A usability study of taxonomy visualisation user interfaces in digital repositories
| Published date | 25 February 2014 |
| Date | 25 February 2014 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-03-2013-0051 |
| Pages | 284-304 |
| Author | Paulo Alonso Gaona García,David Martín-Moncunill,Salvador Sánchez-Alonso,Ana Fermoso García |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval |
A usability study of taxonomy
visualisation user interfaces in
digital repositories
Paulo Alonso Gaona Garcı
´a
Faculty of Engineering, Distrital University, Bogota
´D.C., Colombia
David Martı
´n-Moncunill and Salvador Sa
´nchez-Alonso
Department of Computer Science, University of Alcala
´, Alcala
´de Henares,
Spain, and
Ana Fermoso Garcı
´a
Department of Computer Science, Pontifical University of Salamanca,
Salamanca, Spain
Abstract
Purpose – This paper aims to analyse user interfaces for search and collection visualisation and
navigation from a usability perspective. The final aim is to offer repository owners a scientific basis to
support their decisions when they have to choose an interface that can really help users to effectively
locate and visualise resources over large digital collections.
Design/methodology/approach – This HCI study is divided into two parts: perception and
usability. The first one analysed three perceptual abilities required to use interfaces: attention,
retention of information and understanding. The second one was run on an ad hoc generated collection
including more than 40,000 European digital resources collected and classified according to a given
branch of knowledge in the Art & Architecture Thesaurus.
Findings – Although visual interfaces proved useful for certain tasks related to resource discovery
and search, and despite the overall good general user opinion, the authors found it necessary to
conduct another thorough study to know more about the target users and the amplitude of the
collection, as well as to determine the ideal type of interface to implement. All these factors are
important for increasing user acceptance and avoiding unnecessary implementation costs.
Research limitations/implications – This research was run on a relatively small sample size of
users from Spain and Latin America, which may not be representative of the general population. In
similar studies previous knowledge about usability has been reported to introduce bias in the results,
so the authors tried to avoid this when selecting the participants.
Originality/value – There are no previous usability studies for the development and
implementation of interfaces in digital learning or cultural repositories. The authors’ experience
highlights the importance of addressing usability aspects a priori, to prevent users from ceasing to use
visual interfaces over time, because they do not perceive any benefit from using them.
Keywords User interfaces,Perception, Repositories, Data visualization, Visual taxonomysearch,
Visualizationtechniques
Paper type Research paper
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/1468-4527.htm
This work was partially supported by the Organic.Lingua CIP-ICT-PSP.2010.6.2 Project,
Reference Number 27099; Open Discovery Space ODS Project, Reference Number 297229; and
VOA3R Project, Reference Number 250525. Special thanks to Distrital University for their
support through the teacher training programme.
OIR
38,2
284
Received 14 March 2013
First revision approved
16 June 2013
Online Information Review
Vol. 38 No. 2, 2014
pp. 284-304
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
1468-4527
DOI 10.1108/OIR-03-2013-0051
Introduction
In recent years digital repositories have emerged as increasingly important web-based
applications providing access to learning objects. With millions of resources invested
in projects such as Open Discovery Space (http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/
apps/projects/factsheet/index.cfm?project_ref ¼2972 29), ARIADNE (www.ariadne-
eu.org/), Natural Europe (www.natural-europe.eu/), Organic.Lingua (Dimitropoulos
et al., 2011), VOA3R (Protonotarios et al., 2011), Europeana (www.europeana.eu) and
others, the European Union demonstrates an important interest in the promotion and
development of means to access digital resources with high technological reliability.
Many digital repositories use knowledge classification schemes (e.g. ontologies,
thesauri, taxonomies) to help content and repository experts to organise resources, and
to assist users to better find and locate resources. However we observed that users are
not familiar with the complex knowledge representation schemes that repositories use
to classify the resources, and that current user interfaces do not make it easy to conduct
the essential tasks that users expect when visiting the repository: searching for and
finding digital resources. Focusing on this second issue, we will analyse those
deficiencies in search and navigation interfaces that can become a problem for users
who struggle to find relevant resources. At the end of the day, we believe that the high
cost of the design, development and maintenance of such interfaces is not justified
unless users obtain a real benefit from their use.
After a thorough literature review, we were motivated by the lack of user studies
comparing visualisation interfaces. A survey on the use of taxonomies in tree
visualisation by Graham et al. (2000) found that no conclusive user studies had yet
been carried out. So we asked ourselves whether visualisation techniques and
awareness of HCI methodologies could help creators of digital repositories to provide
better services. These services should ideally help users to locate materials in a more
effective and precise manner in very large collections of digital resources, to improve
the location of materials according to a thematic structure or knowledge area, to
identify effective interfaces according to the context and criteria search for performing
browsing and searching processes over digital resources, and to identify the thematic
coverage of a knowledge area and a specific topic according to the number of digital
resources. By “thematic coverage” we mean the facility that a graphical interface
provides to (easily) identify how well covered a given topic is in a repository according
to the resources the repository stores about the topic. A good example of thematic
coverage-aware representation is the use of circles or nodes of different sizes depending
on the number of resources stored in the repository.
To perform this analysis, we conducted the research in two parts. The first part
analysed perceptual abilities to use interfaces (such as attention, retention of
information, and understanding), setting up the eight interfaces to work wi th simple
taxonomies and data to avoid bias produced by the complexity of the taxonomy or the
data displayed. The second part (usability) used a simulated collection built by
collecting 40,000 digital resources from Europeana – a virtual European library which
makes a large amount of Europe’s cultural resources available in digital form – and
classifying them according to a given branch of knowledge (styles and periods) in the
Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) (Getty Research Institute, 1988). AAT is a set of
structured vocabularies that were published to improve access to information about
art, architecture, and material culture (Aitchison et al., 2001), but also because it
User interfaces
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