User-Centered

Design thinking has gained prominence as an innovative, human-centered methodology for addressing complex problems across disciplines. Despite its widespread application in fields such as business and education, its potential as a research tool in political science remains underexplored. This paper presents design thinking method as a robust qualitative research methodology suitable for examining comparative social and public policy, governance, and political sys- tems, especially contested and value-laden social problems. By aligning the iterative, abductive processes of design thinking with the principles of pragmatism, this framework offers a novel approach to addressing the multifaceted empirical challenges in areas such as health policy, environmental governance, political campaigns, and evidence-based policymaking. Through a six-phase standardized framework and actionable templates, this manuscript demonstrates how design thinking enables researchers to generate insights that bridge theory and practice in political science.

This paper describes an e-gov service that provides a mean to require urban or rural retirement benefits. It also discusses its usability and accessibility in order to assist disabled and illiterate people. The conception of such service has been motivated by the identification of the major needs among the portion of Brazilian people who is digitally excluded and whose functional or plain illiteracy levels are significantly high. Furthermore, the percentage of people with visual or hearing impairments at retirement age is higher than overall population average. Such characteristics should be taken into account when designing interfaces which can be easily used by people with low literacy levels or visual or hearing impairment. This paper also describes the mechanisms for user identification and the assistive technologies employed in the design for providing autonomy to its target public.

The aim of this paper is to present our approach for the redesign of a thematic Digital Library (DL) related specifically to the history of European integration (called European NAvigator, ENA). For the next version of this DL (called ENA 2010), special attention has been paid to DL user experience. Our approach for the redesign has been based on consulting DL user’s communities before starting the practical design of the next DL. The DL user’s communities study permitted to obtain a list of users’ expectations and needs towards the DL. We made the observation that if some users’ expectations and needs would be possibly solved by functionality on the screen; other users’ expectations and needs are much more complex to meet because they go beyond the original role expected from a DL which is to facilitate the access to objects of information and offer a collection of services to the users. The results demonstrated the interest of achieving a DL users study in the preliminary phases o...

This paper presents a part of an ongoing study on incorporating the Multiple Intelligence into learning materials for children. This study believes that incorporating the Multiple Intelligence theory into learning materials is able to add more values towards the usability aspects of learning materials. In accordance, this paper aims at describing an attempt in designing a learning material that incorporates the Multiple Intelligence. In particular, the aims of the paper are (1) to suggest on how the elements of Multiple Intelligence could be incorporated into learning materials and (2) to outline the design and development of a sample of learning material that incorporates the Multiple Intelligence. User-centered design (UCD) approach is used as part of the methods in the design process, which involves three stages: (1) requirement gathering, (2) prototype development, and (3) user testing. This study involves children and teachers at kindergartens. As the results, an initial design of the learning material that incorporates the Multiple Intelligence is obtained and discussed in this paper at length.

This research proposes methods and instruments for assessing usability of academic digital libraries. Criteria in this study are effectiveness, efficiency, satisfaction, and learnability. It is found that there exist interlocking relationships among effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction.

Academic digital libraries emerged as a result of advances in computing and information systems technologies, and had been introduced in universities and to public. As results, moving in parallel with current technology in learning and researching environment indeed offers myriad of advantages especially to students and academicians, as well as researchers. This is due to dramatic changes in learning environment through the use of digital library system which giving spectacular impact on these societies- way of performing their study/research. This paper presents a survey of current criteria for evaluating academic digital libraries- performance. The goal is to discuss criteria being applied so far for academic digital libraries evaluation in the context of user-centered design. Although this paper does not comprehensively take into account all previous researches in evaluating academic digital libraries but at least it can be a guide in understanding the evaluation criteria being w...

Arts and crafts are forms of human creativity. Art is an expression of feelings and emotions and crafts are a form of work using available materials. Traditional crafts practiced by local communities contribute significantly to the legacy of intangibles. This study places traditional crafts in Yogyakarta, establishes their relevance and considerations regarding the factors that influence them. The research objective is to identify the number of consumers interested in handicraft products from bamboo distributed publicly as tourism products and assess the entrepreneurial landscape. The sampling technique uses the quota sampling technique. Research method used qualitative and quantitative descriptive methods, including observation and semi-structured interviews. The primary respondents of Shabbat Bamboo from the data analysis method using SPSS analysis produce descriptive data describing the respondent' condition to understand the study results. The research results on bamboo batik craft products have potential and are in demand by the market; most of the respondents like bamboo batik craft products. From the market research analysis, Odd groupings show that women prefer this bamboo batik craft product, there are still some product deficiencies, and the price offered in the market. Increasing product competitiveness requires developing both labor skills, products, and marketing strategies that create customer value.

