An Intelligent Framework for Website Usability

Journal of Web Engineering

Current Web applications are very complex and high sophisticated software products, whose usability can heavily determine their success or failure. Defining methods for ensuring usability is one of the current goals of the Web Engineering research. Also, much attention on usability is currently paid by Industry, which is recognizing the importance of adopting methods for usability evaluation before and after the application deployment. This chapter introduces principles and evaluation methods to be adopted during the whole application lifecycle for promoting usability. For each evaluation method, the main features, as well as the emerging advantages and drawbacks are illustrated, so as to support the choice of an evaluation plan that best fits the goals to be pursued and the available resources. The design and evaluation of a real application is also described for exemplifying the introduced concepts and methods.

World Journal of Innovative Research

Most system interfaces do not meet user intuition in terms of both context and the underlying actions thereof, hence reducing user's task execution efficiency. This translate into the amount of time taken to learn, recall and complete the procedure for certain task with respect to a given system or device. It was in the light of this that this work took a look at the existing human computer interaction (HCI) usability testing techniques with the intention of empirically establishing which among cognitive walkthrough, heuristic evaluation and user group is the most efficient in identifying and correcting system's usability problems. To create the research pathway a detail review of related work was undertaken to identify the lacuna therein for the research direction. A case study of the Nigerian Defence Academy (NDA) website was used as a specimen for administering the usability test methods and the outcome of each was documented. The research methodology adopted a purposive and stratified sampling technique to reduced biased and increased reliability of the representative sample chosen for this research. The sample chosen was an extract of final year undergraduate students of Federal College of Education (FCE) Pankshin, an affiliate of University of Jos, Plateau State, Nigeria. The students have taken a course in Human Factor in System Design, which provided them with adequate training in usability test techniques, 20 out of the total 30 students with the requisite skill were chosen to undertake the test process. The data collated passed through paired sample T-test procedure of the compare-mean analysis with confidence interval percentage of 95%, using the IBM Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) version 26. The outcome of the T-test showed that the respective means of cognitive-walkthrough, heuristic-evaluation and user-group are 5.750, 4.900 and 6.350, with respective correlation coefficients of 0.192, 0.54 and 0.624. This shows a strong relationship between each pair of the test techniques. However, user-group usability test technique with the highest mean accuracy interval of 1.450 is the best in terms of performance relative to the other two techniques. Finally, the result of the analysis as well as charts created and the participant's findings were summarized thus proffering way forward and recommendations for the improvement of system and user interaction.

Enterprise Business Modeling, Optimization Techniques, and Flexible Information Systems, 2013

University Websites have been one of the important Websites for students, university personnel, and researchers. However, usability has long been a major concern within Websites. This chapter develops an evaluation approach using usability criteria and the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) for the comparison of Websites in a fuzzy environment. Firstly, alternative Websites are examined by experts using usability criteria in the literature. Then, FAHP is used to determine the usability criteria weights from subjective and imprecise judgments of the experts. Finally, Websites are compared based on usability criteria weights.

Graphical user interfaces design in software development process focuses on maximizing usability and the user's experience, in order to make the interaction for users easy, flexible and efficient. In this paper, we propose an approach for evaluating the usability satisfaction degree of a web-based system. The proposed method has been accomplished in two phases and implemented on an airlines website as a case study. In the first phase, a website usability test is implemented by a number of users, and then the results obtained are translated into charts for a final web-based system evaluation in the second phase. The results achieved were satisfactory, since the places where the weaknesses and gaps in the website are identified and recommended solutions to avoid them are drawn. The authenticity of the results have been confirmed by comparing them with user opinions acquired from a questionnaire, which proves the precision in which the website is rated.

proceedings of Advances in Computing …, 2011

Engineering for Human-Computer Interaction, 1999

The dynamic nature of the Web poses problems for usability evaluations. Development times are rapid and changes to Web sites occur frequently, often without a chance to re-evaluate the usability of the entire site. New advances in Web developments change user expectations. In order to incorporate usability evaluations into such an environment, we must produce methods that are compatible with the development constraints. We believe that rapid, remote, and automated evaluation techniques are key to ensuring usable Web sites. In this paper, we describe three studies we carried out to explore the feasibility of using modified usability testing methods or non-traditional methods of obtaining information about usability to satisfy our criteria of rapid, remote, and automated evaluation. Based on lessons learned in these case studies, we are developing tools for rapid, remote, and automated usability evaluations. Our future work includes using these tools on a variety of Web sites to determine I) their effectiveness compared to traditional evaluation methods, 2) the optimal types of sites and stages of development for each tool, and 3) tool enhancements.

1997

This paper describes the strengths and weaknesses of two usability assessment methods frequently applied to web sites. It uses case histories of WWW usability studies conducted by the authors to illustrate issues of special interest to designers of web sites. The discussion not only compares the two methods, but also discusses how an effective usability process can combine them, applying the methods at different times during site development.

