Maximizing Coverage, Reducing Time: A Usability Evaluation Method for Web-Based Library Systems

Usability of a Web Based Library Systems (WBLS) is a major quality attribute. Checklists have become common and easy method to evaluate the usability of these WBLS; however the available checklists support evaluation of general usability aspects of WBLS only. The domain specific usability aspects are required to maximize the usability for such systems. This research proposes and validates a checklist based usability evaluation method that supports the evaluation of general as well as specific usability aspects of WBLS. The usability evaluation checklist is proposed based on analysis of literature and data of a controlled experiment. The checklist is validated in comparison to the “Academic Library Website Evaluation Checklist” via another controlled experiment. The proposed checklist is applied to the WBLS of universities in Pakistan. The manual and statistical result shows that, the proposed usability evaluation checklist identifies more general and specific usability aspects. It is found that both the checklists are equally efficient while identifying the usability errors. The proposed checklist is beneficial for the academia as well as industry to evaluate the usability of WBLS to an optimal level.

Accessibility and Usability Evaluation of Digital Library Article Pages

This study aims to present an exploratory study about the accessibility and usability evaluation of digital library article pages. For this purpose, four widely known digital libraries (DLs), namely Science Direct, Institute of Electric and Electronic Engineering Xplore, Association for Computing Machinery, and SpringerLink, were examined. In the first stage, article web interfaces of these selected DLs were analyzed based on standard web guidelines using automatic evaluation tools to assess their accessibility. In the second stage, to evaluate the usability of these web interfaces, eye-tracking experiments with 30 participants were conducted. Obtained results of the analysis show that article pages of digital libraries are not of free of accessibility and usability problems. Overall, this study highlights accessibility and usability problems of digital library article interfaces, and these findings can provide the feedback to web developers in making their article pages more accessible and usable for their users.

Evaluating an E-Learning Application to Protect Vulnerable Users From Cyberbullying

This research project evaluates Let's Be Safe, an e-learning application. This application aims to educate young adults with intellectual disability about cyberbullying—an issue prevalent among this population—and cybersafety. Twenty-two individuals with mild to moderate intellectual disability took part in the research. The study employed a mixed-methods design including observational and inquiry methods of usability evaluation as well as focus groups. The evaluation investigated the relationships between perceived aesthetics, emotional response, and usability for the application. The focus group gathered information from the participants regarding their knowledge and experience of cyberbullying and cybersafety. The analyses found no significant relationships between aesthetics, emotional response, and usability for this user group. However, the research gathered data, which will contribute to the development of Let's Be Safe. The findings of the focus group revealed that cyberbullying is an issue among this population.

Design and usability assessment of DocManS: A document management system with security and social media features

A document management system (DMS) is required to handle any documents within an institution efficiently. However, several important features are lacking in the current DMS, such as security and social media features. This paper proposes a new solution to tackle the issues by developing a new document management system with security and social media features called DocManS. The development process and usability evaluation by users are presented in this paper. The usability assessment is performed with the use of the System Usability Scale (SUS) framework. The results show that the current version falls within the B range of the SUS framework and several enhancements for better usability in terms of social media sharing and privacy are recommended.

A Suggested Integrated Approach For The Evaluation Of Remote Intranet Usability

As the societal impacts of the Covid-19 progress, so do the workplace and business challenges the pandemic has brought on. It is now crucial to conduct user testing to measure and optimize the usability of corporate Intranets under pandemic conditions. This paper suggests and validates an integrated approach for Intranet remote usability evaluation validated by user testing in a work from home context during a pandemic. The main contribution of the current research is the discovery of some users preferences specific to work from home workers during a pandemic not previously addressed in the literature on intranets.