How to interpret data from usability evaluations?

User-centred design ensures access and usability evaluations are best practise method to achieve this goal. The objective of this work is to evaluate the usability of the recently developed International and Areas Studies Gateway (www.fachportal-iblk.de) with the aid of Social Network Analysis (SNA), a method based on the importance of relationships among interacting units. Whereas information specialists and web designers tend to focus on different kind of problems, SNA reveals the high degree of common discoverability between political science students and researchers. Therefore, the application of SNA creates a higher impact not only for evaluation of the International and Area Studies Gateway design process but on future digital libraries too. The application of SNA in this case is motivated by the lack of thorough quantitative approaches to qualitatively gathered data. Even though there are many techniques for collecting data about usability problems and sample characteristics, there remains a need for a method that maintains a meaningful analysis. For data-mining and visualization purposes, SNA is applied to two data-sets that I gathered. It demonstrates relationships between sample and usability problems as well as among the single sets. In doing so, this method investigates effects of the sample characteristics on the particular evaluation and counts the occurrences and frequency of usability problems. Because it does take into account a user’s personal background (which determines the mode of dealing with a digital library), SNA does not deny the essential role that qualitative methods data collection play in usability evaluations. But with its quantitative analysis, it provides new insights into usability evaluation.