Background/Context: Parents are important consumers of educational information, especially with stipulations in ESSA. Yet, research on parental information needs is limited. It is important to understand how the information is displayed for parents in accessible and understandable ways. This study uses a theoretical perspective of parental…

The extensification activities of Education Informatics Network use in Turkey are in progress. The use and preferability of this education portal by teachers and students depend on various factors. One of these factors is usability. The purpose of this research is to make the usability analysis of the Education Informatics Network from the…

While the influence of presentation formats have been widely studied in Bayesian reasoning tasks, we present the first systematic investigation of how presentation formats influence information search decisions. Four experiments were conducted across different probabilistic environments, where subjects (N = 2,858) chose between 2 possible search…

The success of an application programming interface (API) crucially depends on how well its documentation meets the information needs of software developers. Previous research suggests that these information needs have not been sufficiently understood. This article presents the results of a series of semistructured interviews and a follow-up…

A "user interface" is the part of an interactive system that bridges the user and the underlying functionality of the system. But people sometimes forget that the best interfaces will provide a platform to optimize the users' interactions so that they support and extend the users' activities in effective, useful, and usable ways. To look at it…

With the increasing role that software systems play in our daily lives, software quality has become extremely important. Software quality is impacted by the efficiency of the software testing process. There are a growing number of software testing methodologies, models, and initiatives to satisfy the need to improve software quality. The main…

This paper reports on a guided navigation system built on the textbook search engine developed at Anadolu University to support distance education students. The search engine uses Turkish Language specific language processing modules to enable searches over course material presented in Open Education Faculty textbooks. We implemented a guided…

Many organizations have evolved since their early attempts to mount digital exhibits on the Web and are experimenting with ways to increase the scale of their digitized collections by utilizing archival finding aid description rather than resource-intensive collections and exhibits. This article examines usability research to predict how such…

Discovery tools are the next phase of library search systems. Illinois State University's Milner Library implemented EBSCO Discovery Service in August 2010. The authors conducted usability studies on the system in the fall of 2010. The aims of the study were twofold: first, to determine how Milner users set about using the system in order to…

Searching for relevant information on the web is an important aspect of distance learning. This activity is a challenge for visually impaired distance learners. While sighted people have the ability to filter information in a fast and non sequential way, blind persons rely on tools that process the information in a sequential way. Learning is…

Digital educational games (DEGs) possess the potential of providing an appealing and intrinsically motivating learning context. Usually this potential is either taken for granted or examined through questionnaires or interviews in the course of evaluation studies. However, an "adaptive" game would increase the probability of a DEG being…

The purpose of this thesis is to improve our understanding of sensemaking process as a basis for building better systems to assist sensemaking. Sensemaking is the task of creating an understanding of a problem or task so that further actions may be taken in an informed manner. Sensemaking is a pre-requisite for many other tasks such as decision…

"Social Navigation" for the Web has been created as a response to the problem of disorientation in information space. It helps by visualizing traces of behavior of other users and adding social affordance to the information space. Despite the popularity of social navigation ideas, very few studies of social navigation systems can be found in the…

Discussion of information retrieval and information seeking behavior focuses on a multi-dimensional conceptual model called MISE (multiple information-seeking episodes). Identifies eight different reasons why people engage in multiple information-seeking episodes, characterizes them in terms of traits of Multiple Information Seeking Episode…

Browsing tools have been developed to help users make effective use of the large amounts of information in hypermedia applications, aiding the user both in orientation (Where am I in the collection of information contained in the hypermedia application?) and in navigation (How do I get to another specific piece of information?). There are few…