There are two main kinds of approach to considering usability of any system: empirical and analytical. Empirical techniques involve testing systems with users, whereas analytical techniques involve usability personnel assessing systems using established theories and methods. We report here on a set of studies in which four different techniques were applied to various digital libraries, focusing on the strengths, limitations and scope of each approach. Two of the techniques, Heuristic Evaluation and Cognitive Walkthrough, were applied in text-book fashion, because there was no obvious way to contextualize them to the Digital Libraries (DL) domain. For the third, Claims Analysis, it was possible to develop a set of re-usable scenarios and personas that relate the approach specifically to DL development. The fourth technique, CASSM, relates explicitly to the DL domain by combining empirical data with an analytical approach. We have found that Heuristic Evaluation and Cognitive Walkthrough only address superficial aspects of interface design (but are good for that), whereas Claims Analysis and CASSM can help identify deeper conceptual difficulties (but demand greater skill of the analyst). However, none fit seamlessly with existing digital library development practices, highlighting an important area for further work to support improved usability.

This paper reports on a study of evaluating and generating requirements for the user interface of a digital library. The study involved observation of librarians using the digital library, working on information finding problems on behalf of clients of the library. The study showed that librarians, familiar with the particular digital library system and with information retrieval work in general, possess a repertoire of relatively simple, yet effective, strategies for carrying out searches, and that nonlibrarians tend not to deploy the same strategies. After describing the study and the most commonly observed strategies, this paper makes some suggestions for how an understanding of how the librarians organise their activities may generate design ideas for user interfaces that aid 'ordinary' users in making use of the strategies that help librarians to be effective users.

One of the long-standing challenges in HCI has been the integration of usability evaluation methods within design practice. In the work reported here, we investigated the question of how to include user concerns within an unstructured, system-focused development process.The project investigated the use of Claims Analysis as a method for assessing the effects of design decisions on users' experience. Claims Analysis was found to be more difficult than expected to learn, to communicate to systems developers and to apply effectively in practice.The work has highlighted a tension between user-centred and function-oriented design approaches, and differences in values and perspectives between the human factors specialists and traditional developers involved in the study.

Over the last twenty to twenty-five years 'Design for All' principles and practices including Assistive Technologies have been collected into formal and informal courses which have been used to train designers of Information and Communication products and systems. The aim of this paper is to describe the relevant changes occurring in training and education in the design and use of technology. The development of courses and materials has been supported by a number of EU funded initiatives including HEART, DAN, IDCnet and Design for All@eInclusion. In addition there have been individual responses to the demands for training courses in higher education and we include five case studies from around Europe: Greece, Austria, Czech Republic, Norway and UK. These show what can be achieved and act as beacons for continuing progress. EU and national initiatives to support digital inclusion are trying to address the needs of all those who are subject to social disadvantage as a consequence of age and disability as well as other factors such as low educational achievement, poverty and living in remote rural areas. Applying Design for All principles offers the opportunity of designing systems that are better matched to the existing needs of those who are technologically disadvantaged. However progress towards developing more specialist courses or more fully integrated Design for All principles in mainstream technology courses remains slow. The latest initiatives include the development of a curriculum for professional training and this offers an important alternative educational route, adding knowledge of Design for All to those with established technical skills.

In recent years, there has been great interest in scenario-based design and other forms of user-centred design. However, there are many design processes that, often for good reason, remain technology-centred. We present a case study of introducing scenarios into two digital library development processes. This was found to disrupt established patterns of working and to bring together conflicting value systems. In particular, the human factors approach of identifying users and anticipating what they are likely to do with a system (and what problems they might encounter) did not sit well with a development culture in which the rapid generation and informal evaluation of possible solutions (that are technically feasible and compatible with stable system components) is the norm. We found that developers tended to think in terms of two kinds of user: one who was exploring the system with no particular goal in mind and one who knew as much as the developer; scenarios typically work with richer user descriptions that challenge that thinking. In addition, the development practice of breaking down the design problem into discrete functions to make it manageable does not fit well with a scenario-based approach to thinking about user behaviour and interactions. The compromise reached was scenario-informed design, whereby scenarios were generated to support reasoning about the use of selected functions within the system. These scenarios helped create productive common ground between perspectives.