This item is not the definitive copy. Please use the following citation when referencing this material: Dillon, A. and Watson, C. (1996) User analysis HCI-the historical lessons from individual differences research. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 45(6), 619-638. Abstract: User analysis is a crucial aspect of user-centered systems design, yet Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has yet to formulate reliable and valid characterizations of users beyond gross distinctions based on task and experience. Individual differences research from mainstream psychology has identified a stable set of characteristics that would appear to offer potential application in the HCI arena. Furthermore, in its evolution over the last 100 years, research on individual differences has faced many of the problems of theoretical status and applicability that are common to HCI. In the present paper the relationship between work in cognitive and differential psychology and current analyses of users in HCI is examined. It is concluded that HCI could gain significant predictive power if individual differences research was related to the analysis of users in contemporary systems design.

In an effort to understand the impact of designing for digital genres on usersâ mental representations of structure, a two-phase study was conducted. In phase 1, six expert news readers and a panel of HCI experts were solicited for input regarding genre-conforming and genre-violating web news page design, navigation, and story categorization. In phase 2, a longitudinal experiment with a group of 25 novice web news readers who were exposed to one of the two designs over 5 sessions is reported. During these sessions a variety of user data were captured, including: comprehension (recall, recognition), usability (time on task, accuracy, user satisfaction), and navigation (path length, category node hits). The between-group difference of web site design was signiï¬ cant for comprehension, usability, and navigation with the users of the genre-conforming design demonstrating better performance. The within-group difference of time was signiï¬ cant across these three measures as well, with performance improving over time. No interaction effect was found between web site design and time on comprehension or usability. However, a surprising interaction effect was found on navigation; speciï¬ cally the breadth of navigation (i.e. the number of nodes visited for two classes of tasks) increased over time more dramatically for the genre-violating group than for the genre-conforming group. By examining the changes in these data over time and between the two designs, evidence for the development of usersâ mental representations of structure was captured.

This item is not the definitive copy. Please use the following citation when referencing this material: Dillon, A. and Maynard, S. (1995) Don't forget to put the cat out! Why collaborative hypermedia and everyday writing pass one another by. The New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia: Applications and Research, 1, 135-153. Abstract: Hypermedia technology is seen as offering potentially innovative support for the process of writing as much as information access and reading. However, authoring enviroments to date have had little impact in the realâ world production of text. One possible reason is our poor conceptualisation of current writing practice. In the present paper, 31 adult writers kept diaries of their writing activities over the course of one week. The results indicate that for most pople, real world writing is a short communicative act aimed at a limited audience and that technological support for such writing is less likely to resemble a hypermedia workstation than a portable personal communication device. Implications for work in the design of authoring tools are developed.

This item is not the definitive copy. Please use the following citation when referencing this material: Dillon, A. and McKnight, C. (1995) Never mind the theory, feel the data: Observations on the design of Hypertext-based User Interfaces, In W. Schuler, J. Hannemann and N. Streitz (eds.) Designing User Interfaces for Hypermedia, Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 117-125. Introduction: In the present paper we will seek to place the design of hypermedia-based user interfaces in the appropriate context of user-centred system design. In so doing we will outline what we believe to be the major methodological issues. As this will indicate, we view hypermedia design as essentially no different from any other kind interface design in terms of process and problem. Hence the methodological issues for hypermedia interfaces need to be seen as design problems rather than cognitive scientific ones. In this vein, we argue for a data-driven approach to design that seeks theoretical insight at the methodological and process level of design rather than the user level.

This paper revises different tools developed to manage digital information resources. First, it revises relations between information management and content management. Second, the paper analyses content management software componentes. Last, it proposes a practical classification of the tools.

The purpose of this study is to examine if digital public libraries are serendipitous environments. Serendipity in this instance is defined as finding something unexpected and valuable, while searching for something else. A survey was conducted at two Swedish digital public libraries, where the patrons were asked to fill in a questionnaire online. The questions were based on the work on serendipitous digital environments by Lori McCay-Peet, as well as considerations of human factors that could possibly influence serendipity. The result indicate that a majority of patrons experience serendipity at the digital library, although it’s still more common to do so at the physical library or on other web sites. The result also confirms the importance of taking human factors into account when studying serendipity. The patrons who said they didn’t experience serendipity at the physical library or on other web sites, didn’t experience it at the digital library either – or at least only partially. However, the patrons who didn’t experience serendipity at the digital library still did so in other environments. A digital library is an environment with many possibilities for serendipitous encounters and discoveries, but what is missing is a better understanding of how serendipity can actually help in finding information. By teaching patrons to actively seek out serendipity, and by offering a serendipitous digital environment in which to do so, the library can further information literacy in our society.

A digital library is a collection of services and information objects for storing, accessing, and retrieving digital objects. Automatic text summarization presents salient information in a condensed form suitable for user needs. This thesis amalgamates digital libraries and automatic text summarization by extending the Greenstone Digital Library software suite to include the University of Lethbridge Summarizer. The tool generates summaries, nouns, and non phrases for use as metadata for searching and browsing digital collections. Digital collections of newspapers, PDFs, and eBooks were created with summary metadata. PDF documents were processed the fastest at 1.8 MB/hr, followed by the newspapers at 1.3 MB/hr, with eBooks being the slowest at 0.9 MV/hr. Qualitative analysis on four genres: newspaper, M.Sc. thesis, novel, and poetry, revealed narrative newspapers were most suitable for automatically generated summarization. The other genres suffered from incoherence and information loss. Overall, summaries for digital collections are suitable when used with newspaper documents and unsuitable for other genres. / xiii, 142 leaves ; 28 cm.

