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

This paper aims to present 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.

An empirical experiment has been 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 is considered to be good for these kinds of measures allowing a good degree of control. Nevertheless, personal opinions are also very important and these are elicited by means of a post-experiment questionnaire.

The data were 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.

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 original, and if implemented widely, it would be very valuable to the mass digitization aims.