Hi,
>From the usability studies, and like Andrea says, from what repository users
in the dspace-general mailing list, submitters have some problems that might
be easily fixable. A few that I've heard and seen are:
- does the user know what collection they are submitting to
- can they find the item they just submitted
- do they have to delete everything in an entry to change an author's
name while still preserving the order of authors
- do all the checkboxes and radio bubbles make sense as to what they do?
- When the admin creates a new community or collection, where should
"return" take them to.
- does the admin have to go to the command line to change the form
fields, which is what Mark Diggory was talking about with Configuration
Service.
For help on some of these questions, it will be best to address the
repository admins to get their opinions. It might be worth considering the
way that Ubuntu has managed their usability improvement initiative "100
Paper Cuts <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PaperCut>", to remove the 100 most
annoying oddities of the system.
For the GSoC, since XMLUI is the de-facto interface for DSpace, a
requirement of this project is that the improvements are made to the XMLUI
user interface. Additional submission improvements and general usability
improvements can be done to JSPUI, and even WebMVC/Freemarker.
Peter Dietz
On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 7:44 PM, Andrea Schweer <schw...@waikato.ac.nz>wrote:
> Hi Tim,
>
> thanks for your comments.
>
> On 06/04/11 02:53, Tim Donohue wrote:
> > On 4/4/2011 11:39 PM, Andrea Schweer wrote: Andrea gave you some
> > ideas of places to potentially get started. Though, I'll admit, the
> > idea of making the submission process configurable via the Web
> > Interface is potentially a bit complex (i.e. it's likely out-of-scope
> > for this particular GSoC project). For background on the
> > complexities, see discussion here:
> >
> https://wiki.duraspace.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=23268096&focusedCommentId=25068048#comment-25068048
> >
> > So, a part of me feels that this particular GSoC project would need
> > to be more tightly scoped to Improving UI Usability (or Accessibility
> > or both). It would likely need to avoid digging into deeper issues
> > of reworking the entire underlying workflow logic, as that could be
> > a rather large project in itself. However, that being said, if we
> > found a DSpace committer/mentor interested in mentoring that larger
> > 'underlying logic' project, we could likely pull together a separate
> > GSoC project which could *begin* that refactoring work (If any
> > committer is interested in this, please get in touch!). But, I feel
> > that's a separate GSoC project altogether, and shouldn't be combined
> > with improvements to UI Usability or Accessibility.
>
> Ok, sounds good to me -- I haven't mentored GSoC projects before and so
> I'm not entirely sure about what's realistically achievable in one.
>
> > As you may be able to tell, this "Improve Submitter User Experience"
> > project idea is less "defined" than some of the others, as it came
> > up during discussions just last week. However, we do have some
> > institutions (namely Ohio State University) which have done some
> > recent usability studies on the Submission User Interface, who may be
> > able to help us better define what areas of the UI may require extra
> > work.
>
> In addition to the usability studies, it may also be worthwhile to ask
> dspace repository managers (eg via the dspace-general mailing list) what
> issues they encounter frequently, or to go through the dspace mailing
> list archives and look for e-mails that indicate usability issues with
> the submission UI (eg a very recent e-mail to dspace-tech:
> http://web.archiveorange.com/archive/v/hxciqKvsiLQklYim436e).
>
> Problems I've heard about from the repository managers I work with are
> actually quite basic usability issues:
> - You're only told when you try to go to the next step that you didn't
> fill in a required field
> - There is no feedback while files are being uploaded -- this can cause
> problems when the submitter is on a slow network connection and/or the
> files are large
> - The "initial questions" step could be handled in the "Describe" step
> instead
> - It's currently not possible to re-order eg subject keywords without
> removing and re-adding them.
>
> Thinking about the user experience a bit more broadly, there are
> additional improvements that could be made (probably implemented as
> custom Steps):
> - Don't require the submitter to type in information that already exists
> electronically -- pull the metadata from elsewhere (citeulike, crossref
> doi lookup, bibtex upload...) and then just let the submitter confirm it
> - Try to ensure high-quality, consistent metadata values. For some
> fields, this can already be done using authority control; other fields
> (eg subject keywords) could probably do with some help. This could be an
> integration with Discovery to autocomplete keywords that are already in
> the system and/or auto-suggested keywords via keyphrase extraction.
>
> cheers,
> Andrea
>
> --
> Andrea Schweer
> IRR Technical Specialist, ITS Information Systems
> The University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand
>
>
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