Additional information 

Expanding to Serve a broad and diverse user community

One of the avenues for future development lies in expanding the variety of COTS software authoring platforms that are integrated into this effort. The promise here is that leading COTS software developers are working to keep their software up-to-date and encourage and support large user communities. This means that we can leverage their efforts by expanding the capabilities of their software to bring data resources to NSDL users. Already we have opened up conversations with the Math Works to bring MATLAB capabilities to the Foundry. And we are looking to add connections to the Map Server capabilities created at the University of Minnesota.

A new IDEA for the Foundry

The Foundry has begun the process that could lead to the inclusion of new usability testing for Foundry projects and applications. IDEA Online allows website and application developers to receive expert feedback on usability issues with their designs. The technology provides heuristic evaluations at any stage in the development of a website or application. An heuristic evaluation is a formal review of an interface (or interface design document) that is conducted by a group of trained experts in the field of usability engineering. Each expert reviews the interface separately, makes a report, and provides that report to the designer. The reports compare the design to a set of known design principles, or heuristics. Heuristic evaluations can be performed on web site designs, software interface designs, print publications, and almost any other product.
This type of evaluation is most effective if it is conducted by a group of trained experts. Nielsen (1993) reports that a single evaluator will find only 35% of the usability problems in any given interface. Five evaluators, however, will find about 75% of the issues. Twelve or more evaluators will find about 80-90% of the problems. This suggests that the ideal group size for one evaluation is between five and twelve people. Since heuristic evaluation depends upon the evaluator's knowledge of design principles, as well as how to tell if they have been applied, it is best if this type of evaluation is done by someone who has training and/or experience.
IDEA Online combines the reviews of several evaluators to bring the power of multiple reviews to the assessment of an application's usability. IDEA Online uses best-practice patterns developed by Jakob Nielsen and his useit.com effort. The IDEA Online tool has been successfully implemented at a beta-version stage for testing within the California State University system. The task now is to finalize the design and build new capacities to scale up to the NSDL community. The work to accomplish this goal includes additional coding to the IDEA Online Internet tool for NSDL use and ongoing server-side management of this resource.
This work will be accomplished by Foundry partners at the CDL and CSU San Marcos. These partners will also lead workshops at the NSDL all-project meetings and other meetings that will allow all NSDL projects to receive value from and contribute to this best-practices effort. Please note that these usability assessment tools are not limited to applications developed within the Foundry, but will be made available for interactive applications and web resources developed by all NSDL projects.