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Seema Sharma, Lovely Professional University Unit 10: Evaluation of User Studies

Unit 10: Evaluation of User Studies Notes

CONTENTS
Objectives

Introduction
10.1 Evolution of the System and Interface Design

10.2 Summary

10.3 Keywords
10.4 Review Questions

10.5 Further Readings

Objectives

After studying this unit, you will be able to:
• Explain evaluation of user studies
• Describe evolution of the system and interface design.

Introduction

The Alexandria Digital Library (ADL) is a geolibrary (Goodchild, 1998; National Research Council,
1999) where a primary means of describing and finding information is with a geographic footprint. A
footprint shows a location on the surface of the Earth associated with either a collection object (CO)
(such as a map, an aerial photograph, or a remote-sensing image) or with a user’s query. The footprint
may be represented as a point or polygon, with latitude and longitude co-ordinates. When a user
queries the ADL collections through the user interface, the user creates a footprint on an interactive
map to indicate the area of interest (the query area). The query area is matched with the CO footprints
recorded in the metadata to retrieve relevant collection objects—that is, COs “about” the query area.
This means that the user can choose arbitrary query areas, not just geographic areas that have place
names. This also means that COs about the query area do not have to have the names associated
with them that the user enters for a text based query. For example, the user’s query might be of the
type “What do you know about the Santa Barbara area?” Which can be translated into a query area
for Santa Barbara, which can then be used to find COs with matching footprints.
This approach opens up the possibility of finding all types of information related to an area, including
aerial photographs, remote sensing images, data sets, and texts. Geographic footprints can be applied
to both on-line-accessible (e.g., digital images) and off-line-accessible (e.g., paper maps) COs, giving

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