Scottish UPA Meeting 20/04/10
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Slides from the presentation given at the SUPA meeting on 20th April 2010.
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Scottish UPA Meeting 20/04/10
- 1. USABILITY AND CONTEMPORARY USER EXPERIENCE IN DIGITAL LIBRARIES Boon Low, Lorraine Paterson NeSC, University of Edinburgh Scottish Usability Professionals Association 20 April 2010
- 4. Digital Library - Examples 20/04/10 Usability and Contemporary User Experience in Digital Libraries
- 23. WDL Carousel
Editor's Notes
- Hi thank you very much for coming to this meeting today especially after a long day for many of you I’m sure. We are here to talk about Usability and Contemporary User Experience in Digital Libraries. It is a project currently being piloted at the University of Edinburgh. We have an acronym for it: UX2.0 or Ux2 to make it snappier. Ux2 is also developing into an initiative at the university as we managed to engage more people to collaborate with us. For example, the university library has joint us in another small project just funded for specific user study. This small project just started yesterday and is managed under the general framework of Ux2. Today we are going to give a flavour of a cross section of these very broad subjects., through some work in progress of Ux2.
- The key focus of Ux2 is digital library. All digital libraries are underpinned by one form of repository to another. But what makes a digital library stand out? how does it differ from general databases and content management systems? Here are some definitions. Firstly, it should content primary data and also metadata such as authors, subject headings and isbn number and so on just like your normal library books. Metadata should be catalogued by librarians or users. The data should also be curated and organised in collections, just like the rows of books in library. And a digital library should also facilitate traditional library functions such as various forms of search functions, cataloging and archiving. So a basic form of digital library is basically a managed electronic bookshelf.
- Google Books has been referred to as a digital library with 30 millions books. The content of the site is organised in rows of different categories just like library bookshelves. The books are classified in different subject headings. And Google is working with libraries incorporate bibliographic book data into their collections.
- Another example closer to here is EDINA. It is a national academic data centre based the University of Edinburgh. It provides free-at-the-point-of-use services for the UK higher and further education through subscription by universities and colleges. There are various forms of content provided by the site, ranging from e-books, bibliographic catalogs, census data to film archive.
- This is World Digital Library supported by the UNESCO. It is one of the test subject of an inspection Ux2 has carried out recently. We will come back to this later on in this talk.
- Another quick example, PubMed is a service of the US National Library of Medicine. It’s one of the largest bio-med repositories in the world providing not only free access to typical academic data, it also provide a federated search UI for scientific data genome databases. So as you can see there are various types of digital library even in its most basic and established form, each providing content in different types and scope, as well as variations in user interfaces. But there is more..
- There is a broader definition of digital library that basically describes it as a representation of all aspects of traditional library in digital form. So digital library as an environment. These photos of a library should be familiar to you. Libraries with people in them, not just books. Indeed some of the new digital library developments are geared towards putting in the human contexts. Focusing of the aspects of the library as a place for solving complex problems, sharing and socialising. In a keynote speech in the european digital library conference last September, the word ‘sharium’ has been mentioned, urging the web 2 type of development to enables users to actively stage and share their works with others users. User-generated content is now an emerging development to enrich, to add values to library content. So that the use is grounded locally through specific contexts of use. For example book reviews/rating created by staff and staff of a university course. [ixd patterns in complex website]. [Raul Sigh person.. OA..] We’ve recently come across a persona created for a university research output repository which calls for social networking capability to identify post-research ----------- User generated content such as annotation, tags, mashup Self-organising user interaction, community curation (Flickr..), escalate (viral share)
- To take the representation-in-digital form more literally, there are now some initiatives to create library within the types of virtual worlds that are more common for online gaming. A virtual world is a 3D environment that can provide very immersive interactions in which users can interact with others in real-time and synchronously through an avatar. This picture is actually a group photo taken in within the virtual campus of Edinburgh University featuring some quite interesting looking avatars. The campus is based on an island in Second Life (ask?). There is a variety of buildings in this campus. Some actually look quite similar to the ones in real-life. The university library actually has some space there ready for development..
