Anne Rose

Visualizing digital library search results with categorical and hierarchical axes

Digital library search results are usually shown as a textual list, with 10-20 items per page. Viewing several thousand search results at once on a two-dimensional display with continuous variables is a promising alternative. Since these displays can overwhelm some users, we created a simplified two-dimensional display that uses categorical and hierarchical axes, called hieraxes. Users appreciate the meaningful and limited number of terms on each hieraxis. At each grid point of the display we show a cluster of color-coded dots or a bar chart. Users see the entire result set and can then click on labels to move down a level in the hierarchy. Handling broad hierarchies and arranging for imposed hierarchies led to additional design innovations. We applied hieraxes to a digital video library of science topics used by middle school teachers, a legal information system, and a technical library using the ACM Computing Classification System. Feedback from usability testing with 32 subjects revealed strengths and weaknesses.

The design of history mechanisms and their use in collaborative educational simulations

Reviewing past events has been useful in many domains. Videotapes and flight data recorders provide invaluable technological help to sports coaches or aviation engineers. Similarly, providing learners with a readable recording of their actions may help them monitor their behavior, reflect on their progress, and experiment with revisions of their experiences. It may also facilitate active collaboration among dispersed learning communities. Learning histories can help students and professionals make more effective use of digital library searching, word processing tasks, computer-assisted design tools, electronic performance support systems, and web navigation.This paper describes the design space and discusses the challenges of implementing learning histories. It presents guidelines for creating effective implementations, and the design tradeoffs between sparse and dense history records. The paper also presents a first implementation of learning histories for a simulation-based engineering learning environment called SimPLE (Simulated Processes in a Learning Environment) for the case of a semiconductor fabrication module, and reports on early user evaluation of learning histories implemented within SimPLE.

The International Children's Digital Library: Viewing Digital Books Online

Abstract Reading books plays an important role in childrens cognitive and social development. However, many children do not have access to diverse collections of books due to the limited resources of their community libraries. We have begun to address this issue by creating a large-scale digital archive of childrens books, the International Childrens Digital Library (ICDL). In this paper we discuss our initial efforts in building the ICDL, concentrating on the design of innovative digital book readers.

An applied ethnographic method for redesigning user interfaces

Methods for observing software users in the workplace will become increasingly important as the number of people using computers grows and developers improve existing systems. Successful redesigns rely, in part, on complete and accurate evaluations of the existing systems. Based on our evaluation experience, we have derived a set of practical guidelines to be used by designers in preparing for the evaluation, performing the field study, analyzing the data, and reporting the findings. By providing a general framework based on ethnographic research, we hope to reduce the likelihood of some common problems, such as overlooking important information and misinterpreting observations. Examples from our ongoing work with the Maryland Department of Juvenile Justice are used to illustrate the proposed guidelines.

Content + connectivity => community: digital resources for a learning community

Digital li braries offer new opportunities to p rovide acce ss to d iverse resources beyond those held in school buildings and to allow teachers and learners to reach beyond classroom walls to other people to build distributed learning communities. Creating learning communities requires that t eachers change their behaviors and the Baltimore Learning Community Project described here is based on the premise that access to resources should be tied to the a ssessment outcomes that i ncreasingly drive c urricula a nd classroom activity. Based on examination of curriculum guides and discussions with project teachers, an interface for the BLC digital library was prototyped. Three components (explore, construct, and present) of this user interface that allows teachers to find text, v ideo, images, web sites, and instructional m odules and create their own modules are described. Although the technological challenges of building learning communities are significant, the greater challenges are mainly social and political.

Immediate usability: a case study of public access design for a community photo library

Abstract This paper describes a novel instantiation of a digital photo library in a public access system. It demonstrates how designers can utilize characteristics of a target user community (social constraints, trust, and a lack of anonymity) to provide capabilities, such as unrestricted annotation and uploading of photos, which would be impractical in other types of public access systems. It also presents a compact set of design principles and guidelines for ensuring the immediate usability of public access information systems. These principles and guidelines were derived from our experience developing PhotoFinder Kiosk, a community photo library. Attendees of a major HCI conference (CHI 2001 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems) successfully used the tool to browse and annotate collections of photographs spanning 20 years of HCI-related conferences, producing a richly annotated photo history of the field of human–computer interaction. Observations and usage log data were used to evaluate the tool and develop the guidelines. They provide specific guidance for practitioners, as well as a useful framework for additional research in public access interfaces.

A photo history of SIGCHI: evolution of design from personal to public

For 20 years I have been photographing personalities and events in the emerging discipline of human--computer interaction. Until now, only a few of these photos were published in newsletters or were shown to visitors who sought them out. Now this photo history is going from a personal record to a public archive. This archive should be interesting for professional members of this community who want to reminisce, as well as for historians and journalists who want to understand what happened. Students and Web surfers may also want to look at the people who created better interfaces and more satisfying user experiences.

Building an electronic learning community: from design to implementation

ABSTRACT The University of Maryland at College Park in cooperation with the Baltimore City Public Schools and several partners is working to build an electronic learning community that provides teachers with multimedia resources that are linked to outcome-oriented curriculum guidelines. The resource library contains approximately 1500 videos, texts, images, web sites, and instructional modules. Using the current system, teachers can explore and search the resource library, create and present instructional modules in their classrooms, and communicate with other teachers in the community. This paper discusses the iterative design process and the results of informal usability testing. Lessons learned are also presented for developers.

Readability of scanned books in digital libraries

Displaying scanned book pages in a web browser is difficult, due to an array of characteristics of the common users configuration that compound to yield text that is degraded and illegibly small. For books which contain only text, this can often be solved by using OCR or manual transcription to extract and present the text alone, or by magnifying the page and presenting it in a scrolling panel. Books with rich illustrations, especially childrens picture books, present a greater challenge because their enjoyment is dependent on reading the text in the context of the full page with its illustrations. We have created two novel prototypes for solving this problem by magnifying just the text, without magnifying the entire page. We present the results of a user study of these techniques. Users found our prototypes to be more effective than the dominant interface type for reading this kind of material and, in some cases, even preferable to the physical book itself.

Putting visualization to work: ProgramFinder for youth placement

The Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (HCIL) and the Maryland Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) have been working together to develop the ProgramFinder, a tool for choosing programs for a troubled youth from drug rehabilitation centers to secure residential facilities. The seemingly straightforward journey of the ProgramFinder from an existing user interface technique to a product design required the development of five different prototypes which involved user interface design, prototype implementation, and selecting search criterion. While HCIL’s effort focused primarily on design and implementation, DJJ’s attribute selection process was the most time consuming and difficult task. We also found that a direct link to DJJ’s workflow was needed in the prototypes to generate the necessary “buy-in”. This paper analyzes the interaction between the efforts of HCIL and DJJ and the amount of “buyin” by DJJ staff and management. Lesson learned are presented for developers.