Within today’s technology industry, user experience (UX) is commonly acknowledged as an important driver for user adoption and engagement. However, when it comes to digital humanities, good UX has historically been lacking (Gibbs / Owens 2012), and the user is often ignored in the development process (Warwick 2012). While awareness has grown steadily over the past decade, there still exists a “reality gap” between theory and actual practice in DH tool development (Thoden et al. 2017). A recent systematic literature review delineates the myriad barriers in DH tool usage, many of which can be attributed to poor usability or interface design choices (Liu et al. 2021). It is evident that DH still has a long way to go in terms of UX, especially if the goal is to advance interest, and furthermore turning this interest into long-term user adoption and engagement. Engagement is not achieved through a single usability study or any one eye-catching feature. What is needed is applying a user-centered approach to the entirety of the development process — similar to how technology companies create their products. This poster will share some practical experiences from applying user-centered design in developing a historical digital collection, the Svoboda Diaries Project. We also look forward to sharing the project website with attendees at the poster session to gather additional feedback.

The Svoboda Diaries Project digitizes and makes available a collection of personal diaries and travel journals written by the Svoboda family in Baghdad in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This project works to preserve historical texts and images that capture over 40 years of life, politics, and landscape of Iraq under the Ottoman Empire. Considering that the subject matter is relatively under-studied, we wanted to create a resource which could be useful for as broad an audience as possible. From the outset, we had in mind a diverse selection of potential user personas such as researchers, teachers, students and the general public. To properly engage with such a wide range of users, we first needed to understand their different backgrounds, abilities, and needs, before building our DH tools accordingly — this is an approach known as “inclusive design” which can positively impact the overall UX (Kendrick 2022). As a gateway to the diaries, our project website offers more than just manuscripts and transcriptions; it also provides interactive features that enable users to explore the historical material through various dimensions such as time and geography.

The project does not stop after our initial web launch. Today, the Svoboda Diaries Project website is continuously developed using an iterative, user-centered design approach. Before any new feature goes into development, the team first conducts user research, from surveys to interview studies, validating if said feature can actually bring positive value to at least one user persona. Information architecture and user flows are taken into consideration to ensure the individual feature fits into the website’s overall content hierarchy while remaining intuitive to navigate. Only then are designs fully developed, first as low-fidelity wireframes and eventually high-fidelity prototypes. The finalized design is evaluated through usability testing before being fully implemented on the production website. After launch, follow-up studies are periodically conducted to evaluate user satisfaction and collect additional feedback, providing a research foundation for future iterations. Such an iterative process, based on user testing, has long been proven to yield the best usability results (Nielsen 1993). During the poster presentation, we plan to engage attendees in trialing our website as a demonstration of the user testing methodology.

Digital humanities still remains niche in Ottoman studies, so every project carries with it a greater transformative potential in bridging the digital gap within the discipline (Aladağ 2024). At the same time, DH projects should also strive to bridge the UX gap between scholarly software developers and end users. Beyond the most basic functionalities, creating a positive user experience is what increases the adoption and usage of tools. In doing so, user-centered design can help a digital humanities tool to engage a broader audience.