Usability test of the EHRI portal

Usability test of the EHRI portal
Thursday, 28 April, 2016

Image: Usability test of the EHRI Portal

In May a report on a first usability and user experience evaluation of the EHRI portal will be published on the EHRI project website on the deliverables page. The EHRI portal was first launched in March 2015.

Access points

The EHRI portal offers access to information on Holocaust-related archival material held in institutions across Europe and beyond.

The three main access points are:

  • The Country Reports. EHRI country reports provide an overview of the Second World War and Holocaust history as well as of the archival situation in the covered countries.
  • The Archival Institutions. An inventory of archival institutions that hold Holocaust-related material.
  • The Archival Descriptions. Electronic descriptions and finding aids of Holocaust-related archival material.

User-friendly experience

EHRI brings together several groups of users, including Holocaust researchers, digital humanists and archivists. The cooperation between these communities in the first phase of EHRI led to new impulses in Holocaust research. To ensure a consistent user-friendly experience for the various user groups, the EHRI Portal will undergo two usability assessments. The first usability test took place in January 2016. The second evaluation will be conducted in the second half of the project to assess newly integrated services.

Happy User

For the first usability test, EHRI joined forces with the company Happy User, a company specialised in user testing of websites. EHRI and Happy User jointly developed a test scenario and 8 users (4 Holocaust researchers, 2 archivists/collection specialists and 2 digital humanists), selected from the EHRI User Feedback Group, kindly agreed to work their way through these scenarios and provide us with detailed feedback.

Recommendations

The report of the usability test includes both the results of the test concerning the usability and user experience of the portal, as well as recommendations for improving the interface. Apart from the result that the EHRI portal and access to (information about) Holocaust archives is much appreciated by the users, the main suggestions were:

  • Allow advanced searches in a user friendly way and offer better ways to limit search results.
  • Use “and” rather than “or” as the default search operator so that the portal search engine mimics Google search.
  • Use icons or symbols to help the user find his or her way on the portal (in order to avoid too lengthy chunks of text or too many different language versions)
  • Optimize the lay-out of the pages and present all the information in a more user-friendly way.
  • Include EHRI’s full name and a clear link with extra information on the welcome page as well as information on the portal (now hidden under “help”, FAQs)

These and similar recommendations will be fed into EHRI’s work: over the coming weeks, we will prioritise the recommendations and plan their implementation. Ultimately, this work will result in an improved and enhanced Portal.