- So what are the implications of these current and emerging developments? In general libraries are embracing new ways of providing user interface and user experience. This coincides with the Web 2 trend that sees vast improvements in UI technologies such as the use of AJAX, rich internet applications and interaction design patterns which you’ll hear a little bit more later. This is just a general evolution of web technology. At the same time, traditional practices are increasingly being rehashed by user-centric services such as the use of wikis/blogs in web publishing. This user-centric trend also happens in the library sector. For example, cataloguing and curation are no longer the practices that are confined only to subject librarians or information professionals Users are increasingly doing their own things making personal collections and tagging all sorts online content with metadata. One good example is Flickr, the photo sharing site. Instead of taxonomy, we now have folksonomy, a user- centric way for classifying and assigning subject headings to information. As you have seen just now we also another dimension to to the web – 3D environment that provide fully immersive user interactions. So what are the usability challenges under these circumstances. I heard during the recent Usability Week that the usability of websites has in general has improved because of the maturity, of some web technologies, the use of guidelines and best practices and we are getting better in developing usable sites .But this is not necessary the case for new UI technology such as AJAX and emerging interaction design patterns. In the library sector, investments are mostly technology focused, for developing new technologies. Usability is usually not addressed post-hoc at all. This really exacerbates the usability requirement, as you shall see later on in this talk. Another key issue facing the digital library is the usefulness question. Usability is only part of a bigger picture. There is no point in developing the most usable service and find it not useful and not required by the users at all. This also applies to all the new technologies. For example, I remember hearing Jakob Nielsen’s view or rather reservation the usefulness of tag cloud during the recent Usability Week. And yet these key features in many website and in digital library technologies. So are they useful or not? You’ve seen some initiatives to put library in the virtual world such as Second Life. But how useful is such an environment to students. For example, it might be useful for e-learning purposes but if you are already meeting your classmates everyday, would you want to meet them online too? Social networking is another example. Are students happy with what they have, with Twitter, Facebook. How useful would they find a home grown library social network? Usefulness is about evaluating user experience which is highly subjective and depending on the context of use. [Students may like to do social network for personal purposes but they may not like the idea of following their lecturers, or would they?] If you are measuring subjective user experience, the equation would be broaden. For example, in the recent Usability Week session on designing complex websites, usability, usefulness and appeal are being treated equally as a evaluation metric. A similar view is also expressed in a brilliant book, Thoughts onInteraction Design by Jon Kolko.
- So you’re really opening up a can of worms. These are some so called user experience goals I’ve encountered recently in a workshop. These appear to be positive and negative human emotions which seemed a bit random. But you may find it relevant to what you are doing.
- At the university, we are working on a few projects that are relevant to some of the issues which I’ve just mentioned. UX2.0 is our pilot project.. It’s is a public project funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee or JISC, a funding body which channel funds from the Higher Education Funding Councils in the UK to support the use of IT in the education sector. The remit of JISC include various IT research and development programmes, a range of services that include funding the national data centres such as Edina. It also runs JANET, the private high speed IT network which connects all UK higher-education organisations, schools and research councils and other similar private networks in other countries. The project has been ongoing since last April and will end in March next year. It aims to.. an existing open source digital library which we named as UX2 digital library. We are taking the user-centred design approach through usability testing and digital library evaluation which is related to usefulness. The project has 3 objectives all are progressing in parallel and to a different extent. Today we will focus mainly on the first objective and introduce the other two as best as we could depending on the time. We also have sister project that will run for the six month as well. We will also mention it briefly too.
- First part of the objective required a usability inspection of selected DLs Second part was to research contemporary UX techniques. For this we undertook an investigation into interaction design patterns. Blogged about some of the findings during the investigation in a 5-part series Also published the full report on the project website. A condensed version of the report will be published in an online journal at the end of the month. (Ariadne)
- The method chosen to conduct the inspection was heuristic inspection. For this we chose 2 sets of known heuristics; ISO standards and Nielsen’s heuristics. We chose these because the are both highly regarded and used regularly by usability professionals. The also have overlapping points that complement each other while also providing additional heuristics to give a more exhaustive evaluation.
- The World Digital Library is a collaboration between the Library of Congress, UNESCO and the national libraries of 32 countries. Its objective is to “promote international understanding, to expand non-English and non-western content online, as well as to contribute to research and education.” Europeana is a repository which links media from a number of European organisations . You can search for images , video, sound clips and text across museums, galleries, libraries and digital collections. Scran is a multimedia digital library providing a database of items from museums, galleries, archives and media across Scotland .
- Most of you will be familiar with faceted search but in the digital library it is defined by its integration with searching and browsing
- Faceted search criteria not always clear – use diagram to illustrate this Allowing users to select multiple categories is an emerging and advanced feature of faceted navigation. It should also be clear to users what results are being provided
- The default order of presenting categories in the inspected DLs is questionable. Currently, the most popular and default presentation lists facets in a descending order based on the total number of matches. Order of presenting categories example: date or period type facets can be presented chronologically (with the option to change the order by number of results) and subject headings, alphabetically.
- Be interesting to see if usability testing reinforces this as an issue in WDL Outlining the AquaBrowser project in more detail by Boon (later)
- Reminder that the timeline is currently in beta When a search is conducted using the associated search form, the size of text in the word cloud changes to become uniform. Very little information is provided to inform users of the number of results for each year and the effectiveness of the tag cloud is diminished. Consequently it does not meet Heuristic 1: Visibility of system status or ISO 2: Self descriptiveness. not clear when links are active or when they have been visited as the highlighted colour of the text is the same in both situations - does not meet Heuristic 4 which requests that users should not wonder if different situations mean the same thing. users have limited control over the presentation and navigation of results which hampers the efficiency with which a user can navigate the DL (Heuristic 3 & ISO 5: User control and pace of interaction)
- WDL also use a carousel but in a different manner to Europeana. The provide horizontal scrolling to quickly browse images from a variety of categories
- In addition to this they use carousels in a cover flow style similar to iTunes not clear why links which provide the same information behave differently and there is nothing to indicate to users before selecting a link what will happen. This does not meet Heuristic 3 or ISO 3, which states that UI dialogues should provide users with control over the system and conform to user expectations. “ now Boon will talk about the AquaBrowser project and the UX2 digital library”
- AquaBrowser is one of the leading library products currently being deployed by many university libraries. It basically provides faceted search interface with library catalogue and it also have a social networking module that connect all AquaBrowser users in the world. Sound impressive? That’s what we’re told. In Edinburgh, the product is being implemented by Edinburgh University, the National Library of Scotland and Napier University. So it’s fairly popular. We have just been funded by JISC to undertake a user study on the use of AquaBrowser at Edinburgh University. This is a short project. Actually it has just started yesterday and lasts for 6 months until October. It’ll bring two consultants to work with us.
