A new user interface for a text proofreading web portal in a digitization and crowdsourcing context

Abstract

Purpose: This paper presents a new user interface design for text proofreading portals in a digitization and crowdsourcing context. Several of the current proofreading portals lack usability in their user interfaces. The aim of the new design is to increase user performance and satisfaction. Approach: An empirical experiment was conducted to evaluate the new user interface as a comparison with 18thConnect – TypeWright proofreading portal. Two of the main measures involved times and errors and this approach was considered to be good for these kinds of measures allowing a good degree of control. Nevertheless, personal opinions were also very important and these were elicited by means of a post-experiment questionnaire. Findings: The data was statistically analysed and overall the new user interface helped users to perform better in terms of task time. Errors were also better with the new user interface, but the differences were not statistically significant. Furthermore, users were more satisfied with the new user interface. User satisfaction measures were mostly statistically significant. Originality: As far as has been ascertained, there have been no systematic studies evaluating a new design with an existing design of a proofreading portal. Therefore, this research is considered to be very original and if implemented widely would be very valuable to the mass digitization aims.