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Hardware design On-screen design Next Bibliography Index Guideline 22 Guideline 21 Guideline 20 Guideline 19 Guideline 18 Guideline 17 Guideline 16 Guideline 15 Guideline 14 Guideline 13 Guideline 12 Guideline 11 Guideline 10 Guideline 9 Guideline 8 Guideline 7 Guideline 6 Guideline 5 Guideline 4 Guideline 3 Guideline 2 Guideline 1 Introduction Table of contents Previous On-screen design Hardware design Next page Bibliography Index Guideline 20 Guideline 19 Guideline 18 Guideline 17 Guideline 16 Guideline 15 Guideline 14 Guideline 13 Guideline 12 Guideline 11 Guideline 10 Guideline 9 Guideline 8 Guideline 7 Guideline 6 Guideline 5 Guideline 4 Guideline 3 Guideline 2 Guideline 1 Introduction Table of contents Previous page

Scope and purpose
Evaluations
Arrangement of the guidelines

Scope and purpose
The need for best practice guidelines for the design of electronic textbooks arose from the growing availability of learning and teaching material for Higher Education in electronic format, to which students are increasingly turning as a first port of call when seeking material to support their studies. With initiatives such as the National Grid for Learning and The People's Network improving the flow of online material, it is timely to pay attention to the internal design of the resources themselves so that, once accessed, the required data can be retrieved as quickly and easily as possible.

Several other sets of guidelines exist for designing electronic resources (e.g. Jakob Nielsen's Designing Web Usability and Peter Muller's Writing Hypertext Books). EBONI's Electronic Textbook Design Guidelines, however, provide advice on preparing material for a specific audience of academics and students in Higher Education, and incorporate this audience's special requirements. As such, they are of use to:

Writers and publishers of scholarly digital information
Lecturers in HE
Information professionals
Agencies which invest in the creation of scholarly digital resources
Electronic book hardware and software developers
Projects and services involved in the digitisation of learning and teaching resources

The on-screen design guidelines are primarily intended to be applied to books published on the Web, but the principles will be relevant to ebooks of all descriptions and, in certain cases (e.g. Guideline 16: Provide bookmarking, highlighting and annotating functions), it is possible that only commercial ebook software companies will have the resources to comply at their disposal. They simply reflect the results of our user evaluations, and it is recognised that they will be implemented at different levels by different content developers.

It is important to note that the guidelines are not intended to establish a strict uniformity of interface for all electronic learning and teaching resources, but rather to encourage use of those styles and techniques which are most successful in terms of usability.

It should also be emphasised that this version of the guidelines is a draft and does not include feedback from the later stages of the project. A revised set will be produced incorporating these data as well as feedback from creators of digital content on various aspects of the guidelines.

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Evaluations
The guidelines have been formed as a result of extensive evaluations of electronic books involving around 100 students, lecturers and researchers from a range of disciplines in UK Higher Education. These include:

The WEB Book experiment, which focused on the impact of appearance on the usability of textbooks on the Web. Two electronic versions of the same chapter, one in a very plain scrolling format, the other made more "scannable" according to John Morkes and Jakob Nielsen's Web design guidelines, were selected as the material for evaluation, and the scannable text proved to be 92% more usable.

An evaluation of three textbooks in psychology, all of which have been published on the Internet by their authors and are available free of charge. These textbooks differ markedly in their appearance, and the study aimed to find which styles and techniques are most effective in enabling students to find the information they require, and to record students' subjective satisfaction with each book.

An evaluation of Hypertext in Context by Cliff McKnight, Andrew Dillon and John Richardson. This textbook was compared in three formats: print, the original electronic version on the Web, and a second electronic version, revised according to Morkes and Nielsen's scannability guidelines. Experiment conducted by Joan Dunn.

A comparison of three electronic encyclopaedias: Encyclopaedia Britannica, The Columbia Encyclopaedia and Encarta. Experiment conducted by Julie Shortreed.

A comparison of a title in geography (New Frontiers of Space, Bodies and Gender by Rosa Ainley) which is available in three electronic formats: MobiPocket Reader, Adobe Acrobat Ebook Reader and Microsoft Reader.

A study into usability issues surrounding portable electronic books. Five devices were evaluated by lecturers and researchers with the aim of determining which physical design elements enhance and which detract from the experience of reading or consulting an electronic book.

A specially developed "Ebook Evaluation Model" was implemented in varying degrees by each of these experiments, ensuring that all results could be compared at some level. This methodology comprised various options for selecting material and participants and described the different tasks and evaluation techniques which can be employed in an experiment. These ranged from simple retrieval tasks measuring the participants' ability to find information in the material to "high cognitive skill" tasks set by lecturers to measure the participants' understanding of concepts in the texts, and from Web-based questionnaires measuring subjective satisfaction to one-to-one interviews with participants discussing elements of interacting with the test material in detail.

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Arrangement of the guidelines
EBONI's Electronic Textbook Design Guidelines address two main factors affecting ebook interface design:

The on-screen appearance of information
The look and feel of ebook hardware

The first fifteen guidelines focus on on-screen design issues, while the remainder advise on hardware design. Each guideline has a number, a title, a brief description, a list of checkpoints with which developers of digital textbooks should comply in order to maximise the usability of their content for the HE community, and examples are included to illustrate aspects of good practice.

Where appropriate, the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are referred to. Developers of online content should comply with these to ensure material is available to the widest possible audience, and should also refer to the following publications:

The W3C User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0
The W3C HTML 4.0 Guidelines for Mobile Access (work in progress)
DAISY Digital Talking Book 2.02 Specification
The Open eBook Forum Publication Structure 1.0.1

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