Journal of Computer Science, 2006

The presence of multiple websites offering similar services has changed the user outlook. The user now prefers to visit those sites, which are easy to use. Many different methods have been proposed to measure usability of a website. The quantitative methods focus on the performance measurement of the website whereas the qualitative methods estimate the user's opinion of a website. However none of these specify measurement of the human emotions; the emotional experiences of the user during the website visit. This emotional aspect plays a strong guiding force in the way a user uses the website. In this paper we propose a distinct measure, which combines the qualitative, quantitative factors referred in the literature with rarely mentioned factors such as trust and feature state. The measure thus obtained determines the usability of a website from the user view point .It can be employed to compare usability of different websites.

In this paper, we discuss some issues related to automatic support to usability evaluation. The discussion is based on our experience with WebRemUSINE, a tool that we have designed and developed in order to perform intelligent analysis of Web browser logs using the information contained in the task model of the application. This approach supports remote usability evaluation of Web sites.

In this study, a decision support system (DSS) for usability assessment and design of web-based information systems (WIS) is proposed. It employs three machine learning methods (support vector machines, neural networks, and decision trees) and a statistical technique (multiple linear regression) to reveal the underlying relationships between the overall WIS usability and its determinative factors. A sensitivity analysis on the predictive models is performed and a new metric, criticality index, is devised to identify the importance ranking of the determinative factors. Checklist items with the highest and the lowest contribution to the usability performance of the WIS are specified by means of the criticality index. The most important usability problems for the WIS are determined with the help of a pseudo-Pareto analysis. A case study through a student information system at Fatih University is carried out to validate the proposed DSS. The proposed DSS can be used to decide which usability problems to focus on so as to improve the usability and quality of WIS.

Design, User Experience, and Usability: Theory, Methodology, and Management

The usability assessment of software systems is becoming more relevant, especially when it comes to web-based systems. A well-built and user-friendly website is capable of capturing a potential customer. There are different methods to evaluate usability, including heuristic evaluation and usability testing with users. In the present work, the critical functionalities of an airline's website were evaluated, such as the purchase of tickets, flight reservations, among others. First, a heuristic evaluation was performed and then a usability test with users. The evaluations were developed in an academic context and the participants were postgraduate students of a university. The problems detected in the first evaluation served to define specific tasks in the usability test with users. In this way, the results of the evaluations were complemented.

This work presents two empirical studies on the application of usability principles to evaluate a web site. Participants learned about usability principles using two teaching approaches: one approach employed patterns and the other guidelines. The comparison required participants to perform a usability review of a web site. The web site contained simple usability errors that were specifically embedded for the task and were violating usability principles. Results indicate that novice designers are able to identify a satisfactory number of usability errors within web pages. Patterns and guidelines can successfully communicate usability principles and knowledge to inexperienced designers. Both studies indicate that there were not significant differences between the performances of the two groups. The study was successful in showing that usability based on patterns and guidelines can be very useful to novice web designers.

Proceedings of 3rd …, 2003

An approach for web site usability evaluation (WebUse) is developed. It uses data collected from objective web site usability evaluations like physiological parameters, time, etc. and from subjective parameters evaluated by usability questionnaires. The objective data are measured in interval scale, as the objective data in ordinal or nominal scale. For aggregating these mixed data a neuro-fuzzy model is employed. WebUse approach is implemented in a MS EXCEL software tool. A case study for evaluation of a web site by this approach is carried out. The analysis of experimental results showed that the approach supports the analysis of web sites and allocation of usability problems. A comparison of WebUse approach with a conventional evaluation approach showed significant better performance for WebUse. The main advantage of WebUse is the combination of objective and subjective usability parameters which improves the reliability of the usability evaluations and thus more usability-related bottlenecks of web sites can be discovered. Further advantage of WebUse is its ability of handling missing data for some usability criteria.

Advanced Science and Technology Letters, 2016

The usability is nowadays an aspect that can determine the success of a software product. For this reason, there are methods that allow specialists to verify if the properties of the system interfaces contribute to achieving the desired degree of usability. Although the heuristic evaluation is one of the most recognized methods, there is not a formal process to execute this technique. The original author only proposes general recommendations. Based on the analysis of different studies that report the use of this method, we established a new usability evaluation process that can be used for any professional in Computer Sciences. This work is focused on the validation of our protocol to conduct heuristic evaluations. For this purpose, a case study was conducted with the participation of twenty postgraduate students. The analysis establishes that the results are more accurate when a formal process is used.

… , 2007. ESEM 2007. …, 2007

Applications worldwide, Web quality assurance, and more specifically Web usability have become key success factors. Therefore, this work proposes a usability evaluation technique based on the combination of Web design perspectives adapted from existing literature, and heuristics. This new technique is assessed using a controlled experiment aimed at measuring the efficiency and effectiveness of our technique, in comparison to Nielsen's heuristic evaluation. Results indicated that our technique was significantly more effective than and as efficient as Nielsen's heuristic evaluation. First International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement 0-7695-2886-4/07 $20.00