Usability Evaluation of a Research Repository and Collaboration Website for Human-Animal Bond Researchers
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Abstract
This paper describes an empirical usability evaluation of HABRI (Human-Animal Bond Research Initiative) Central as part of the effort to develop an open-access research repository and collaboration platform for human-animal bond researchers. By repurposing and altering key features of the original HUBzero system, HABRI Central hosts previously published materials from related disciplines and an extensive bibliography, in addition to traditional hub materials such as tools and datasets. It is expected that changes made in HABRI Central can be extended to other hubs with similar bibliographic functionality requirements.
Seven graduate students in the College of Veterinary Medicine at Purdue participated in the usability evaluation. They performed tasks including exploration of the system, finding an article in the repository, submitting an article to the repository, adding bibliographic information of an article to the repository, and using user groups and questions and answers. Participants also answered open questions regarding their overall experience and rated HABRI Central's usability using the System Usability Scale (SUS). Response measures included task successfulness, navigational steps, task time, participant comments and behavior notes recorded by the experimenter. The evaluation took about one hour for each participant.
Results of the evaluation showed that the overall user experience of HABRI Central is satisfactory, but the results also indicated a number of usability issues. Participants had difficulty in inputting metadata such as resource type and author information when submitting an article to the repository. Participant comments and experimenter notes during the article submission process indicated that the workflow could be further improved to reduce user confusion. There were also interface design issues regarding page layout and consistency. It is expected that findings from this study and the evaluation methodology can be extended to the development and evaluation of similar systems based on the HUBzero platform.
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