Problems of subject access: (ii) user studies and interface design

A research project in progress at Middlesex Polytechnic is examining the problems of subject access in an online public access catalogue. A series of user studies have been carried out which examined students' use of existing catalogue facilities, which in turn led to the experimental evaluation of various interface designs for an online catalogue. The experiments were primarily concerned with the effect of the following variables on the speed and accuracy of retrieval of specific items, the use of colour, the speed of presentation of information, the amount of information on a screen, the paging and scrolling of information, the position of a sought item within a list.