Project Sunflower

Project Sunflower aims to perform hardware landscaping on various eBook readers currently available in the market. The aim is to understand various factors that affect and influence the rendering of the ePub format on the different eBook readers. The studies conducted during the course of the project will help us better understand the current situation of the eBook reader capabilities in terms of the ePub format and also give insight into probable recommendations, if any that may help us enhance the usability and effectiveness of the eBook readers as well as the eBook medium as a whole.

Approach

The project is divided into three areas of work in order to realise the main objective:

• Documentation of installation, usage and software integration for each of the chosen candidate systems.
• The activities to be performed during this phase are review and analysis of factors such as:
  • Software features of each device through practical testing to help evaluate usability and ‘learnability’ of the device features.
  • User impression of device speed and responsiveness
  • User reading speed on each device
  • User satisfaction with the device
  • Impact of choice of platform on user recall of the information read
• Evaluate device ergonomics

Final Outcome

The final results obtained from the study will be put together into a comprehensive document with findings and suitable recommendations in the form of a usabillity study report.
As a secondary result, we will also be detailing the methodology used in order to conduct each study (for example, method used to monitor muscoskeletal stresses).