The Usability Study Of Information Architecture On Library Website

With the development and advance of the society,nowadays the Internet has permeated into everyone's daily life.Library is a commonplace for the gathering,communicating and disseminating of the knowledge and culture,and thus the library website becomes the platform for both the external information service and internal knowledge management.So far,it is the tendency of informationization that many public libraries and most university libraries have established their own websites.However,the quality of those websites is still a problem that we have to pay great attention to.The principal reason is that we lack the essential usability study during the information architecture of website. This thesis aims to probe into some of the usability problems when we conduct IA based on the perspective of the users.Information architecture is both an art and a science which endeavors to the organizing of information resource on the website.Usability study is a methodology focusing on the users' need and experience.Therefore,the usability study of the information architecture on the library website is to discover the usability problems in the course of IA based on the viewpoint of the users, and then take some research tools or methods to test and evaluate the function of the website in order to give some comments or suggestions to the practical work and construct a website with more "perceived usefulness" and "perceived easy of use". This thesis first describes and explains the research subject through the literature review and synthesis on both IA and usability study, especially the relationship between the two parts.The third chapter discusses the principle and methods of IA on the website of library,and then puts forward the theoretical model of the relationship between IA and usability study,including the conceptual-related model, logical-related model and structural-related model.The fourth chapter introduces the main research methods and tools of usability study, especially elaborates the usability evaluation methods applying to the websites.The fifth and sixth chapters carry out two empirical studies which refer to the websites' usability condition of IA,including the public library website and university library website because of their different research object,objective and scope.The fifth chapter adopts the online Delphi method and AHP to establish an evaluation index system to evaluate the status quo of Shanghai public library website.The sixth chapter adopts the on-the-spot usability testing method and scenario questionnaires to discover the usability problems and users' behavior molds in the library websites of Fudan University.The last chapter retrospects the main work and innovation of this thesis and puts forward some research aspects need to be further studied.