California Digital Library Assignment 6: Interactive Prototype #1 HOW TO USE THE PROTOTYPE

PROTOTYPE SITE OVERVIEW

Our interactive prototype concentrates on clarifying the user's orientation into the CDL sources. We have created a working website of 10 pages -- 3 main pages and 7 placeholders that simply illustrate the overall proposed information architecture for the site. We have filled the main pages, Home, Select Sources, and Browse, with significant workable content to work through the scenarios. The Select Sources and Browse pages function directly with the live CDL website to retrieve Sources, source lists, and "more info" on sources. Consequently, these live CDL pages contain UI problems that are outside the scope of our interface redesign. This implementation choice presents some constraints to our design described in Notes below.

• Home of prototype
• Select Sources supported by CDL
• Browse through complete CDL Source collection

• User Guides explain in detail how to use the directories and services
• Site Map orients you to the CDL website
• About CDL offers more information about the library
• Help
• Services to create a Profile, Save Lists, Mail, Print, Download, Update, or Request
• What's New in the Collections hosted by CDL
• Feedback contact us with questions or comments about CDL

Please begin at the Home page of the prototype.

#1. You are a UC undergraduate student. You are using the California Digital Library for the first time. Rather than looking for a specific resource, you are browsing the system to determine what resources might be available related to your major, Art History. You are interested in both general Art History resources as well as in Renaissance Italian sculpture of the 16th century.

#2. You are a UC graduate student in the Genetics Department. You are looking for a specific journal article that a professor recommended. You don't remember the exact title or reference, but you know that the article was published within the past couple of months, is about mitochondria DNA in sea urchins, and is by somebody named Roberti. Please see if you can find this article.

#3. You are a faculty member in the History Department studying religious minorities in the 19th-century United States. You are currently working on a research paper about Jews in the American South during the Reconstruction period. It is important for you to stay up-to-date on related developments in your field, so you are using the CDL to look for recent related scholarly journal articles.
 

Notes:

We have linked the Select Sources form directly to the live CDL site, and therefore have had to make some concessions in our preferred UI design. For instance, as in our lo-fi prototype, we would have preferred to implement multiple choice selections for both Source Type and Topic, but the live CDL site only allows for radio button (single) selection at this time. Also, we would like to make a Keyword textbox available in combination with these two selection choices to allow for a more focused search, combining the search for Source Types by a particular Topic with a keyword search as well. However, the live CDL site does not allow for this.  The keyword search widget is in our prototype but is labeled not functional at this time. Had we had the opportunity to build databases on our own (for a more robust "Wizard of Oz" backend) we might have implemented this UI design without the crutch of the live CDL site. We felt there was more of a need for the user to understand the breadth of the Sources supported by CDL, and therefore have chosen to focus more on building the Browsing and general source selection page than the Select Sources "search" page.

Essentially the interface works without divine intervention. There are three caveats to this:

1. there are nonfunctional Source links from the Browse by Format page that don't pertain to our scenarios (as indicated by the open triangle)
2. the nonfunctional combination of Keyword search function with the radio buttons for Source Types and Topics (vs. checkboxes)
3. there is still a point at which a user will cross over from our redesigned interface into the live CDL site and encounter its existing limits and a vocabulary for sources and navigation that conflicts in some ways with ours