One out of three respondents were women and seven out of ten
were between thirty and fifty years of age. All the participants said
they had either a good, very good or expert technical knowledge
of computers in approximately equal proportions. In line with this,
seven out of ten of the participants use web browsers several times
a day.
The attitude of the participants to the new features found on
the websites was positive: they like to find new features sometimes
(56.82%) or often (15.91%). Other answers were: no opinion
(18.18%), and rarely (4.55%). In contrast, almost half of the participants
said they were happy (45.45%) with the information tools
and interfaces they use. Finally, more than half of the participants
(56.41%) have published scientific papers, and three out of four read
scientific papers on quite a regular basis.
We asked participants to compare several tasks completed with
the journal’s existing interface, on the one hand, and with Area’s
interface, on the other. To answer the questions we encouraged
participants to visit both sites and to familiarize themselves with
their interfaces before they started to complete the questionnaire.
For all seven tasks, users preferred the new interface. In six out
of the seven, participants preferred Area for solving the proposed
tasks in 80% of cases.