The aim of this paper is to evaluate accessibility, usability, and usefulness of digital library plus (dl+) from the faculty members' perspective. A questionnaire was prepared, and sent to the email address of all participants who had registered in digital library plus. Data analysis shows that only a few number of faculty members are interested to register in digital library and use it. Most of the subjects intended to use e-journals. They believe that journal structures are easy for using. Digital library plus is almost one of the digital library for researchers, educators, graduators, and postgraduate students of Iran in English language. As it is, in its beginning most of the faulty members are not familiar with this phenomenon. In fact digital library evaluation has various aspects but this paper focuses on usability, accessibility, and usefulness of digital library. This paper provides insights into evaluation of digital library plus from the users' perspective.

Users' dissatisfaction with the software used will impact the efficiency. Moreover, the lack of knowledge of users' involvement in the development of the software will cause issues to the user's later on. In the case of human-computer Interaction (HCI),it has been suggested that a user's participation and HCI concern in the application growth life-cycle (SDLC) as an important procedure for a successful program execution. However, it is still not sure to what extend user participation is important and HCI problem has been settled by system professionals. The result which is mentioned in this paper and the review opinions from the experts' point of view are taken from analysis on the value of HCI in SDLC. The objectives of the analysis are to identify the condition of the users' contribution in SDLC and to identify the HCI elements that have been settled. Results show that many of the experts have engaged the customers in SDLC, but the majority only during the ...

The paper provides and discusses a life cycle model for agile software development methods like SCRUM. The process model integrates the idea of HumanCentred Design (HCD) into the agile approach. Based on the discussion of existing life cycle models and known process patterns a process model is discussed that combines the advantages of HCD and SCRUM. The SCRUM process model was used in the discussion to be as concrete as possible. However, the suggested approach is applicable to other agile process models as well.

Continuous changing requirements of software are the result of continuously changing reality. This reality can be considered as the context of the software. Agile development methods allow quick adaptations to changing requirements. Initially, agile development methods were focused on the development of the application core only. Recently, process models were discussed that integrate HCI aspects. This paper will discuss ideas to integrate user evaluations into the development process. User interfaces are structured as UI-pattern instances. Tool support is provided that allows the specification of pattern instances as XAML specifications. Additionally, the tool allows the replacement of one pattern instance by another one. In this way, different versions of the same user interface can be generated rapidly without much effort. These different versions can be evaluated with the help of users. Based on these usability tests final decisions for the software design can be made. New requirements can be captured additionally. This will be based on feedback of the users.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to examine the models and methods for evaluating digital libraries. Methods: Springer, Science Direct, ProQuest, Emerald, Wiley, LISTA, Web of Science (WOS), Scopus, Magiran (Persian), Irandoc (Persian), SID (Persian) and Noormags (Persian) databases were searched systematically based on the defined criteria. Selection criteria included full-text articles and dissertations published in English and Persian languages in 2004-2017. The final included articles (n = 64) were reviewed, selected and analysed by group discussions. Results: The results of analysing 64 included articles for this systematised review specified that the evaluation of digital libraries is mostly focused on the service quality aspect, and DigiQual was the most frequently used model. Few studies have evaluated digital libraries in the health sector. The researcher developed questionnaire is the most frequently used method to evaluate digital libraries. Conclusion: Because there are fewer studies of digital libraries evaluation in the health sector, the specific features of health digital libraries should be addressed by librarians and health digital library designers to develop specific models.

Nowadays, a technological development boost can be observed within information technology and its application possibilities. This development results in a digitization of economic processes and human workflows, e.g. within the manufacturing industry. Furthermore, the discussion between digital assistance of employees vs. automation of processes leads to an ongoing change of work tasks or employees' responsibilities. Decision-makers will have to focus on organizational, human as well as on technological aspects to ensure organizational and employee's acceptance of digital solutions likewise. Despite all efforts, today's software products still lack of quality with regards to missing or unused functionality and bad usability. Thus, current software engineering methods seem to be insufficient. Therefore, this paper describes an iterative approach combining software engineering paradigms like human-centered design and agility to enable decision-makers within manufacturing industry to build digital tools that are accepted by their employees and are of value for the company itself.

