Abstract
The rise of the mobile era, and later of the multi-platform systems and ubiquitous
computing has brought the opportunity for people to have access to information from
anywhere, and also a lot of complex and interesting challenges to the way people manage
their information needs and practices, and the visualization of content. The quick pace at
which this area moves forward has allowed to create a great amount of systems that
nowadays assist all sorts of users in their affairs.
Nevertheless, academics and researchers currently keep struggling with daily
research and information-seeking related tasks, like keeping track of the version of
documents, managing large documentation repositories, tracing references to sources,
and searching for quotes in their bibliography, just to name a few. Plus, they claim to
often find themselves having the tools that assist them in this activities scattered in
different workspaces, which makes it harder for them to be productive in their work.
Even though there have been important advances in the field of Human-Computer
Interaction regarding multi-environment systems, and that there are already usability
good practices available for this, there is still a need for a tool that integrates all the
features that academics need to do their research job.
The purpose of this work was to develop and assess the usability of a multiplatform
design solution, following a User-Centered Design approach, that effectively
assists academics in the execution of their research tasks, and brings them closer to
accomplish their goals, in the long run. To achieve this purpose, a high fidelity prototype
was developed and subjected to a usability evaluation.
The results of the evaluation show that the solution was well received among the
participants, in general. Most participants said to have had a good experience when
interacting with it and stated that the approach contributed to improve the research
process of academics. The prototype evaluated fairly good in all the tested aspects of
usability, like attraction, transparency, efficiency, control, stimulation, as well as other
user experience aspects, like affinity, simplicity, connectivity, consistency, learnability
and security. Nevertheless, the solution was merely a first approximation and had also
several flaws, that were systematically recorded and reported in a usability issues list, at
the time of the evaluation results analysis, that served as a great input, later on, to put
together a list of recommendations to be implemented in future design iterations.
