• What is EASy-D?
• What can I do with EASy-D?
• What's EASy-D's current state of development?
• I think there is an error in the EASY-D interface. What can I do?
• How can I contribute to this interesting project?
• How is EASy-D related to human-computer interaction and usability?
• What about evaluations and usability in general?

EASy-D is a literature database. It contains studies that are concerned with the evaluation of adaptive systems. The most interesting feature in comparison to a usual database is that it is tailored for these kind of evaluation studies, i.e., you may search for certain experimental designs, criteria, system types, etc.

EASy-D is designed to support two groups of people

• researchers who plan to evaluate their own system may identify related studies that could help to find useful experimental design, to find adequate criteria, or to avoid pitfalls
• researchers, developers, programmers, and users who are interested in adaptive systems, but don't know whether adaptivity is useful for their product or domain will find hints to systems and studies that might be related.

EASy-D started in August 2001. It currently contains 7 studies and 5 evaluated systems. Due to a hard disk crash about 35 more studies were lost and need to be restored (sorry...). Thus, there is currently only a small number of systems and studies, but we hope that the database will soon grow if other researchers submit their studies through EASy-D's online form.

The system has not been tested at large yet, thus it's very likely that you really found a bug. Please report it to the admin. If you are the person who submitted this record, you can update the entry by clicking on the update link at the end of the record. In this case a password is required which was sent to you by email. If you found an error, but you don't have a password, sent an email to the admin, and the changes will soon be included. We do our best to keep the quality of the records high, but we are not perfect. Please help us to provide high quality data to the community.

Everybody is invited to submit studies to this database either your own or studies that you think might be useful for others. There are only two preconditions:

• there must be a published study as reference. In some cases even a technical report might be sufficient if it is available in any way (e.g., email request) to the public.
• the study must evaluate one or more adaptive systems.

Certainly many evaluations of adaptive systems cover usability issues and most of them include human-computer interaction (HCI), as adaptive systems are interactive systems. However, EASy-D is not an usability evaluation database. This database contains studies that evaluate adaptive systems only. The database includes no study that evaluates a non-adaptive system. For those who are looking for HCI stuff we compiled a small collection of usability resources (see next question).

We compiled some links to usability resources that might be helpful.

• Similar to Easy-D, Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines sums up the current research evidence by listing many guidelines and citing experiments that support these guidelines. Very useful for web designers.
• Search the huge HCI Bibliography and find lots of other useful HCI information there.
• An overview of usability resources is provided by usability first.
• Even nuclear launch websites need usability.
• Here is a good example of useful design: At the door of my neighbour's flat next to my door there are two buttons: a switch for the light and a bell. The interesting thing about this device is, that the bell gleams in the dark. Guess, how often my neighbour wakes up in the middle of the night, because people came in from the street and were looking for the light switch in the dark stairway ...