This paper describes an e-gov service that provides a mean to require urban or rural retirement benefits. It also discusses its usability and accessibility in order to assist disabled and illiterate people. The conception of such service has been motivated by the identification of the major needs among the portion of Brazilian people who is digitally excluded and whose functional or plain illiteracy levels are significantly high. Furthermore, the percentage of people with visual or hearing impairments at retirement age is higher than overall population average. Such characteristics should be taken into account when designing interfaces which can be easily used by people with low literacy levels or visual or hearing impairment. This paper also describes the mechanisms for user identification and the assistive technologies employed in the design for providing autonomy to its target public.

Summary Scenario-based design is a family of methodologies that strives to concretely describe systems during early stages of software process activities. Sound theories behind proposed scenario- based methods suggest a possibility of software process improvement. This paper covers practical application of three selected scenario-based design methods in regards to software system analysis and design. Web browser systems, given that most

The importance of understanding the wants and needs of an information source's users is a key belief of user-centered design. In digital libraries, we find two approaches to including users as factors in system design. User studies tend to provide a more abstract view and can be associated with information science research. Usability assessment tends to be associated with the practical assessment of the ease, efficiency, learnability, and flexibility of the digital library. However, usability assessment seldom deals with differences in user communities. This study of the information needs and information seeking values of three groups of digital library users illustrates how important it is to understand differences between user communities, to have a "nuanced view of the user", to support informed decisions assessing the need for digital library content and organization. Volunteer Voices This study reports on interviews with three communities of interest for a collection of primary source materials related to Tennessee history. Volunteer Voices (www.volunteervoices.org) was an IMLS-funded statewide digitization project of Tenn-Share and the Tennessee Electronic Library (TEL)

Jockeys must wear safety vests as a piece of compulsory personal product equipment (PPE) due to the highly dangerous nature of horse racing. Notwithstanding that 'design thinking' became popular in various fields (e.g. business, education, health, IT), product innovation still not widely attract its application to the design of some PPE products. This article discusses a qualitative case study about the design of Australian safety vests for jockeys along with the application of user-centred design principles. This led to asking for a revision of this framework to accommodate design dependencies in terms of a suggested dependencybased user experience (D-UX) design framework along with further research in this field.

The paper approaches the actual situation of carpooling, by reporting the most updated data divided by its different orms: private, corporate and urban carpooling. For this last kind some innovative experience are reported: instant carpooling, carpooling integrated with car sharing and with other transport modes. The potential of carpooling in the future scenario of disruptive technologies, such as the autonomous driving cars and the dynamic road charging is analyzed. Finally a proposal for some recommendations related to the user-centered approach and on the role of the different stakeholders.

In the past two decades, the use of Digital Libraries (DLs) has grown significantly. Accordingly, questions about utility, usability, and cost of DLs have started to arise and greater attention is given to the evaluation of this type of information system. Since DLs are destined to serve user communities, one of the main aspects to be considered in DL evaluation is users' opinion. The literature on this topic has produced a set of different criteria to judge DLs from the users' perspective; measuring instruments to elicit users' opinion and approaches to analyze the elicited data to conclude an evaluation. This paper provides a comprehensive literature review on the user-centered evaluation of DLs. We believe its main contribution is to bring together previously-disparate streams of work to help shed light on this thriving area. In addition, the paper discusses the different studies and proposes some challenges to be faced in the future.

High demand in acquiring online academic materials, digitization of education and research materials is just not enough. Beyond that, the needs of accessing and retrieving information through the network environments has made digital library to be the right answer and choice for many. Academic digital library appears to find its niche in the world of academic society resulting dramatic changes in learning and researching environment. Like any other digital libraries, academic digital library should be evaluated so that institutions can understand how useful their academic digital libraries are to their domain of users. Literature shows that usability evaluation is in fact one of the most applied user-based approaches in evaluating digital library. It may lead and can result in improvements to system's interface. This paper reviews the literature on evaluating digital library via usability evaluation, its models and dimensions. Despite of different methods in usability evaluation study, the selection of method depends largely on the aim of the evaluation, also on aspects like the nature of the system, the targeted users and also the contents. The literature revealed that evaluating based on the aspect between user and system's interface, and between users and system's performance may not embrace the entire objective of usability evaluation. Another user-based measure is by taking into consideration on the aspect on how the digital library can suit with users' work or academic environments.

