Search

In this paper, we describe a comparative user evaluation of two multilingual thesaurus-enhanced visual user interfaces, namely T-Saurus and Searchling, developed for digital libraries. The study used 25 academic users carrying out three search tasks on both user interfaces to the UNESCO digital portal, holding 400,000 documents. It applied usability and affordance strength questionnaires, interviews, thinkalouds, and direct observation to investigate users' evaluation of the key components of both user interfaces, namely multilingual features and thesaurus and search functions. The empirical data gathered will be useful for designers of search interfaces that use thesaurus and multilingual features. Results of the study show that users were able to successfully carry out the search tasks using thesaurus-enhanced search interfaces. However, they preferred Searchling for its flexible language option, thesaurus browsing and visualization.