The library profession is now heavily involved in providing access to
information through library web sites and it is a challenge to design a web
site that has reliable content and a user interface that is intuitive to those
who use it. As web accessibility and usability are major issues in the design
of library Web sites, this paper suggests that the design will be most
successful when a usability analysis tool is used throughout the design and
redesign of academic library web sites.
The research drew on the literature of Human-computer Interaction and
usability engineering examining best practice usability and accessibility
design guidelines. It identified those guidelines that were relevant to
academic library web sites. In order to establish the extent to which
Australian academic library web sites met usability guidelines a usability
analysis tool was developed and used to evaluate a randomly selected
sample of web sites. The web sites were categorised under higher education
institutional archetypes as suggested by DETYA (1998) and the results
were discussed in light of these groups. The research found that there was
no correlation of the usability of the web sites between the archetypes. In
fact the pattern of usability was randomly distributed across all institutions,
with the best and worst results appearing in each archetypical category. The
study concluded that the web has provided a whole new start for all
institutions and after examining the results, it suggested that the design of
early web sites was not based on the size or the past history of the
institution that it belonged to, but rather reflected those factors, already
established in the literature, that faced library web managers at that time,
when designing the library web page.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/218633 |
| Date | January 2002 |
| Creators | Raward, Roslyn, n/a |
| Publisher | University of Canberra. Information Management and Tourism |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | ), Copyright Roslyn Raward |
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