This paper is about the elicitation methods for requirement collection. Requirements engineering initial step is the most key phase of the software development life cycle (SDLC). If the first step in conducted in wrong way the whole project may fall down. The elicitation techniques are used to eliminate the barriers in communication of the user and the requirement engineers. In this paper we examine the strategies connected to name the necessities. We attempt to know the flaws and plus points of these practices and come up to a convenient or suitable technique amongst them.

The importance of understanding the wants and needs of an information source's users is a key belief of user-centered design. In digital libraries, we find two approaches to including users as factors in system design. User studies tend to provide a more abstract view and can be associated with information science research. Usability assessment tends to be associated with the practical assessment of the ease, efficiency, learnability, and flexibility of the digital library. However, usability assessment seldom deals with differences in user communities. This study of the information needs and information seeking values of three groups of digital library users illustrates how important it is to understand differences between user communities, to have a "nuanced view of the user", to support informed decisions assessing the need for digital library content and organization. Volunteer Voices This study reports on interviews with three communities of interest for a collection of primary source materials related to Tennessee history. Volunteer Voices (www.volunteervoices.org) was an IMLS-funded statewide digitization project of Tenn-Share and the Tennessee Electronic Library (TEL)

Most studies of participatory design examine the development of a single, customized software system that supports typical workflows within a single client organization. To cope with other use contexts and new forms of work – such as communities and virtual networks – the traditional repertoire of PD methodology needs to be expanded to deal with distribution and diversification of users. Based on a ten-year case study, we describe experiences with PD in the development of a groupware system that initially targeted a single use context, but was continually extended and adapted to new contexts of use with new requirements and work practices. To enable distributed participation across contexts, new methods had to be established: inter-contextual user workshops bring users from different contexts and developers together to reflect on the usage and design of the software and its further development. Commented case studies make this face-to-face interaction persistent, providing a written...

Most studies of participatory design examine the development of a single, customized software system that supports typical workflows within a single client organization. To cope with other use contexts and new forms of work-such as communities and virtual networks-the traditional repertoire of PD methodology needs to be expanded to deal with distribution and diversification of users. Based on a ten-year case study, we describe experiences with PD in the development of a groupware system that initially targeted a single use context, but was continually extended and adapted to new contexts of use with new requirements and work practices. To enable distributed participation across contexts, new methods had to be established: inter-contextual user workshops bring users from different contexts and developers together to reflect on the usage and design of the software and its further development. Commented case studies make this face-to-face interaction persistent, providing a written documentation of distributed use experiences and design decisions. In the process of building an inter-contextual community of users, the PD focus shifts from custom software development to empowering users in assessing their own practice and technology use.

In the past few years, there has been an increasing awareness of the important role of requirements engineering (RE) in a project's success, in both research and industry. Developing consistent requirements specifications that meet the customers' needs, in traditional development, is likely to be infeasible. For one reason, customers do not usually have a clear picture of what they really want. Secondly, the business domain could be changing quickly, especially if it heavily depends on technologies. Agile software development (ASD), on the other hand, supports iterative and incremental development and emphasises customers' involvement in the development process. We argue that adopting ASD in RE overcomes the limitations of the traditional development. ASD, however, is no silver bullet and its adoption comes at a price. This paper helps the reader to: (1) get a quick yet a comprehensive grasp of RE in traditional and ASD; (2) understand the synergies/commonalities between...

This paper reviews a number of recent studies conducted by the Information Use Management and Policy Institute at the College of Communication and Information, Florida State University. The studies reviewed in the paper demonstrate how, over the Institute's 11-year history, the staff accomplished effective, sustainable, and practical assessments that affected change and improved the delivery of library services and programs. Moreover, the paper suggests that such studies do not to have to be expensive nor does the methodology need to be complicated. The paper reviews three recent studies: (1) a website assessment, (2) a broadband mapping assessment, and (3) a training assessment. In addition, the paper makes comparisons among these three in terms of methods, data collection, reporting, impacts, and benefits.

