Activity Theory is a framework or descriptive tool which is commonly used in Human-computer Interaction. In particular, it is used more and more in the design and evaluation of some collaborative systems such as a modular object-oriented dynamic learning environment. Activity Theory offers many advantages to interface design for interactive systems when compared with the traditional cognitive psychology approach. This is because the traditional cognitive method cannot penetrate the human side. Therefore, the thorough analysis of human activities in Activity Theory makes it an effective and efficient method for evaluation and design of a system. There is currently some ongoing research work on the design or evaluation of interactive systems, in particular commercial information systems. However, none of them are about online virtual research environments. Therefore, this project aims to evaluate the interface of an online virtual research environment called CRADLE using Activity Theory. We will conduct a humanities study in this project, which seeks to find contradictions between the current interface and user expectations, which will in turn be used to design the next generation of CRADLE. In order to find a better way to represent the human community in CRADLE’s digital humanities context, we proposed two candidate proposals and refined them based on participants feedback.