Usability Evaluation
A heuristic evaluation of the SCALE prototype revealed terminology and system responses that could confuse users. Three evaluators used different SCALE user preference settings to look at six pages from the NSDL as rendered by SCALE.
A focus group with staff from NSDL collections projects, plus follow-up phone interviews with them, posed questions on:
- Reading scientific articles online
- Encountering unfamiliar terminology
- Following links to reference articles
- Displaying articles through the SCALE prototype
- Using SCALE to provide reading support for document collections
- Sharing reference works with SCALE
The focus group participants' comments included:
- Add information about what SCALE is and how to use it
- Highlight the first instance of a term, rather than all instances
- Open reference articles in a new window
- Invert and condense the relevance menu to five choices
- Don't highlight obvious terms
- "Readers may not have time to read reference articles
- Participants are willing to contribute authority lists to SCALE
Future focus groups will include undergraduate students.
An initial accessibility evaluation indicated that the main challenge will be to find non-visual cues that can provide a distinction between existing and SCALE-added links. Also, NSDL articles rendered by SCALE will be no more accessible than they were before they were processed by SCALE.