In the past few years, there has been an increasing awareness of the important role of requirements engineering (RE) in a project's success, in both research and industry. Developing consistent requirements specifications that meet the customers' needs, in traditional development, is likely to be infeasible. For one reason, customers do not usually have a clear picture of what they really want. Secondly, the business domain could be changing quickly, especially if it heavily depends on technologies. Agile software development (ASD), on the other hand, supports iterative and incremental development and emphasises customers' involvement in the development process. We argue that adopting ASD in RE overcomes the limitations of the traditional development. ASD, however, is no silver bullet and its adoption comes at a price. This paper helps the reader to: (1) get a quick yet a comprehensive grasp of RE in traditional and ASD; (2) understand the synergies/commonalities between the two approaches in handling RE; (3) recognise the associated challenges of adopting ASD; and (4) identify the current prominent agile RE research areas.

Software development field is becoming more productive day by day with the wonderful model name Agile. Agile is the main focus of research now a days. It is because of its abilities of handling changes in efficient way through iterative and incremental practices. Although it became famous because of its capabilities still there are some issues in it, which is ignorance of usability engineering in different phases of agile that is an important aspect to understand the software. Usability has deep roots in software quality and is a core construct of Human Computer Interaction (HCI). To develop interactive and usable systems there is a need of such a model which can integrate HCI with Agile. To address this issue, we have proposed a model which will work with both User Centered (main focus of HCI) and Agile by assembling different practices from both fields which will result in useable products. It will enhance software life with user satisfaction by giving them running software with usability.

In recent years, digital libraries (DLs) have changed the whole process of information handling. DLS is becoming the lifeline for all human activities in terms of collection, organizing, storing, retrieval and dissemination of information. This paper examined the access and usability aspect of DLs for undergraduate students in Nigeria. The paper describe the concept and significant of digital library from the global perspective to Nigerian environment. A number of published literatures in the area of DLs were identified and critically evaluated. From the review, the paper reported the basic understanding of the body of knowledge on the access and usability attributes of DLs. The paper reported that easier and wider access to information is often touted as a primary benefit of digital libraries. In addition, a number of basic requirements and rubrics for understanding the access and usability attributes of digital libraries were extracted and reported.  The paper concludes with a cross-examination of the challenges such as erratic power supply, poor network connectivity; indifferent attitude of digital library staff etc as those major obstacles that compels student when using the DLs. The paper recommends that efforts must be made to ensure wider access to digital collections through the provision of adequate access points, adequate digital facilities; availability of network and alternative power sources.

The aim of this paper is to evaluate accessibility, usability, and usefulness of digital library plus (dl+) from the faculty members' perspective. A questionnaire was prepared, and sent to the email address of all participants who had registered in digital library plus. Data analysis shows that only a few number of faculty members are interested to register in digital library and use it. Most of the subjects intended to use e-journals. They believe that journal structures are easy for using. Digital library plus is almost one of the digital library for researchers, educators, graduators, and postgraduate students of Iran in English language. As it is, in its beginning most of the faulty members are not familiar with this phenomenon. In fact digital library evaluation has various aspects but this paper focuses on usability, accessibility, and usefulness of digital library. This paper provides insights into evaluation of digital library plus from the users' perspective.

Software development field is becoming more productive day by day with the wonderful model name Agile. Agile is the main focus of research now a days. It is because of its abilities of handling changes in efficient way through iterative and incremental practices. Although it became famous because of its capabilities still there are some issues in it, which is ignorance of usability engineering in different phases of agile that is an important aspect to understand the software. Usability has deep roots in software quality and is a core construct of HCI. To develop interactive and usable systems there is a need of such a model which can integrate HCI with Agile. To address this issue. To solve this issue we have proposed a model which will work with both User Centered (main focus of HCI) and Agile by assembling different practices from both fields which will result useable products. It will enhance software life with user satisfaction by giving them running software with usability.

Crowdsourcing is growing rapidly in both industry and academia, introducing new ways of conducting work and improving our understanding of how to utilize the potential of crowds. Related research has emphasized on how to improve crowdsourcing platforms and related practices to foster collaboration, motivation, trust, quality and creativity. However these challenges don't seem to be as apparent in vibrant online communities. Research in how to make online communities work, provides insights in how to address the challenges crowdsourcing is facing right now. For this work we have gathered from literature relevant design guidelines (heuristics) for online communities and have applied them to 20 crowdsourcing platforms to evaluate how those platforms conform to the heuristics. The heuristics can be used as a tool for designers of crowdsourcing platforms, to evaluate how to improve these platforms and to compare them against their competition. The paper highlights the current challenges of crowdsourcing platforms to acquire positive aspects of online communities.