- This is what we will do. Firstly a qualitative study targeting a general user research as well as the usefulness of Aquabrowser. The study will involve online survey, user interviews and field studies which will take place at the university library in George Sq. It will produce library personas and usefulness data that would be reproduced as case studies. We also hope to validate the personas through further quantitative survey. In addition to traditional survey techniques, we are intending to try some informal or guerilla methods such as intercepting users in the library as they are about to perform some search task. And of course we will be doing usability testing formally too. This project is related to UX2 as we are also planning to undertake a similar study at the same time, involving UX2 digital library which will be the next topic.
- The second objective of the project is to enhance UX2 Digital Library
- The library currently has a small collection of educational content curated from e-science and grid computing projects This includes the Enabling Grids for e-Science project based at CERN. This project actually produced the middleware that crunch the data generated from the Large Hadron Collider. (Edinburgh leads the training activities EGEE along with many other institutions in Europe.
- The library facilitates various types of resource discovery. It has cataloguing and content management facilities. Notable characteristics include faceted search, AJAX forms which allows users to dynamically add and remove form widgets. We also have an autosuggest search box too. The autosuggest returns not only suggestion by spelling, it also suggests related authors and subjects too. Faceted search Modified version of Blacklight OPAC: directory-like listing, word cloud, dynamic search UI Enterprise search server Apache Solr Metadata management Dublin Core metadata, organised in 3 categories in UI Wiki approach: authenticated users can modify metadata Content management Authenticated users can upload / delete files Provenance: history and versioning Only content owner can purge (physical delete) files, along with provenance
- The library is based a mixture of open source technologies from Java and Ruby on Rails platforms. The faceted search engine is based on Apache Solr. I am happy to chat about these technologies after the talk if you are interested.
- A key aspect of UX2 is to explore social interaction. As a result, we are assimilating social networking and have put in place an infrastructure ready to be integrated with the UX2 digital library The infrastructure provides typical social network features such as following friends, commenting and sharing objects. And we have recently enable interoperability with Twitter such that comment made on the social platform can also be diffused to Twitter. Again I’m happy to chat about the technical aspects of the platform after the talk. --------- UX Research Persistent search context: ECDL 2009 (elaine), Usability Week 2009 Identified Interaction Patterns: Inspector Design Pattern (pic), Two selection panel (pic), Usefulness testing using low-fi (content rich) prototypes with users, user personas Implementation: enhancing library UI (blacklight) Evaluation – using existing framework
- But now I would like to do a quick demo of the Twitter integration. Login at Twitter, Login at UX2 via Twitter, Go to Twitter/DL group Type in a message “Greeting from SUPA (http://scottishupa.org.uk) meeting, a test via UX2 website.” Review results, 1) group page, 2) own homepage, 3) Twitter ---------- Why UI prototypes.. Usability week re. Agile Development Low-FI/content rich vs wireframe UI prototype 1 (1) New search interface front page, new search box location, customisable facet directory Word cloud – ‘information at a glance’ interaction pattern (2) (3) UI prototype 2 New search interface results: maintaining search contexts. Interaction pattern 1: ‘inspector’, ‘two panel selector’ (4) (5) (6) <- logged in reveal actions UI prototype 3 (7) What user see after logging in (Twitter like) where they can input easily Gimme more.. (8), flip to search library (9) Back to Jason page (10) Comment, blog, review, rating (federated to external) Stream anatomy, filter by (11 -16) Speculated on sidebar and library stream as results from user research (17)
- Lorraine:
- Ease of use is commonly described as the ease with which people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal. Usefulness is defined as the extent to which a person believes using the tool or system will benefit their task performance Self-reported usage differed from actual usage- as a consequence, reported usage may not be a suitable surrogate measure.
- Highlights the importance of measuring usefulness separately from usability
- In the Web 2.0 environment, the system and user are multiplied and the content provided is generated by the system as well as users (including non-system users). In addition to evaluating the performance, usability and usefulness between system, content and user, the interaction between users, between interconnected (and disconnected) systems and between user generated and system generated content should also be evaluated. Next slide – next 6 months
- Two slides to go.. In the next 6 months we are going to focus on two things: user studies for AquaBrowser and UX2, and the implementation of new prototypes for the UX2 digital library.
- That ends the talk.. Here are some contacts and further details for following up. Thanks for coming and listening to us. If you have any questions you would like to ask please feel free. Thank you.