It was important to think about the sort of user who would be trying out the retrieval system. At the beginning of the project, the designers knew that ENQUIRE was to be evaluated at the London Business School (and used alongside the School's existing catalogue, based on the Tinlib OPAC). This could have led to the system being geared in a specific way to the business student, but there was also the requirement for it to be configurable, and thus capable of running in many environments. Later in the project it was decided that trials should also be run at City University using the INSPEC database, so that decision was fortuitous. The assumption was made that the two sets of users were sufficiently similar across domains, and that the environments in which they worked were also similar. ENQUIRE was eventually to run in three locations: a library catalogue area, a PC laboratory for PhD students, and several general-purpose Unix laboratories.
To aid the design process a user profile was identified, based partly on the team's experience in previous projects with similar user populations.
Two formative evaluation experiments with actual LBS users are described later in Chapter 4.