Crowdsourcing is growing rapidly in both industry and academia, introducing new ways of conducting work and improving our understanding of how to utilize the potential of crowds. Related research has emphasized on how to improve crowdsourcing platforms and related practices to foster collaboration, motivation, trust, quality and creativity. However these challenges don't seem to be as apparent in vibrant online communities. Research in how to make online communities work, provides insights in how to address the challenges crowdsourcing is facing right now. For this work we have gathered from literature relevant design guidelines (heuristics) for online communities and have applied them to 20 crowdsourcing platforms to evaluate how those platforms conform to the heuristics. The heuristics can be used as a tool for designers of crowdsourcing platforms, to evaluate how to improve these platforms and to compare them against their competition. The paper highlights the current challenges of crowdsourcing platforms to acquire positive aspects of online communities.

Media are agents of socio- cultural change. This change offers a new approach to the understanding of life styles. New media technologies could be effective tools for the improvement of the user satisfaction. We investigate two principles for describing Visual Rhetoric for Mobile TV Content can be used to extract value from users. First Visual Rhetoric is excellent to suggest a system oriented approach to observe the changes within the social context. Second Visual Rhetoric can help to clarify the user's experience by focusing on the affective side of human-product interaction. These principles can guide the designers in shaping and evaluating strategies during the design process. The arguments are based on drawing in-depth description on the impact of the new technologies of Mobile TV and on empirical research activities in form of action research strategies. Emphasizing the greater need to defined features and elements of a user interaction within the digital world, we especially focus on cultural processes.

It is generally recognized that our behaviours affect the environment. However, it is difficult to correlate behaviour of an individual person to large-scale problems. This is usually due to insufficient ergonomy of available tools. The main cause is that most of user-awareness tools available are technology-centered instead of user-centered. In this paper, we present a participatory design approach we followed to design and develop an energy-aware mobile application for user-awareness on energy consumption for Smart Home monitoring. To engage end-users from the early design stages, we conduct two on-line surveys and a focus group involving about 630 people. Results allowed on identifying functional requirements and guidelines for mobile app design. The purpose of this research is to increase user-awareness on energy consumption using tools and methods required by users themselves. Furthermore in this paper, we present the technological choices that drove our implementation of an energy-aware application based on prosumers' requirements.

Digital library interoperability is supported by good quality metadata. The design of metadata creation and management tools is therefore an important component of overall digital library design. A number of factors affect metadata tool usability, including task complexity, interface usability, and organizational context of use. These issues are being addressed in the user-centered design of a metadata tool for the Internet Public Library.

A mental model is a model that people have of themselves, others, the environment, and the things with which they interact, such as technologies. Mental models can support the user-centered development of digital libraries: if we can understand how users perceive digital libraries, we can design interfaces that take these perceptions into account. In this paper, we describe a novel method for eliciting a generic mental model from users, in this case of a digital library's search engine. The method is based on a content analysis of users' mental representations of the system's usability, which they generated in heuristic evaluations. The content analysis elicited features that the evaluators thought important for the search engine. The resulting mental model represents a generic model of the search engine, rather than a clustering of individuals' mental models of the same search engine. The model includes a number of references to Web search engines as ideal models, but these references are idealistic rather than realistic. We conclude that users' mental models of Web search engines should not be taken at face value. The implications of this finding for digital library development and design are discussed.

The organizations that develop information systems are usually composed of members and groups with different technological backgrounds and experiences. While these different backgrounds are necessary to support the many dimensions of information system development, at the same time they can result in barriers to sharing organizational knowledge, and can thus impede this work. Understanding how the technological backgrounds of organizational groups are constituted and mediated thus provides useful insight into how information system development occurs in organizational contexts. This article contributes to this discussion with a qualitative and interpretive case study of a small team engaged in creating metadata for a digital library. A number of unexpected and recalcitrant problems were encountered that delayed this metadata work. Drawing on theories of networks of practice, technological frames, and perspective making and perspective taking, the article uses ethnographic-and action research-based interviews, to probe project members' understanding of metadata. The analysis identified different networks of practice and technological frames in the project, including the IT workers, who had a systems administration perspective, and the faculty members, who had a theoretical research perspective. The tensions caused by these differences are described, as are the ways in which the project resolved them. Two findings are that the intercommunal negotiation was established not just between individual networks of practice in the project, but with reference to an emerging community of practice that served as a boundary object, and that intercommunal negotiation also had to be carried out diachronically across time, with this latter form of negotiation being difficult to achieve.

