STRUCTURAL USABILITY MATURITY IN NATIONAL ACADEMIC DIGITAL LIBRARIES: A HIGH-RESOLUTION HEURISTIC EVALUATION OF THE HEC DIGITAL LIBRARY OF PAKISTAN

Abstract

National digital libraries are important socio-technical infrastructures of modern research ecosystems, interpreting access to scholarly communication and determining the size of institutional research possibilities. Although the freedom to license and integrate the back-end technologies used is heavily compromised, the structural usability maturity of the national academic platforms has not been explored well, especially within the context of developing environments of higher learning. In this work, a high-resolution heuristic analysis of the Higher Education Commission (HEC) Digital Library of Pakistan is provided based on a systematic inspection model consisting of 247 checkpoints of usability on nine dimensions, which are theoretically based. Among them, 184 checkpoints could be applied to the assessed system components.

Using a tri-level compliance model (Pass =1, Neutral =0, Fail =-1) with normalized aggregation, the platform had the largest composite usability score of 71.7%, which is considered moderate-to-high usability maturity. But when analyzed disaggregated, there is a high level of architectural asymmetry between the front-facing discoverability dimensions (Home Page: 36.8%; Task Orientation: 53.1%; Navigation and Information Architecture: 54.2%), and the back-end/support-oriented dimensions (Search: 100%; Help and Feedback: 96.6%; Visual Design: 92.6%; Writing and Content Quality: 85.7%). A two-proportion z-test with two proportions proves that there is a statistically significant difference between layers of 43.7 percentage points (z =6.57, p < 0.000001), with a very large effect size (Cohen’s h =1.03).

The results indicate that institutional digital infrastructures could focus on the robustness of the back-end and the content provisioning and invest a relative amount in the entry-point orientation, predictability of the navigation and credibility cues. This research integrates high-granularity checking with inferential validation to provide a replicable framework of large-scale academic usability audit and propel a structural viewpoint regarding usability maturity within research platforms on a national level. The findings have strategic consequences to digital infrastructure management especially within resource-limited higher-education systems.