A Mock-up for the Development of a Digital Edition for Ancient Greek Fragmentary Poetry: Results of Its Evaluation

Abstract

Ancient Greek poetry is an essential part of the western cultural heritage; thus, it is important that people have access to its texts and whatever relates to their understanding in a reliable and easy way. Whenever user evaluation is concerned, mock-ups are used by designers to acquire feedback from users. A mock-up is defined as a model of the final product, and may be used for demonstration, evaluation and other purposes. The authors prototyped a mock-up for focusing on the requirements of a scholarly digital edition of Archilochus. This was put under evaluation to assess its usability: it was submitted to extensive use and testing by a sample of prospective users, to better focus on the requirements from a product's perspective. Experimentation involved a group of university students, attending a Greek Philology course at Parma University. More than half of the respondents considered the mock-up a useful study support. The evaluation also pointed out that the mock-up had to be revised, so as to guarantee better cognitive simplicity of the user interface.