The aim of the study was to evaluate an online tutorial designed to teach digitization and metadata indexing of library and archival resources. The online tutorial was designed according to constructivist teaching principles to promote collaborative learning. The tutorial was hosted on the OLS (Open learning System) of the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN). The research was concerned with answering three research questions: Is the online tutorial a teaching instrument capable of teaching metadata indexing and digitization skills? Is the online tutorial an effective teaching tool? Does the use of constructivist teaching elements in the tutorial design allow for a more effective communication of knowledge and skills? A total of 10 participants registered for and took part in the online tutorial. On completion of the tutorial a qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the tutorial was done. In terms of the latter a self-administered questionnaire was used as the data collection technique. The qualitative evaluation was done via an analysis of discussions on the discussion forum and e-mail correspondence between learners and the researcher during the running of the tutorial. A more quantitative analysis was then conducted of the responses to the self-administered questionnaire. The qualitative and quantitative analysis identified significant issues that affected the running of the online tutorial. The main issues included problems relating to Internet access to the online tutorial, participation of learners on the tutorial and the functioning of the online learning environment. The analysis of the results of the evaluation provided answers for the three research questions. The analysis found that the online tutorial was able to teach metadata indexing and digitization skills. This was based on completed work that was submitted by participants and responses participants gave to questions on the postcourse questionnaire. However, the amount of work submitted by all participants for the metadata indexing and digitization exercises was generally low. The online tutorial was able to conduct effective teaching at certain times in the tutorial. However, there were a number of issues that disrupted the functioning of the online tutorial and this limited the effectiveness of teaching on the tutorial. The use of constructivist teaching elements in the tutorial design was unable to enable effective communication of knowledge and skills and the promotion of constructivist learning on the tutorial. This goal was hampered by various problems associated with the hosting of the online tutorial and Internet connectivity to the OLS site. Various suggestions for further research were made. / Theses (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2009.

Cultural heritage digital libraries have become an important and prominent tool within humanities scholarship, offering increased expressive power for representing complex networks of relationships and the ability to use computational tools and interactive environments to help researchers ask new questions. While digital libraries offer tremendous advantages for publishing the final products of scholarship, in the words of Bradley and Vetch, "as they currently are delivered, do not intersect terribly meaningfully with the process of scholarly research." In this work I investigate how scholars use visually complex source documents-materials where access to a visual representation of the original object is required and present a prototype system, CritSpace designed to facilitate scholarly engagement with digital resources. Rather than creating a one-size-fits-all application, CritSpace is a web-based framework for building interactive visual interfaces that support scholarly use of digital libraries. The theory and design behind CritSpace is based on a formative study of the work practices of scholars from different disciplines and prior research in field of spatial hypertext. To illustrate a concrete example of using CritSpace and to evaluate its usefulness, I conclude with a case study that walks through the process of deploying CritSpace to support work in a specific scholarly domain, textual criticism and presents a summative usability study of the tool. The results of this study show that CritSpace is effective at supporting textual criticism. More significantly, they also indicate that the innovations added in CritSpace promote the intensive analysis of visual material in addition to knowledge organization and structuring.

As digital books begin to take center stage in our lives the importance of the old printed book still lingers on. A large number of the books printed on the paper media still have much to offer to readers for various reasons (e.g. less famous authors of prose, old books with interesting and original problems). To help individuals in digitizing and reusing their physical and digital books we decided to build a framework that will help people convert physical and digital books to other formats taking into consideration four dimensions: learning outcomes or methodology, target device characteristics, representation and the user. Our focus is on textbooks in history. Consequently, we do not consider some problems like math formulas. This work has the potential of helping people deal with the huge backlog of physical books that can become invisible as the digital books take off. To show that our platform can help in repurposing books for student study activities, we have developed some transformations. The transformations we have implemented shows that the framework can be used to add study aids to books, optimize books for a target platform (e-reader device and application combination), and supplement available features of a target platform and maintain consistency across various audio/visual devices and e-book formats. One of the important steps in the thesis was determining the study activities that we would support as examples in our implementation. We have chosen to implement support for the survey, question, read and review activities of the SQ3R reading technique. We have also implemented support for additional activities like search. The chosen activities and the support implemented for these activities are examples and are not meant to be complete. Another important decision point was to decide which target platforms (e-reader device and application combination) we need to support. We decided to choose a few representatives and leave the rest as future work. The target devices were selected so as to have a variety of device capabilities like screen size, display technology (e.g. e-ink, VGA), and user interaction styles (e.g. touch-based, button based) combined with application capabilities (e.g. audio only, visual only, audio visual, grayscale, and color). The devices selected were: iPad, iPod, iPhone, Kindle 3rd generation, Kindle Fire, Sony PRS and a laptop. The e-reader applications are the ones that are available for these devices.