Development of usability measurement index for higher education institutions websites

Abstract

With the enormous growth of the World Wide Web and increase in Internet activity and transactions, institutions are faced with the daunting task of maintaining high quality web presence. Higher Education Institutions have been at the forefront of this change, with university websites increasingly acting as a portal for a wide range of on-line transactions. Therefore, websites undergo continuous changes and revisions. In this context, designing usable websites and maintaining adequate usability becomes a subject of major Importance and presents a challenging task for web designers and webmasters especially for universities with high web activities. After careful review of usability models and usability measurement index model put forward by various researchers, this paper presents a systematic approach to measuring the usability Higher Education Institutions websites using the weighted-point based system. Based on extensive literature review and surveys conducted, usability factors for IHL websites has been proposed which are based on 5 main categories: i) content, ii) Interactivity, iii) Ease of Use, iv) Design Appeal and v) Satisfaction. Each category possesses several usability factors that are unique to IHL websites. The category and factors are weighted and rated by professionals and end-users respectively. Computation of the category weights and rated scores results in the total score which is then used to determine the usability measurement index of the website.