JISC

"Usability Studies for JISC Services and Information Environment"

Staff and funding

Principal investigator: Prof Helen Petrie, Dr Panayiotis Zaphiris, Stephanie Wilson, Fraser Hamilton

Research staff: Terry Hoi-Yan Ma, Neil King

Total funding: £33,483

Funding source: JISC

Duration: December 2002 to April 2003

Project description

The focus of the project is to investigate how usability can best be applied to the services and resources provided by JISC, with particular reference to the further development of the Information Environment. The major deliverables of the work is a Digital Libraries usability and accessibility framework, enabling JISC services to further develop truly usable and accessible services for the higher and further education communities. The study will also apply the framework to a number of JISC services, identifying current issues of usability and accessibility. The project has two core aims:

• A usability foundation study

• Usability evaluation of current JISC services

The prime objectives are to:

• Establish JISC usability requirements
• Investigate and present a review of appropriate human-computer interaction design methods, techniques and guidelines for JISC services
• Conduct a study to establish usability criteria and best practices for services and resources similar in nature to those offered by JISC
• Define clear and workable methodologies and toolkit for usability and accessibility evaluations
• Conduct requirement elicitation, design generation and evaluations on four JISC services
• Analyse, disseminate and discuss the outcomes
• Establish a viable usability and accessibility framework for Digital Libraries