Engineering processes and methodologies used in building tomorrow's systems must place a greater emphasis on designing usable systems that meet the needs of the systems' users and their tasks. This paper identifies the need for defining human factors and human-computer interaction (HCI) engineering activities that contribute to the design, development, and evaluation of usable and useful interactive systems, and presents a rationale for integrating these activities with software engineering and incorporating them into the system life cycle.

In recent years, digital libraries (DLs) have changed the whole process of information handling. DLS is becoming the lifeline for all human activities in terms of collection, organizing, storing, retrieval and dissemination of information. This paper examines the access and usability aspect of DLs by undergraduate students in Nigeria. The paper describes the concept and significance of digital library from the global perspectives down to Nigerian environment. A number of published literatures in the area of DLs were identified and critically evaluated. From the review, the paper reports the basic understanding of the body of knowledge on the access and usability attributes of DLs. The paper emphasizes that easier and wider access to information is often touted as a primary benefit of digital libraries. In addition, a number of basic requirements and rubrics for understanding the access and usability attributes of digital libraries have been extracted and reported.  The paper concludes with a cross-examination of the challenges such as erratic power supply, poor network connectivity; indifferent attitude of digital library staff etc as those major obstacles that affects students when using the DLs. The paper recommends that efforts must be made to ensure wider access to digital collections through the provision of adequate access points, adequate digital facilities; availability of network and alternative power sources.
Key words: Digital Libraries, Access, Usability attributes, Nigeria

ADEPT is a 5-year project whose goals are to develop, deploy, and evaluate inquiry learning capabilities for the Alexandria Digital Library, an extant digital library of primary sources in geography. We interviewed nine geography faculty members who teach undergraduate courses about their information seeking for research and teaching and their use of information resources in teaching. These data were supplemented by interviews with four faculty members from another ADEPT study about the nature of knowledge in geography. Among our key findings are that geography faculty are more likely to encounter useful teaching resources while seeking research resources than vice versa, although the influence goes in both directions. Their greatest information needs are for research data, maps, and images. They desire better searching by concept or theme, in addition to searching by location and place name. They make extensive use of their own research resources in their teaching. Among the implications for functionality and architecture of geographic digital libraries for educational use are that personal digital libraries are essential, because individual faculty members have personalized approaches to selecting, collecting, and organizing teaching resources. Digital library services for research and teaching should include the ability to import content from common office software and to store content in standard formats that can be exported to other applications. Digital library services can facilitate sharing among faculty but cannot overcome barriers such as intellectual property rights, access to proprietary research data, or the desire of individuals to maintain control over their own resources. Faculty use of primary and secondary resources needs to be better understood if we are to design successful digital libraries for research and teaching.

In order to study how the notion of User Experience (UX) evolved over the last few years, an international survey originally conducted in 2008 by Law et al. has been replicated. Its main goal was to get some insights on the points of view from practitioners on the notion of UX. After having slightly adapted the initial (English) survey and having translated it into French and German, more than 758 valid answers have been collected from all over the world. This experience report aims at illustrating some of the challenges involved in the replication of such a study as well as successes and limitations.

In order to study how the notion of User Experience (UX) evolved over the last few years, an international survey originally conducted in 2008 by Law et al. has been replicated. Its main goal was to get some insights on the points of view from practitioners on the notion of UX. After having slightly adapted the initial (English) survey and having translated it into French and German, more than 758 valid answers have been collected from all over the world. This experience report aims at illustrating some of the challenges involved in the replication of such a study as well as successes and limitations.

There has been a long-standing commitment within museums, galleries and science centres to deploy complex technologies to enhance engagement and participation amongst visitors. The design of these systems has proved highly challenging and tensions arise in enabling both, individual action as well as cooperation and collaboration. In this paper we draw on our recent studies to consider the problems and issues that arise in facilitating the private and the public, the individual and the collaborative, and its implications for the success of innovative systems in museums and galleries.