User-centred Design of Web-based Interfaces to Bibliographic Databases

This book reports results of a research study into the usefulness of a user-centred approach for designing information retrieval interfaces. The main objective of the research was to examine the usability of an existing Web-based IR system in order to design a user-centred prototype Web IR interface. A series of usability experiments was carried out with the Web of Science interface. A set of search tasks was obtained from a user survey and was used in the experiments. A heuristic evaluation was also carried out to find out the usability problems in the interface. The results of both the usability testing and the heuristic evaluations served as a baseline for designing a prototype Web interface. A summative evaluation of the prototype interface showed that both novice and experienced users improved their search performance. Comparative analysis with the earlier usability studies also showed significant improvements in performance and satisfaction with the prototype. These results show that user-centred methods can yield better interface design for IR systems.