Abstract

Walking into a library to borrow a book has an expiration date. With digital loans, we will not be going to the library for books, but we still may go for a recommendation or an experience of shared reading. Knowing what our users are looking for, discussing and recommending, and using that information to offer a more personalized reading service, is vital for the future of ebook streaming services. Librarians need readers to create book collections that improve the user’s experience, and need to do our best to create an affective bond between the reader, the book and the library that brought them together.

Abstract

Within a website design process, usability evaluation is a key step to ensure success. Among the various evaluation methods, user testing provides information about potential performance problems, such as the effectiveness and efficiency with which users perform tasks on the web. In this context of evaluation and performance measurement, statistics is a tool that provides validity and reliability to the tests’ results, and delivers the evidence needed to make better design decisions.

Abstract

The ROPO effect (research online, purchase offline) corresponds to the process by which customers first search for information on the web and then finalize the transaction in a physical store. Like “showrooming”, the opposite trend, ROPO is a natural and common human behaviour that will not die off as digital consumer culture continues to evolve. Libraries can benefit from these practices if they are able to align their contents with user needs, offer library web sites with a user-centred design, and improve the user-experience. In this way, users can search for information on Internet, find and evaluate their library’s contents, and then go to the physical library to use its collections and services.

Abstract

Conferences, books, blogs, forums, magazines and courses related to the disciplines of usability, interaction and user experience have shown that the year 2009 saw some deepening in user-centered design techniques and gave more prominence to two key issues: web 2.0 sites and mobile devices designs. To this we must add the launch of interactive games based on augmented reality, a further step in interaction that, coupled with what the Wii offered us a couple of years ago, enables us to see where the videogame industry may be going, as well as the trends in interaction in the coming years.

Abstract

The discipline of information architecture (IA), although present in some way for over 50 years, has taken on special relevance with the advent of the Web and the explosion of the amount of available information. Nowadays, IA has clear pillars based on the managed content but especially on users, without forgetting the context. This article discusses components to combine when developing IA, and a basic methodology is identified. As the amount of information around us is still growing, IA continues to innovate with new forms of organization, more efficient search engines and Semantic Web technologies that let computers take care of the less creative part of coping with the avalanche of information.

Abstract

Remote usability testing tools are very valuable and useful in the design and management of usability tests. These tools can help simplify and streamline our processes. We describe the tool “Loop11” in detail and offer comments on what we learned from our experience with it in two usability tests.

Abstract

Technological advances in the field of information and interactive systems mean that increasing numbers of factors and criteria are considered to assess quality during the design, development and evaluation process. In this context, concepts such as quality of use and user experience have appeared and in many cases are replacing or supplementing existing usability properties to identify the quality of the interaction process. In this paper we describe and analyze the evolution of the different concepts to identify the quality of the interaction on information systems and we help to characterize and locate each quality factor in one dimension and a specific range of the process of use, and consider the relationships and overlap between these concepts.

Abstract

Methodology and results of a user study on several connected TV devices is presented. Heuristic evaluation, user testing and eye tracker are applied. The results point out a low usability in the tasks that require keyboard and those related to the video on demand service (VoD). These latter tasks have been analysed in depth with eye tracker technology in the device that follows the HbbTV protocol.

Abstract

In a world where the use of electronic communication and information systems is constantly expanding, a good user experience becomes a decisive factor for the success of a product in increasingly saturated and competitive markets. Ensuring the success of a product such as a website or a mobile application is not trivial as plenty of factors may have an influence on determining the adequacy of the experience for a given group of users. This paper uses real examples to study the concept of user experience, dealing in depth with the different factors which influence the ultimate success of a product, as well as how they must be taken into account while designing and managing interactive information systems. We also discuss the way they are supported by the different standards to improve user experience.