Usability and Adaptability of User Interfaces
Academic use of digital resources is increasing constantly, with more and more specialist and general data collections and tools for research and learning being made available across the sector. Embedding usability in the development practice of academic projects is crucial to protect the investment in valuable resources and to open them up to a wider group of users. Over the past several years JISC has taken forward a significant body of work exploring the role of usability and human computer interaction both within the projects it funds and within the UK higher education community in general.
A number of reports have been published as part of this work, including: |
Whilst this work has been important in developing approaches and strategies for how usability and user experience could be improved in JISC services and resources, it does not directly address the embedding of these skills and building sector capacity that can enable institutions and projects to implement usability throughout the development and lifecycle of projects, resources and tools.
To address this, the JISC is funding a range of projects to develop and implement usability case studies, to embed skills and capacity across the sector and to create adaptable and easy to learn interfaces for research tools. Specifically, the projects will:
- Support institutions and projects in building and embedding the skills and capacity to undertake usability and user experience in the resources and tools developed.
- Enable institutions to develop and instigate practical approaches to usability through ‘rapid usability’ projects that will iteratively inform the development of a usability support and toolkit project.
- Assist UK higher education institutions in embedding usability within their projects, resources and systems, and help strengthen the business case for embedded and systematic usability within institutions.
- Contribute toward the development of an infrastructure for effective usability within UK higher education.
- Encourage the uptake of e-research tools and methodologies by making specialist tools easier to learn and more adaptable to the needs of different user groups.
An aggregation bringing together updates and news from all project blogs can be found here.
Usability Projects
This strand of the work will directly address the embedding of skills surrounding usability and human computer interaction and help build sector capacity that can enable institutions and projects to implement usability throughout the development and lifecycle of projects, resources and tools.
The usability strand has two components: - A project to support usability practice; Usability UK will provide an integrated resource to explore usability methods in context for best application in JISC projects and the wider HE sector
- Usability case studies; the case study projects will form a ‘test bed’ for the guidance and toolkit developed by the support project. The projects will adopt a rapid innovation approach is to enable the project to implement a process of design and testing (and refinement of this process) to help gather requirements and the development of a prototype
- LocateME usability case study: To enhance the Library at Coventry University’s integrated resource discovery environment, locally branded as LOCATE, enabling it to operate effectively across a range of mobile devices.
- Supporting engagement with the Mingana Collection : The study will investigate the usability issues surrounding the use of touch-tables as an interface to digital document repositories in support of: Teaching orientated around digitised manuscript repositories; Research through engagement, by enabling the capture of knowledge and questions; Collaboration between researchers.
- British history Online usability case study: Identify mitigating strategies for the problem of information overload across three generic types of site facility: category listings, product listings, and search (form and results).
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Learnability and Adaptability Projects
Under this strand projects are funded to develop new or improve existing user interfaces to existing e-research tools, in order to make them easier to learn by non-specialist users. This will contribute to increasing efficiency of researchers and empowering them to make better use of research infrastructure.
An increasing number of e-research tools and services exist to support and enable a wide range of research tasks. In many cases the initial focus in the development of these tools was on advanced and rich functionality with requirements often defined by specialist users. As a result user interfaces require a high degree of technical knowledge and understanding of the original development. This creates barriers for the further uptake of e-research infrastructure beyond a more specialist user community. Unfortunately, not all research tasks can be addressed through a very simple user interface.
Depending on the data used and the research questions, tools may be required that allow fine-grained control over a wide range of settings in order to be fully effective. Because of this, complex tools require user interfaces that enable novice users to easily master a particular task, while at the same time not restricting the options of expert users.
All projects funded under this Strand will produce:
- A new or improved interface to an e-research tool that significantly improves the learnability of the resource.
- A project blog that documents the progress of the project with at least monthly postings.
- A detailed briefing paper that describes the approach taken and the lessons learned in terms of learnability and usability design.
- A final budget and completion report
The following eight projects are funded under this strand: