS, the Swedish Institute of Computer Science. I will state a set of interaction requirements for how to extend the GeoNotes system with functionality for social awareness. Furthermore I will set up functional requirements for those interaction requirements to after implementation be able to conclude which interaction requirements I have been able to implement for. I will also give suggestions on how to position users in a WLAN. The deliverable from this project is a locationbased information system with functionality for social awareness. However, it was not within this project to test the system on true users. Therefore the statement that this functionality can help users to navigate a potential information overload is still just a hypothesis. To retrieve the position of a user in a W-LAN a packet is sent to all base stations in the network. In the first returning packet the mac address of contacting base station is extracted. Each base station is therefore a unique position. Triangulation was discarded due to its sensitivity to noise and weather circumstances, although a system that uses triangulation would have offered a much higher granularity

The Curious Case of the PDF Converter that Likes Mozart: Dissecting and Mitigating the Privacy Risk of Personal Cloud Apps

Third party apps that work on top of personal cloud services such as Google Drive and Dropbox, require access to the user's data in order to provide some functionality. Through detailed analysis of a hundred popular Google Drive apps from Google's Chrome store, we discover that the existing permission model is quite often misused: around two thirds of analyzed apps are over-privileged, i.e., they access more data than is needed for them to function. In this work, we analyze three different permission models that aim to discourage users from installing over-privileged apps. In experiments with 210 real users, we discover that the most successful permission model is our novel ensemble method that we call Far-reaching Insights. Far-reaching Insights inform the users about the data-driven insights that apps can make about them (e.g., their topics of interest, collaboration and activity patterns etc.) Thus, they seek to bridge the gap between what third parties can actually know about users and users perception of their privacy leakage. The efficacy of Far-reaching Insights in bridging this gap is demonstrated by our results, as Far-reaching Insights prove to be, on average, twice as effective as the current model in discouraging users from installing over-privileged apps. In an effort for promoting general privacy awareness, we deploy a publicly available privacy oriented app store that uses Far-reaching Insights. Based on the knowledge extracted from data of the store's users (over 115 gigabytes of Google Drive data from 1440 users with 662 installed apps), we also delineate the ecosystem for third-party cloud apps from the standpoint of developers and cloud providers. Finally, we present several general recommendations that can guide other future works in the area of privacy for the cloud

"So, Tell Me What Users Want, What They Really, Really Want!"

Equating users' true needs and desires with behavioural measures of 'engagement' is problematic. However, good metrics of 'true preferences' are difficult to define, as cognitive biases make people's preferences change with context and exhibit inconsistencies over time. Yet, HCI research often glosses over the philosophical and theoretical depth of what it means to infer what users really want. In this paper, we present an alternative yet very real discussion of this issue, via a fictive dialogue between senior executives in a tech company aimed at helping people live the life they `really' want to live. How will the designers settle on a metric for their product to optimise