Universal Access for Any User, in Many Languages, on Any Platform:
The OCLC FirstSearch User Interface Architecture

Gary Perlman, OCLC Online Computer Library Center
Dublin, Ohio, 43017 USA

Abstract

The OCLC FirstSearch service allows users to search for bibliographic and full text records in over 80 online databases. Web-based, FirstSearch was designed to adapt to unexpected user needs, platform considerations, languages, and changing requirements. The many unknowns during development necessitated an architecture that would allow many types of contributors to modify the interface easily and frequently. For example, marketing, documentation, and user interface designers edited the strings used in the interface, including translation; and user interface and graphic designers edited the screen layout. Structured initialization files with a simple convention for adapting to specific users, platforms, languages, etc., allowed continual broadening of the accessibility of the system without complicating the overall architecture.

The presentation begins with a discussion of the general requirements for FirstSearch (multi-platform, multi-lingual, levels of users, low-end hardware, accessible) and the need for better coordination of contributions from the FirstSearch team. The architecture is then described, which partitions the specification of the interface into platform-specific, language-specific, and language/platform independent functional components. The user interface, in the form of Web pages, is then generated dynamically (although it would also be possible to generate static pages). The presentation ends with a discussion of experiences with the changes to the interface and a cost-benefit analysis of the architecture, with the overall conclusion that addressing many accessibility issues in the architecture facilitated individual accessibility issues.

This work was presented to the ACM Conference on Universal Usability, November 16-17, 2000, Arlington, Virginia, USA. (PDF)

Biography

Gary Perlman was born and raised in Montreal. Dr. Perlman's Ph.D. is in experimental psychology from the University of California, San Diego. In additional to over 20 years of consulting in information technology, he has held research and academic positions at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, Wang Institute of Graduate Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie-Mellon University, Ohio State University, and at the OCLC Online Computer Library Center, where he is a consulting research scientist and is primarily responsible for the the OCLC FirstSearch user interface. His research interests are in making information technology more useful and usable for people. He is the author of over 75 journal and conference articles. He is best known in the HCI community as the director of the HCI Bibliography, http://www.hcibib.org/, a free-access online resource of over 20,000 records searched hundreds of thousands of times each year.