In current practice of software development for digital humanities (DH) applications, the consideration of an application’s usability as a major factor for user acceptance can still not be taken for granted (Thoden et al. 2017), (Lehenmeier / Burghardt 2019). However, particularly for projects that focus on data collection in some field, not only the initial project success, but also the longer-term dissemination of project results as well as continuous scientific cooperation based on a project’s outcome will depend on the accessibility of data collections to domain experts beyond the actual project participants. This lets usability appear to be a relevant curation aspect with regard to the collected data.

See the overview in Zuiderwijk et al. (2020), which mentions poor usability of “complex user interfaces” for querying as an inhibitor of data reuse.

Our contribution will report on ongoing development of a web-based software platform for collecting and analysing bio-bibliographical data for literary studies on GDR authors,

See http://www.ddr-literatur.de/ for further details. The project is funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), grant number 419244741. The authors would like to thank their project partners from Humboldt University of Berlin and the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, who participated in the user interviews underlying the work presented here.

Starting with interviews for finding out the German literature domain experts’ information needs, overall technical affinity and experience with query interfaces, and considering their design preferences known from cooperation within the project, the design of the editor basically adheres to a form-based, rather than an icon-based or diagram-based approach (see Catarci et al. 1997; Lloret-Gazo 2016 for this distinction). As the figure below shows, it uses embedded structures for expressing conditions on entities that involve relations to other entities,

The underlying abstract query representation allows the usage of variables for coindexation of entities and is, hence, more expressive than a mere tree structure. Integration and end user tests of this advanced feature will be done at a later stage of the project, though.

Representation of a query retrieving birth events for female persons who have regularly completed an education in Berlin. In a similar way, the projection of the query, which specifies which attributes of the selected entities shall actually be included in the query result, can be formulated. For this example, the projection could include, e.g., the names of the persons, the dates and places of birth and the types and periods of the retrieved education events.

Following Jakob Nielsen’s 5-users-rule for usability testing (Nielsen 2000)

See, e.g., Faulkner (2003) for an investigation of the limitations of this principle.

Given the objective to make the platform available to external domain experts, the findings from the tests show, on the one hand, that future versions of the editor should improve access for users unfamiliar with the domain model.

This could be achieved, e.g., by interactive tutorials, which could apply proposals for knowledge transfer based on “example-driven modelling” (Bak et al. 2013) to the case of query formulation.